1Drawing on a series of ethnographic vignettes from fieldwork in Nepal, Michael Hoffmann takes readers from the lowland town of Nepalgunj in the Terai to the upland city of Pokhara while offering readers a glimpse inside Nepal's growing urban industrial labour scene. The book draws on research and multiple field visits between 2013 and 2020 to weave together a story of changing industrial labour relations and class formations, of the evolving power of Maoist unions, and the occasional foray into the world of spirits and occult economics. Through a mix of details about the daily routines of industrial workers and their bosses and reflections on the lasting impact of the Maoist revolution and Nepal's integration into global labour markets, Hoffmann gives readers insights into how labour politics, class consciousness, ethnic and Indigenous identities, gender politics, urban versus rural dynamics, and religious practices all play a part in Nepal's evolving industrial landscape and workforce.
2Hoffmann opens the book by situating his project within a larger set of scholarly debates about labour and society that will likely be familiar to scholars of anthropology and labour. In addition to the usual suspects (Karl Marx, Max Weber, EP Thompson), he also draws on anthropological insights from scholars such as Michael Burawoy, June Nash, Don Kalb and Jonathan Parry. The book is split into two sections, which correspond to his two research sites. Part I focuses on an extended case study of a food-processing plant in Nepalgunj, while Part II includes case studies of a noodle factory, a water-bottling facility, the building trade, and sand-mining operations in Pokhara. Hoffmann uses these cases to develop his arguments about changing industrial labour dynamics in Nepal and to highlight key differences between the two regions.
3The author develops one of his key arguments in Part I, namely that the influence of labour organising, which was dominated by communist parties after the civil war (and remains largely the case today), helped to secure worker protection and enshrine the power of unions. As he notes, ‘much of the book has shown how Maoism has affected labor relations in these new industrial and urban work environments and in some cases has helped make labor more, instead of less, secure’ (165). But he argues that these benefits have not been divided equally. Regarding the first case, the Agrawal food-processing facility in Nepalgunj, Hoffman argues that ethnic Madheshi workers, as skilled workers, have overwhelmingly reaped the benefits of unions’ organising labour, have gained more secure labour contracts and employee benefits thanks to the unions, whereas Indigenous Tharu loaders (paledars) who carry out heavy manual labour have not benefited from unionisation efforts, so their jobs remain highly precarious and physically dangerous.
4Hoffmann argues that this was due to various factors, ranging from strategic decisions made by Maoist party leaders to focus on winning Madheshi voter support after consolidating power in government, to biases (from Indian or Nepali Bahun managers) against lower-caste and Indigenous workers, a bias also evident in Maoist party leadership. As Hoffman reveals, a general manager told him ‘Tharu contract workers still have a lot to learn. It will take them a minimum of twenty years before they adapt to a modern industrial working culture’ (64). Elsewhere he notes that management describes Indigenous Tharu contractors as backwards or uncivilised ‘jungly people’ (67). This pattern of Indian or upper-caste Nepali Brahmins running industrial operations, while lower-caste ethnic or Indigenous groups work as temporary contract labourers, is a central theme of the book. As Hoffmann argues, such precarious labour, especially in the Terai, is also associated with the historical legacy of bonded labour (kamaiya) within Tharu communities.
5In contrast to this picture of the largely successful organisation of labour by Maoists in the Terai, the story in Pokhara is one of labour unions on the decline or, in many cases, entirely absent. According to Hoffmann, this is partly due to smaller-scale industries in Pokhara compared to Nepalgunj, many of which are on private land on the city outskirts, rather than on industrial estates. Another factor concerns contractors (thekedars) shifting from temporary labourer status to self-employed contractors or even business owners, especially in the construction industry, as workers aspire to achieve middle-class status. Hoffmann also argues that union rivalries, mostly between Communist and Congress Party-affiliated unions, have further weakened the power of unions. And finally, especially in the case of Maoist unions, the consolidation of the party via electoral politics has increasingly enmeshed communist unions in the bureaucratic malaise of the state. As Hoffmann suggests, ‘the shift from radical militant unionism to a more bureaucratic and standardized organization at the central level’ (158) has meant that unions focus more on the business of business – such as collecting union fees or arbitration settlement fees in cases of legal action – and less on advocating for workers’ rights. One result is that many of the cases that come before the unions are not from workers at all but from contractors or owners trying to collect unpaid bills.
6To Hoffmann's surprise, and this is worth noting for scholars of comparative labour in particular, the experience of industrial labourers in Nepal appears to run counter to common claims about the destructive power of global capitalism and the creation of a new underclass of precarious labour (Standing 2011; Hann and Parry 2018). As he argues, ‘Nepal remains an outlier in the context of the global decline in labor activism and the continuing devaluation of labor by capital around the world’ (174). Instead, what Hoffmann documents at his industrial sites is a move away from more precarious and temporary forms of labour contracts (asthai kam) towards more regular and permanent employment (isthai kam), though with some important caveats, as I've noted among Tharu labourers. Hoffmann credits this shift to the legacy of Maoists labour organising following the civil war, especially for the larger industrial sites in Nepalgunj.
7Through his analysis of these different urban industrial sites in Nepal, Hoffmann tries to show that a key result of the post-conflict Maoist era is the creation of a bifurcated labour force in Nepal. As he explains in the case of Nepalgunj, ‘Those who had a permanent job were most likely Madheshi locals or were from an Indian background. Those who worked as casual laborers were more likely from the Tharu ethnic group. In Pokhara, the division was less about permanent versus casual labor and more about larger versus small factories…there is a division in the informal economy between the labor elites and the common workers, and that ethnic identities map upon this division in important ways’ (170). Hoffmann also argues that we are seeing class identity take over and replace caste identity as the key social signifier in Nepal. I have to admit my skepticism on this point, as I didn't see enough evidence in his cases to support this, and the evidence that was provided may not be generalisable beyond his selection of industrial labour sites. Regardless, for scholars interested in how post-Maoist labour politics are interacting with an emerging industrial labour force and global market pressures, from increasing labour migration to Malaysia and the Middle East to growing middle-class aspirations by a globally connected Nepali youth culture, the grounded case studies provided by Hoffmann offer many important insights into these dynamics in Nepal.
8There is one final issue I wish to touch on, which is at the heart of chapter three and concerns some interspersed items in other chapters, and that is the role of rituals and religion. Hoffmann draws on the work of Jean and John Comaroff (1999 and 2000) and the idea of ‘occult economies’ to argue that religion is often used as a managerial instrument of control to pacify and shape the labour force and as a hedge against uncertainty. Informing this theory of occult economies is the belief that supernatural forces can have a direct impact on economic systems, and the goal of religious practitioners is to harness these forces for capital accumulation. Hoffman argues we can see such religious dynamics manifested in at least three distinct ways in the Nepalgunj case.
- 1 Hoffmann spells the name of the deity ‘Vishwakarma’ with a ‘w’, but it is unclear why. This (...)
9First, Hoffman discusses a physical redesign of the building sites by Hindu management under the guidance of an expert in Vastu Shastra, a kind of Vedic sacred geometry akin to the Taoist feng shui. Ostensibly, this was done to improve the factory workflow and to make the business more profitable, but Hoffmann's own analysis suggests this was as much an Indian business fad linked to globalisation as a serious religious act. Many of the managers he spoke to confessed to doubting its validity and, as he notes in the case of the Tharu loaders, ‘The casual workers, however, did not embrace the spiritual reforms taking place in the factory. For them, Vastu Shastra had little meaning’ (81). A second example is the rituals performed by machine operators at a shrine honouring the Hindu god Vishvakarma1 (the craftsman god), which were to protect workers from accidents. A third example includes animistic rituals practised by Tharu contract workers when they return home to their villages, as well as occasional visits to a local ritual specialist (guruwa) to help with physical ailments blamed on malevolent spirits. Management had a similar response to Tharu animism as Tharu workers did to the Vastu Shastra rituals. ‘Yet walking home to conduct a sacrifice to appease a house god or visiting another factory to see a shaman were practices that the company's management dismissed out of hand’ (80).
10Hoffmann describes these interactions as potentially reflecting ‘limited spiritual economies’, but I would suggest that what was going on were incommensurate forms of religious practice that operate on different registers, yet both could be more productively read as forms of lived religion, a framework that I expected to see Hoffman draw on, but which was noticeably absent. As religious scholars Kim Knibbe and Helena Kupari argue, lived religion ‘attempts at theorizing the future of religion in modernity by focusing on how religion is practised. Rather than assuming an inherent incompatibility between religion and modernity, it enquires into how religion is encountered and experienced – how it comes into play – in different environments: public and private, official and informal, sacred, secular, and religiously “neutral”’ (Knibbe and Kupari 2020: 159). This is an approach that works especially well with ethnographic work of the kind that Hoffmann undertook and could have strengthened his engagement with religion.
11I raise this last point because Hoffmann's analysis came across as being dismissive of animism as an artifact of outmoded, rural folk superstitions that linger on the margins of Nepali society and aren't really held anymore by Nepal's urban industrial workers. This point is most obvious in the final case study on sand mining where he asks, drawing on arguments by Aihwa Ong (1987) and Comaroff and Comaroff (2000), if it may be more accurate to read ‘the story of possession of the workers by evil spirits … as a more subtle cultural expression of resistance to workplace-based exploitation’ or ‘to generally view the practices of shamanism and spirit possession in the wider area as a cultural response from the many who are left out of the benefits of new forms of capitalism? The answer, I believe, is both, but there is also a third reading of such practices’ (161–62). I found his third answer highly unconvincing and problematic given that he is a scholar of religion. Instead of taking such religious beliefs seriously, Hoffmann instead argues that folk superstitions simply divert attention from real issues, such as the unsafe conditions of sand mining. He therefore concludes that ‘such ideas, discourses, and practices of shamanic advice to the miners provided legitimacy to the contractor of the mine…the fact that some of the miners were under the influence of shamans who defined the “evil” in the mine as originating from supernatural beings, rather than exploitative work regimes, also contributed to the stability of this complex wealth-extraction scheme in the sand mine’ (162–63). Such questionable framing left a bad taste in my mouth and raised other questions about his analysis of religions in Nepal more generally.
12As a grounded ethnographic study of urban industrialisation and evolving class politics in Nepal, and of the ways post-conflict Nepal is being shaped by new labour relations, this book is a welcome addition. For scholars of lived religion in the Himalayas, you may want to look elsewhere for a more nuanced analysis of how lived religion is entangled with industrialisation, or take the insights offered by Hoffmann with a pinch of salt. This criticism of the handling of religion aside, this book is a good contribution to the field of Himalayan Studies, and should also be of interest to those, like Hoffmann, who argue for the value of comparative labour studies.