Overview

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.

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9781478003687

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Reviews

Finkelstein's work is very refreshing. . . . The data involved is rich, and the theoretical framings and arguments very persuasive. -- Sinead D'Silva * LSE Review of Books *

In each chapter-archive, Finkelstein urges the reader to reflect on how some forms of work in contemporary capitalist society are rendered meaningless in order to sustain others.... Researchers studying the history of Mumbai's textile mills, the processes of deindustrialization, storytelling, and archiving, and affect theory will find value in engaging with this book. -- Saumya Pandey * Society for the Anthropology of Work * Tackling the question of power, of the structure of domination in post-colony, and of the lives lived among the imperial debris makes The Archive of Loss an engaging reading for those willing to advance the project started by Maura Finkelstein and to approach ethnographically both the official records and the alternative archives. . . . The book offers a detailed description of decay and ruination as a prolonged process that follows its own logic and unfolds according to its own rules, supporting a ghostly presence of the past that refuses to die down. -- Natalia Kovalyova * Anthropology Book Forum * Finkelstein's work is very refreshing. . . . The data involved is rich, and the theoretical framings and arguments very persuasive. -- Sinead D'Silva * LSE Review of Books *

Finkelstein's work is very refreshing. . . . The data involved is rich, and the theoretical framings and arguments very persuasive. -- Sinead D'Silva * LSE Review of Books * Tackling the question of power, of the structure of domination in post-colony, and of the lives lived among the imperial debris makes The Archive of Loss an engaging reading for those willing to advance the project started by Maura Finkelstein and to approach ethnographically both the official records and the alternative archives. . . . The book offers a detailed description of decay and ruination as a prolonged process that follows its own logic and unfolds according to its own rules, supporting a ghostly presence of the past that refuses to die down. -- Natalia Kovalyova * Anthropology Book Forum * In each chapter-archive, Finkelstein urges the reader to reflect on how some forms of work in contemporary capitalist society are rendered meaningless in order to sustain others.... Researchers studying the history of Mumbai's textile mills, the processes of deindustrialization, storytelling, and archiving, and affect theory will find value in engaging with this book. -- Saumya Pandey * Society for the Anthropology of Work * The conceptual framing of the book is refreshingly original, the prose elegant and the structure convincing.... By carefully spelling out phenomena that do not fit into established narratives, the book illuminates the blind spot of dominant explanations. -- Pablo Holwitt * South Asia * The significance of this powerful book goes beyond being an ethnography of the urban or the spatial.... Archives of Loss is a must-read for understanding urban transition. -- Sarasij Majumder * Journal of Anthropological Research * Maura Finkelstein's book is a wonderful ethnographic study.... [The Archive of Loss] is an important addition to studies of urban workers and the textile industry and is important for anthropology, ethnography, human geography, urban history and labour studies. -- Vicki Crinis * Asian Studies Review * The Archive of Loss is an exemplary ethnography of a world in transition, caught as it is between an industrial past and post-industrial present, and the unexpected openings-material, social, political-of seeing this world otherwise. -- Waqas H. Butt * Anthropological Quarterly * Maura Finkelstein's The Archive of Loss is a finely theorized ethnographic archive of what she calls lively ruination that pushes methodological boundaries in novel ways. -- Preeti Sampat * American Ethnologist * Archive of Loss is fascinating. It is an original, remarkable, and admirable account of other sides of the glossy coins of Mumbai as a post-industrial city aiming to reach world-class status (whatever that may mean). It is moreover a convincing 'first-hand' account of the working and social lives of those Mumbaikars who live somewhere in the shadows of 'development.' -- Hans Schenk * IIAS Review *

Author Information

Maura Finkelstein is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Muhlenberg College.

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