Dean of the College and Anthropology Program Present
Digital Housewives: How Indian Households are Producing the Global Creator Economy
Tuesday, November 15, 2022
Olin 102
5:00 pm EST/GMT-5
5:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Sucharita Kanjilal, Doctoral Candidate, Anthropology, University of California-Los Angeles
This talk examines the relationships between labor, social life and capitalism through an ethnographic account of the emerging “creator economy” in India. Drawing on two years of fieldwork in Mumbai, Pune, Indore and Singapore, I follow an unlikely group of digital creators — middle-aged housewives who produce recipes and home cooking content on YouTube and Instagram — as they become enchanted with technological futurity and navigate Hindu nationalist food politics in contemporary India. How might our understandings of culture, technology and global capitalism change if we take the Indian housewife creator as a key figure of contemporary labor?
Heralded as a paradigmatic shift in the “future of work”, the creator economy is a $100-billion global industry of over 50 million content creators as well as the digital infrastructures through which creators earn a living by monetizing digital content. In popular and scholarly accounts, the creator economy is treated as primarily a technological shift towards ‘digital labor’, rooted in the promise that individuals, especially women of color in the Global South, can now earn livelihoods and even amass fortunes with just a smartphone and an internet connection. This provocative and homogenizing claim distills both the affective appeal and the analytical limits of the creator economy as a singular, digital-first, global enterprise composed of hyper-productive individuals.
In this talk, I critically evaluate this promise about the future of work, using ethnography to investigate, not the content of creators’ pages, but the material conditions, social relationships and embodied practices out of which their digital labors emerge. I situate the creators’ work in the cultural and political milieu of rapidly digitizing contemporary India and its diasporas, where the resurgence of Hindu nationalist politics plays a daily and deadly role, and food is pivotal to the performance and reproduction of caste, religious, ethnic and national identifications. Consequently, I argue that the global creator economy accumulates profits because it relies on not a futuristic transformation of individualized labor, but the resurgence of an older set of production relations – the household industry. Specifically, I enumerate how households, themselves reproduced by existing inequalities of gender, class, caste, nation and postcolonial racial geographies, are digitally re-mediated as a start-up entities. Through such an analysis, I provide a timely exploration of the situated labors, desires and subjectivities through which a vast and lucrative global capitalist project is being produced, animated and emplaced.
Bio: Sucharita Kanjilal is a doctoral candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a former journalist from Mumbai, India. Her doctoral research combines anthropological perspectives on digital media, labor and capitalism, anti-caste and postcolonial feminisms, theories of affect, and critical food studies. Her work has appeared in Gastronomica, the Routledge volume Caste in/and Film (forthcoming) Quartz.com, Scroll.in, Hindustan Times and the Heritage Radio Network.
For more information, call 845-758-7667, or e-mail [email protected].
Time: 5:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Location: Olin 102