Rhythms of Endurance: Homing as infrastructural labour in Kolkata’s poor communities

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Donner, Henrike. 2024. Rhythms of Endurance: Homing as infrastructural labour in Kolkata’s poor communities. In: Fabio Gygi and Saad Quasem, eds. An Unwell World? Anthropology in a Speculative Mode. New York: Berghahn. [Book Section] (Forthcoming)

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The Anthropology of Infrastructures has gained prominence in critical urbanism theory and often draws on the experiences of urban citizens in the Global South. This chapter interrogates how poor women's homing work presents infrastructural labour and affects the course of struggles over housing. Based on research in Kolkata, India it argues that poor women’s homemaking creates urban life in the face of state disinvestment and an underlying politics of displacement. It suggests that in order to address the current crisis of care we need to pay attention to the way such labour is distributed across time and space in the making of the city. The chapter looks at what makes the conditions of dwelling for poor communities possible and highlights in particular the gendered (and caste/religion/ethnicity-) based regimes of labour that create homes under processes of neoliberal governance which are built on colonial histories and capitalist presents. Finally, it argues for a reading of homing practices not simply as acts of resilience and survival, but as everyday practices managing far-reaching decline

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