Based on fieldwork conducted in the transforming textile mill lands of Mumbai, India, this talk expands ideas begun in her book, The Archive of Loss: Lively Ruination in Mill Land Mumbai, which explored everyday life and work at the last privately owned textile mill, which she calls Dhanraj Spinning and Weaving Ltd. Through memories of the Great Textile Strike of 1982–1983, this talk looks for the truths within “fictions” told by Dhanraj workers. Through “untrue” stories, she engages the notion of an impossible subject and explore the crisis of an impossible story: what do anthropologists do with informant testimonies we know to be factually incorrect? How do we collect, interpret, and use informant lies, manipulations, and untruths as critical archival material? She attempts to answer these questions through her relationship with someone she calls Kishan, a North Indian textile worker from Bihar. In doing so, she shows what it looks like to live precariously in a space of ruination.

Maura Finkelstein is a writer, ethnographer, and former associate professor of anthropology. She is the author of The Archive of Loss: Lively Ruination in Mill Land Mumbai, published by Duke University Press in 2019. Her writing has also been published in Anthological Quarterly, City and Society, Cultural Anthropology, Anthropology Now, Post45, Electric Literature, Allegra Lab, Red Pepper Magazine, The Markaz Review, the Scottish Left Review, Mondoweiss, and Al Jazeera.

https://www.maurafinkelstein.com/

Made possible with the generous support of the Title VI grant from the U.S. Department of Education.

Free and open to the public.