Lexington Books Embodied Working Lives: Work and Life in Maharashtra, India: Manual Laboring in Maharashtra, India

Both theoretical and empirical social science approaches to manual work in developing countries emphasize the infusions of power in social relations between workers and employers. But little attention has been paid to either the lived experiences of non-industrial and industrial manual workers or to the particularly physical character of their work. In Embodied Working Lives Louise Waite contributes to an expanded understanding of both. The concept of embodiment recognizes that bodies' habitual relations with the world engender subjectivities and life experiences. The most careful consideration of everyday-embodiment is found in the phenomenological tradition that theorizes 'incarnated consciousness' and 'embodied subjectivities.' This book follows such an understanding of embodiment, whose essence is to bridge the biological and the social. Waite incorporates embodiment into an ethnographic exploration of the worker-understood, in her study, to have 'personhood,' preferences, and desires which play a part in social relations. Waite's situates the subjects of her study in a deeply dense context of social relations that sufficiently complicate our understanding of culture, work, bodies and embodiment, phenomenology, anthropology, and habit. This book is essential reading across the social sciences and in the humanities. It is a groundbreaking ethnography that raises interesting questions in applied phenomenology, humanist philosophies, and also policy studies. Review The use of qualitative data is well-done, with lots of examples and nuances of meaning drawn out of the interviews. Care is taken to analyze the effect of caste, the shades of inequality and their reflections in various parts of people's lives. The dialectic of the mind and body, the delving into the question of balancing pain and pleasure of working, the exploration of the quality of thought regarding the dignity of labor is outstanding. The discussion of relative agency of workers in body management and conditions of work is also profound.--Vivian Price, California State University, Dominguez Hills About the Author B>Louise Waite is Lecturer, School of Geography, University of Leeds.