Along the Integral Margin

Uneven Development in a Myanmar Squatter Settlement

Stephen Campbell

• Publisher: ILR Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781501764899
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

In recent years anthropologists have focused on informal, unfree, and other nonnormative labor arrangements and labeled them as "noncapitalist." In Along the Integral Margin, Stephen Campbell pushes back against this idea and shows that these labor arrangements are, in fact, important aspects of capitalist development and that the erroneous "noncapitalist" label contributes to obscuring current capitalist relations.

Through powerful, intimate ethnographic narratives of the lives and struggles of residents of a squatter settlement in Myanmar, Campbell challenges narrow conceptions of capitalism and asserts that nonnormative labor is not marginal but rather centrally important to Myanmar's economic development. Campbell's narrative approach brings individuals who are often marginalized in accounts of contemporary Myanmar to the forefront and raises questions about the diversity of work in capitalism.

Table of contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. A Deeper History of Myanmar’s Political Transformation
• 2. From Rural Dispossession to Precarious Urbanization
• 3. Squatting amid Capitalism and the Contradictions Thereof
• 4. Debt Collection as Labor Discipline
• 5. The Integral Informality of Marginalized Workers
• 6. Unfreedoms of Capitalism
• 7. Squatter Self-Organization and Collective Struggle
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index