Articles

“When Men Do Care: Labor, Caste and Migration in Rural Pakistan. Cultural Anthropology, forthcoming.

Book

My current book project, Plastic Patriarchy: Family and Capitalism in Migrant-sending Villages in Pakistan, explores how transnational joint families are shaping capitalist development ‘from below’ in migrant-sending villages. Drawing on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork in rural Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the book is an intimate ethnography of the micropolitics of migrant joint families from upwardly mobile classes. It shows how changing relations of family solidarity and conflict constitute the practices and meanings of labor, land and capital in a remittance-dependent and real estate-oriented economy stretching across Pakistan and Malaysia. The book argues that in spite of major disruptions of honor-based tribal norms caused by migration, the patriarchal family is stretched and creatively renewed.