(Re)Constructing the Body: An Ethnographic Study of Factory Accidents and Reconstructive Plastic Surgery in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu

Abstract

University of Washington Abstract (Re)Constructing the Body:An Ethnographic Study of Factory Accidents and Reconstructive Plastic Surgery in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu Lily N. Shapiro Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Sareeta Amrute Department of Anthropology This dissertation is an ethnography of factory accidents and the reconstructive plastic surgeries that occur in their wake in Coimbatore, India. In what follows, I trace the workplace accident through various lenses and spaces. Keeping the accident as my primary analytic, I examine the social relations, institutions, and systems of power that produce the accident and become active in its aftermath. I ask, what can a focus on the accident show us about the daily operation of neoliberal capitalism, of social relations including care and debt, of systems of labor and social reproduction? What does it reveal about the body and the construction and reconstruction of the body in relation to ideas about what different bodies do and what they are for? How do the accident, and attendant ideas about risk and danger, articulate with understandings of gender, class, and ability? The accident disrupts the notion of neatly separable spheres of life, showing the ways in which the factory and the hospital are entangled. How, then, are practices of surgical expertise related to and dependent upon questions of labor, machine work, and care? This is a study of the accident, but it allows us to explore the interstices of medicine, labor, care, and the body. This dissertation is based on fifteen months of ethnographic research in Coimbatore, primarily at a large plastic and orthopedic surgery hospital, where between one and two hundred patients are seen each month as the result of a workplace accident. There, they are treated for a great variety of injuries that span a range of levels of severity, though most involve the hands and arms. This project takes up both the labor of the surgeons, exploring what kind of work the surgery does as part of a wider continuum of caring practices that are called up as the result of injury, and exploring the connections between workspaces, medical spaces, and medical expertise. Much of this research is also based upon in-depth interviews with individuals injured at work and treated at this hospital. Through these data, I explore notions of risk, work and labor practices, and experiences of trauma, care, and recovery (however incomplete). At its basis, this project is interested in the interweaving of concepts of work, care, and the body as they are constituted in and through the accident. The chapters, then, revolve around different ways of understanding, narrating, and analyzing the accident. They chart a rough chronology of the accident and the way that it intercedes in and exposes different institutions and practices. My primary argument is that care does not happen in spite of or on the margins of capitalism, but rather that capitalism provokes and depends upon mechanisms of care and caring relations. The first chapter approaches the relationship between work and the accident. How is our understanding of factory labor illuminated by a focus on the accident? The second chapter is about narratives and habit. How do people narrate their own accidents and recoveries, and how do these narrations articulate with concepts of temporality and habit? I use the Tamil word paḻakkam (habit) as an analytic to understand the slow process of adjusting (or being unable to adjust) to a changed body. The third chapter is about the surgery and the hospital — what does the post-accident surgery do, how does it attempt to reconstruct particular ideas about bodies, especially in terms of what I am calling class, and how do those ideas (and the material way they play out on bodies themselves) change our understanding of form, function, and normativity? The fourth chapter is about care and capitalism. What does it mean to care for someone in the wake of an accident? How do people care for themselves, how do family arrangements shift, and how do these shifts reveal uncertainties in already tenuous conditions? I draw on literature on the social reproduction of labor to think about the ways in which these uncertainties and forms of care articulate, reproduce, and exceed capitalist productivist logics. Finally in the fifth chapter, we turn to the question of responsibility and care, considering the critique of owners and labor policy structures that workers articulated in the wake of accidents.