Castoffs of Capital
Work and Love among Garment Workers in Bangladesh
FINALIST FOR THE 2023 GREGORY BATESON PRIZE FROM THE AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION
LISTEN: LAMIA KARIM DISCUSSES CASTOFFS OF CAPITAL ON THE SOUTH ASIAN FILMS & BOOKS PODCAST
Castoffs of Capital draws on fieldwork in Bangladesh to examine how female garment workers experience their work and personal lives within the stranglehold of global capital. Anthropologist Lamia Karim focuses on relations among work, gender, and global capital’s targeting of poor women to advance its market penetration, showing how women navigate these spaces by adopting new subject formations.
Castoffs of Capital examines how female garment workers experience their work and personal lives within the stranglehold of global capital. Drawing on fieldwork in Bangladesh, anthropologist Lamia Karim focuses attention on the lives of older women aged out of factory work, previously largely ignored, introducing a new dimension to the understanding of a female-headed workforce that today numbers around four million in Bangladesh.
Through a feminist labor studies lens, Castoffs of Capital foregrounds these women not as workers but as mothers, wives, sisters, lovers, friends, and political agents. Analyzing relations among work, gender, and global capital’s targeting of poor women to advance its market penetration, Karim shows how women navigate these spaces by adopting new subject formations. She locates these women’s aspirations for the “good life” not only in material comforts but also in their longings for love and sexual fulfillment that help them momentarily forget the precarity of their existence under the shadow of capital.
Through richly detailed ethnographic studies, this innovative and beautifully written book examines the making and unmaking of these women’s wants and desires, loves and tribulations, hopes and despairs, and triumphs and struggles.
Cover alt text: Woman in headscarf facing forward. An opaque rectangle with the title and author name obscures her face, with translucent colored rectangles below.
Awards
American Anthropological Association: Gregory Bateson Prize — Honorable Mention
Lamia Karim provides a rich account of global capitalism from the perspective of women who produce the clothes that we wear every day, offering a nuanced understanding of the complex choices and lives of the women who work in garment factories. Accessible and insightful, Castoffs of Capital informs interdisciplinary understandings of contemporary inequality, and it will transform our understanding of workers and the socioeconomic structures that shape the world.
Leela Fernandes, author of Governing Water in India: Inequality, Reform, and the State
In Castoffs of Capital, Lamia Karim presents new dimensions of garment workers’ lives, from the dynamics of capitalism to the nature of social norms that render these workers nameless and faceless.
American Anthropologist
Karim’s ethnography seamlessly weaves the women’s narratives together with strands of contemporary anthropological theory to create an exceptionally readable text.
CHOICE
Using ethnographic and life history research, Karim presents a nuanced portrait of the aspirations and realities of low-wage factory workers through the stories of their lives both inside and outside the workplace.
Economic Anthropology
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction: Toward an Ethnography of Older Factory Women
1. The Disorder of Work and Life
2. The Age of Excitement: The Rise of the Garment Industry in Bangladesh
3. The Arc of Change: Factory, Family, and Class
4. Changing Norms of Romance, Marriage, and Sexuality
5. After Work: Life in the Shadows of Capital
Conclusion: Politics of the Precariat
Epilogue: After Death: A Body without a Home
Appendix I: Sixteen Garment Workers in 2017–2018
Appendix II: Follow-up on Sixteen Garment Workers in 2020
Notes
Index
