Domestic servitude blurs the divide between family and work, affection and duty, the home and the world. In Cultures of Servitude, Raka Ray and Seemin Qayum offer an ethnographic account of domestic life and servitude in contemporary Kolkata, India, with a concluding comparison with New York City. Focused on employers as well as servants, men as well as women, across multiple generations, they examine the practices and meaning of servitude around the home and in the public sphere. This book shifts the conversations surrounding domestic service away from an emphasis on the crisis of transnational care work to one about the constitution of class. It reveals how employers position themselves as middle and upper classes through evolving methods of servant and home management, even as servants grapple with the challenges of class and cultural distinction embedded in relations of domination and inequality.
"By taking us into the intimate sphere of employers' and employees' personal experiences, Ray and Qayum expose the blurry intersections that domestic work sustains between class and gender, the private and public, and the old and modern. As self-employment expands the world over, these insights are invaluable for our understanding of contemporary capitalism."
American Journal of Sociology
"Cultures of Servitude is a beautifully written, empirically rich, and theoretically sophisticated study that rethinks the relationship between class formation and domestic servitude in the globalized economy. Exposing the complex interactions between domestic workers and their employers in the context of the dramatic social changes that have transformed India in recent decades, it bristles with
Los Angeles
"[An] engaging and insightful piece of scholarship."
