Maura Finkelstein

Mumbai's textile industry is commonly but incorrectly understood to be an extinct relic of the past. In The Archive of Loss Maura Finkelstein examines what it means for textile mill workers—who are assumed not to exist—to live and work during a period of deindustrialization. Finkelstein shows how mills are ethnographic archives of the city where documents, artifacts, and stories exist in the buildings and in the bodies of workers. Workers' pain, illnesses, injuries, and exhaustion narrate industrial decline; the ways in which they live in tenements exist outside and resist the values expounded by modernity; and the rumors and untruths they share about textile worker strikes and a mill fire help them make sense of the industry's survival. In outlining this archive's contents, Finkelstein shows how mills, which she conceptualizes as lively ruins, become a lens through which to challenge, reimagine, and alter ways of thinking about the past, present, and future in Mumbai and beyond.

This article questions the idea of "equine therapy" and explores the communication occurring between horses and humans in the equine therapy encounter. The choreography performed by horses, riders, as well as the staff and volunteers who facilitate lessons often appears to simply happen, with human-horse partnerships occluding the layers of trust and collaboration that go into the functioning of an equine therapy facility. I argue that horsemanship, particularly "therapeutic horsemanship," is the foundation of what makes the therapy space a safe and productive environment for both horses and humans. Through fieldwork conducted at an equine therapy facility in eastern Pennsylvania, this article asks: How do horses participate in the equine therapy encounter? How can equine therapy be used to think anthropologically beyond the human? And what happens when non-human animals like horses inhabit the position of ethnographic informant? Through the breakdown of therapeutic horsemanship at a high-profile international horseshow, this article draws attention to the successes and failures of horse-human communication in equine therapy. Attending to therapeutic horsemanship as a form of communication provides new

I am still haunted by the stolen homes I encountered in East Jerusalem in June of 2018. I was in Palestine for two weeks, traveling through the region with 12 other American academics, all interested in learning about the occupation through a settler colonial framework. One day, we wandered through the labyrinthine of lanes of the old city as Mahmoud, our guide, pointed out the Stars of David affixed to Palestinian homes and the signs in Hebrew that marked these doors as twice-stolen land. Pointing to one door he said, “This family left for a wedding in Jordan, only to come back to settlers occupying their home.” He pointed to another: “That family was simply pushed out, while Israeli soldiers kept watch over the theft by Americans, recently naturalized as Israeli citizens.” Our group was — justifiably — horrified. And yet Mahmoud simply shrugged and explained how common these acts of theft were. He told us many families simply chose not to travel, not to leave their homes. Even so, their continued presence was no guarantee that their house would not be stolen right out from under them.

In the 15 chapters of this book, a diverse group of writers explores the unique structure of the chawl, all the while considering a complicated and interwoven set of themes and questions. While many of these questions remain unanswered, we struggle with them because, at their heart, they are the questions of Mumbai itself. With vacant land being non-existent, the demolition of the chawls is going to redefine the skyline of south and central Mumbai. The chawls make up around 16,000 structures, located in the heart of Mumbai. Yet, for many of us these structures are unfamiliar, as this city of extremes is often understood through only its slums and its mansions. In this book we have tried to trace the past, present and future of the city, as told through and within the chawl. These conversations are meandering and circular, at times overlapping and repetitive. Like a walk through the chawl neighbourhoods themselves, each chapter leaves the impression, Haven t I walked down this lane b...

As a college professor, I consider the classroom to be a site of engagement, activism, and learning, not just for my students, but also for myself. Over the past seven years I have taught at two small liberal arts colleges, first as an adjunct and visiting assistant professor and now on the tenure track. Over these seven years I have dedicated myself to creating and recreating my classrooms as a space in which I—alongside my students—teach and learn about what it means to be in the world. I receive this knowledge as much as I give it.

So my pedagogical approach echoes my methodological training as an anthropologist. That is, I favor questions over answers. I prefer curiosity to authority. I develop assignments that privilege process over outcome. In short, I understand the liberal arts as a structure through which students are given the space to think, to reflect, and to challenge their assumptions about the world, asking: What does it mean to think critically? How do we ask questions and relearn how to be curious? How do we begin to challenge our opinions and assumptions with empirical evidence? How do we sit with the discomfort of unbuilding and rebuilding a world we think we know?

I thought I was finally figuring it all out: who I want to be in the classroom.

But this semester I am pushing at the edges of this commitment by teaching a new course called “The Anthropology of Palestine.”

At the turn of the 20th century, rural labor migrants began moving to the Indian city of Mumbai, sleeping in tenement buildings known as chawls and working around the clock at the city's many textile mills. The mill lands made Mumbai, transforming a fishing village into a bustling port city. But when the economy shifted in the 1950s, followed by massive mill closings and layoffs in the 1980s, this enclave of industrial workers began to fall apart. In contemporary Mumbai, old low lying textile mills and chawls are being developed into shopping malls, high rise apartment buildings, and luxury hotels, transforming the neighborhood into a space of elite residence and consumption. For contemporary industrial worker communities still residing in these neighborhoods, the disjunction between the occupied material space of mills and chawls and the looming material space of cranes and construction results in an occupation of place and time that diverges from the temporal expectations of progress and development. In this article, I argue that chawl life operates according to " chawl time, " a temporal-spatial frame located between industrial and postindustrial time. In making this argument, I draw attention to how chawl residents exist in both this contemporary moment of rapid redevelopment and revitalization of former industrial spaces and a perceived past moment of industrial activity and working class stability. In doing so, this article reveals how anachronistic subjectivities are vital products of modernity. [Keywords: South Asia, urban India, labor, housing, precarity, temporality, chawl time, space]

Based on fieldwork conducted in the mill lands of Mumbai, India, this article investigates how deindustrialization shapes contemporary textile mill workers' identities. The centrality of textile manufacturing in Mumbai once made employment in the mills meaningful work. As mills closed and workers began to lose their jobs, the narrative of deindustrialization emphasized the need to protect the rights of the unemployed and eclipsed the reality that some individuals continue to work in the mills and emplace themselves in the city through their identification with mill work. This article demonstrates how deindustrialization discourse tends to erase contemporary textile workers from the city or frame workers as fake or relics of the past. I argue that framing textile workers as anachronistic while labor continues is an aspect of modernity and illuminates Mumbai's mill lands as an allochronous space that is indeed relevant to the city. Deindustrialization produces unemployment; however, it also produces other forms of marginality such as unprotected and unrepresented labor. Given that employed mill workers are not relics of the past, their perspectives are relevant to contemporary understanding of deindustrialization.

In the 15 chapters of this book, a diverse group of writers explores the unique structure of the chawl, all the while considering a complicated and interwoven set of themes and questions. While many of these questions remain unanswered, we struggle with them because, at their heart, they are the questions of Mumbai itself. With vacant land being non-existent, the demolition of the chawls is going to redefine the skyline of south and central Mumbai. The chawls make up around 16,000 structures, located in the heart of Mumbai. Yet, for many of us these structures are unfamiliar, as this city of extremes is often understood through only its slums and its mansions. In this book we have tried to trace the past, present and future of the city, as told through and within the chawl. These conversations are meandering and circular, at times overlapping and repetitive. Like a walk through the chawl neighbourhoods themselves, each chapter leaves the impression, Haven t I walked down this lane before? This is both intentional and unavoidable. How is the chawl defined? What makes it unique among the various building typologies located throughout the city? How have cultural formations emerged through the constraints imposed by such limited living space? These are not easy questions to answer, but this multi-genre book, with the help of an assemblage of visuals - from floor plans, photographs and drawings to screenplay and cinematic representations - attempts to consider the ways in which the chawl emerges as a distinct symbol of the city of Mumbai, holding not only the history of the city s transformation but also its unique social identity.

In the 15 chapters of this book, a diverse group of writers explores the unique structure of the chawl, all the while considering a complicated and interwoven set of themes and questions. While many of these questions remain unanswered, we struggle with them because, at their heart, they are the questions of Mumbai itself. With vacant land being non-existent, the demolition of the chawls is going to redefine the skyline of south and central Mumbai. The chawls make up around 16,000 structures, located in the heart of Mumbai. Yet, for many of us these structures are unfamiliar, as this city of extremes is often understood through only its slums and its mansions. In this book we have tried to trace the past, present and future of the city, as told through and within the chawl. These conversations are meandering and circular, at times overlapping and repetitive. Like a walk through the chawl neighbourhoods themselves, each chapter leaves the impression, Haven t I walked down this lane before? This is both intentional and unavoidable. How is the chawl defined? What makes it unique among the various building typologies located throughout the city? How have cultural formations emerged through the constraints imposed by such limited living space? These are not easy questions to answer, but this multi-genre book, with the help of an assemblage of visuals - from floor plans, photographs and drawings to screenplay and cinematic representations - attempts to consider the ways in which the chawl emerges as a distinct symbol of the city of Mumbai, holding not only the history of the city s transformation but also its unique social identity.