Central and South Asian brick kilns are emblems of bondage. The reports of international organizations and scholarly literature have explained their connections with broader economic processes and social hierarchies. It is an exhausting and intensive work and, in the long run, detrimental to the health of workers, especially children. The exploitation of labor at brick kilns is often related to debt-chains and systems of dependence. To make these systems of dependence function there are different actors involved, one crucial figure being the ‘recruiter’ that creates the contact between the employee and the owner of the brick kiln. The first part of the paper discusses to what extent labor conditions at brick kilns can be considered as form of slavery, particularly from the point of view of workers. Building on workers’ narratives, the paper then addresses other crucial, and often underrated, questions: which role do ideas of freedom play in the lives of people that work in conditions of bondage? Is brick kiln only a phase in the life-cycle? Against the backdrop of an ethnographic research carried out in some of the brick kilns in the province of Kabul, this paper explores the aspirations of freedom and the perception of future that workers develop. This perspective allows us to discuss the problem of bondage and human exploitation in a way that does not simply emphasize the passive and victimized situation of workers. Rather, it situates bondage in the context of life trajectories whereby ideas of a not-yet-achieved freedom clash with the harshness of present conditions and are imagined in a logic of becoming.
DE LAURI, A. (2015). Brick after Brick. Dynamics of Bondage and Freedom in Afghanistan. Intervento presentato a: Global Conference: Slavery Past, Present and Future, Oxford.
Brick after Brick. Dynamics of Bondage and Freedom in Afghanistan
DE LAURI, ANTONIO
2015
Abstract
Central and South Asian brick kilns are emblems of bondage. The reports of international organizations and scholarly literature have explained their connections with broader economic processes and social hierarchies. It is an exhausting and intensive work and, in the long run, detrimental to the health of workers, especially children. The exploitation of labor at brick kilns is often related to debt-chains and systems of dependence. To make these systems of dependence function there are different actors involved, one crucial figure being the ‘recruiter’ that creates the contact between the employee and the owner of the brick kiln. The first part of the paper discusses to what extent labor conditions at brick kilns can be considered as form of slavery, particularly from the point of view of workers. Building on workers’ narratives, the paper then addresses other crucial, and often underrated, questions: which role do ideas of freedom play in the lives of people that work in conditions of bondage? Is brick kiln only a phase in the life-cycle? Against the backdrop of an ethnographic research carried out in some of the brick kilns in the province of Kabul, this paper explores the aspirations of freedom and the perception of future that workers develop. This perspective allows us to discuss the problem of bondage and human exploitation in a way that does not simply emphasize the passive and victimized situation of workers. Rather, it situates bondage in the context of life trajectories whereby ideas of a not-yet-achieved freedom clash with the harshness of present conditions and are imagined in a logic of becoming.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.