Contextualised by an outline of Karnataka’s recent political history, this chapter focuses on how the dominant class uses political institutions to maintain and advance its position. It is concerned with the interplay of accumulation, domination and the everyday workings of political institutions. Although primarily focused on dynamics of domination and exploitation at local government level (and in connection with state poverty reduction programmes), it also traces the links between accumulation and domination up to the level of state institutions, and points to the links between political power and agribusiness, mining and real estate. At the level of local government the chapter shows the critical role played by gatekeepers (those who man the interface between state and society) in shaping the material and political outcomes of state policy. More influential gatekeepers, who tend to be from the dominant class and caste, are able to advance their economic position and strengthen their political position by using their role as distributors of public resources to reproduce labouring class dependence. The chapter locates processes of corruption among class relations, and argues that talk of a shift towards ‘post-clientilist’ states is premature and overstated - particularly in areas with relatively steep social hierarchies.

This chapter presents biological anthropology’s contribution to racial science in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with special attention to the anthropological study of documented skeletal collections. Examples of research before and after the discipline’s turn away from racial typology illustrate that the process did not occur in a linear fashion. The chapter ends with an overview of contemporary approaches to studying the lived experiences of people whose remains are in documented skeletal collections.

This chapter is concerned with the question of what whiteness means today. Looking both at history and at Christian nationalism allows us to see that for much of its history, whiteness in the US meant respectable family values. European immigrants were promised the privilege of whiteness for the cost of assimilation, for leaving ethnic markers of clothing and language behind and assimilating into white cultural norms around family and gender roles. While today we tend to discuss respectability politics around people of color attempting to challenge racial stereotypes by practicing white middle-class norms, this discussion shows that Christian nationalism also functions to defend respectability in the form of sexual and familial norms. This commitment to defending respectability is a product of the history of US nationalism and perpetuates a politics of whiteness without ever needing to explicitly say so.

This chapter strives to provide an account of what I call the Boasian intervention on race and racism that both acknowledges its importance and innovations as a (liberal) anti-racist project and critically highlights contradictory aspects of that project, particularly with regard to its analysis and representation of racism and whiteness in the United States. The first part summarizes how Franz Boas and his students contested discourses of biological determinism and scientific racism via transformations in discourses of race and culture. The second, more extensive, part focuses largely on selected works of Boas and Ruth Benedict and critically examines how their reinvention of race and representations of “race problems” in the US had different implications for European immigrants, who could become absorbed into the whiteness of American identity, and people of color, who could not.

In this chapter, I detail the racial logics of the Anthropocene in its current discursive formation, focusing on three related critiques of the term. First, I show how the Anthropocene logic is derived from the categorization impulse of the geosciences, an epistemic push that has close ties to histories of racial science. A critical reading of geology has shown that the categorization of strata performs a similar pedagogy to the “family tree of man.” Second, this categorization is framed by the progressive narrative of modernity. In the Anthropocene, as an often apocalyptic narrative, the whiteness of historical time shows through and privileges a “colorblind” lens for the Anthropocene. Third, the objective description of the Anthropocene presents a universalizing narrative, one that has trouble detailing the differential experiences of environmental impacts. This universality reifies race into the oncoming environmental crisis even as it attempts to celebrate a world without divisions and differences. Finally, I draw from the critiques of the Anthropocene to highlight the multiple stories that are being told of the geophysical, ecological, and societal changes.

This chapter focuses on blackface in Argentina, and on the larger implications embedded within the practice in that specific nation. The particularities of its use in the Argentine context are significant because of the country’s powerful nation-building mythology, which holds there are no Black people in the nation. Numerous scholarly investigations have demonstrated the consistent and sustained presence of Africans and Afrodescendants throughout the country’s history.

The introductory chapter has two purposes. Firstly it outlines the conditions of labour in India, the state of Karnataka and the fieldwork districts and villages. Secondly it outlines the book’s main arguments, which are contrasted to mainstream approaches to the analysis of poverty. Given classes of labour’s high levels of fragmentation and informality and the difficulty of directly challenging capital, emphasis is placed on the extraction of concessions from the state as a strategy for improving the conditions of the poor in the short to medium-term. More specifically this entails labouring class organisation focused primarily on the implementation of welfare programmes, and broader moves to push for pro-labour policy changes. The class-relational approach used in this book analyses labour relations, civil society organisations, local government institutions and state policy through more than a decade of fieldwork across hamlets, villages and districts. By doing so it draws out the uneven dynamics of class relations at different levels and in different social settings, and sheds some light on the impediments to, as well as possibilities for, pro-labouring class change.

In this chapter, I analyze a genre of travel writing on Kuwait that has surged over the past decade. I specifically explore a series of self-published travelogues written by Western, white women who have previously taught in K-12 schools and institutions of higher education in Kuwait. These narratives, which are couched in white supremacist and eugenicist ideologies, offer insights into discourses of racialization and white superiority in Kuwait. I use these travelogues as a starting point to think about whiteness in Kuwait and its connection to global white supremacy. I argue that one needs to read these self-published travelogues as ethnographic data to understand how gendered race/whiteness (and white supremacy), as deployed in the self-reported experiences of Western, white traveloguers, plays out in various educational settings across Kuwait, a country that is not considered by anthropologists to be a fruitful site for ethnographic or racial inquiry.

Issues of race and racism have been highly controversial in contemporary China. This chapter examines the significance of various events and the polemics they provoked around the politics of race and nationalism. Indeed, the controversy has to be appreciated in light of the rise of nationalistic feelings among Chinese netizens, who have insisted that the fashion world should no longer cater to Western aesthetics and should align with the aesthetics of Chinese people.

Our starting point in this book is that across the globe, race – and its articulations with other forms of identification, ideology, and practice – remains one of the key conceptual tools to secure sociopolitical dominance, develop cultural politics of resistance, and engage in self-identification. Yet race opens up a major field of contradiction and misunderstanding. On the one hand, the ideas and practices of race that emerged with European expansion and colonization have impacted all modern societies – even as we should be sensitive to the particularity of histories and experiences in different places. On the other hand, the general accepted view is that there is no such thing as biological race; race is socially constructed, and its meanings are created for sociopolitical ends. Along with many others, we take the view that, while biological race is not “real,” “folk” ideas about it continue to proliferate as if race were natural, shaping sociopolitical relations and cultural practices.