Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. 184 pp. US$22.50, paper. ISBN 978-0-8166-9396-2.
Life Support is an innovative attempt to grapple with the new forms and geographies of labour, production, and service provision that have emerged in the global economy. Drawing on insights from three sites in India’s outsourced economy—call centres, the IT industry, and surrogacy clinics—Kalindi Vora develops a theory of labour as “vital energy.” Building on the concept of biocapital, she argues that reproductive labour plays a central role in this new mode of transnational accumulation. Be it the affective labour of a call centre worker in Gurgaon dealing with an irate customer in New Jersey, or the work of gestation and mothering performed by a paid surrogate in Gujarat who creates a baby for a wealthy foreign couple, Vora argues that the production, circulation, and appropriation of vital energy stands at the centre of the production of value and processes of accumulation in these businesses.
Building on feminist and postcolonial theories, the author develops her conceptual approach in chapter 1. She argues that in order to understand these forms of work and how they generate value, we need to go beyond Marxist theories of labour and even the notion of biocapital, and instead centre attention on the “production and circulation of vital energy represented in the categories of affective and biological labor” (41). Her strategy is to juxtapose seemingly very different kinds of work in order to draw out their connections: “What call center work and commercial surrogacy have in common is the labour of producing and transferring human vital energy directly to a consumer, through the work of affect and the intentional or dedicated use of bodily organs and subjective processes. The work of producing vital energy … is distributed unequally at the level of international exchange, as are opportunities for consumption” (39). Vora suggests that the appropriation of vital energy from workers in India to fulfil the requirements of customers in the West echoes and replicates older, colonial modes of accumulation: “In performing this labor with its transnational transfer of value, racialized and gendered bodies or subjects become the bearers of colonial legacies and neoliberal restructurings that create an opportunity to expand as well as think outside of current ways of conceptualizing labor” (39).
To develop her argument, Vora draws not only on ethnographic research with call centre employees, IT professionals, and gestational surrogates, but also on literary sources. The style of writing and mode of argumentation falls more within cultural studies than anthropology, and as a result the book seems over-theorized: the “data” presented is somewhat too thin to support the heavy theoretical load that it is expected to carry. While one can understand the eclectic choice of source material given the stated aim of the book—to develop a novel theoretical framework through which to address the question of labour in the globalized service economy—I did wish for a richer presentation of ethnographic material collected from surrogacy clinics and other sites. For instance, the discussion of call centre workers’ experiences in chapter 2, which draws mainly on a play and a second-hand ethnographic account, is inadequate in view of the substantial anthropological literature that we now have on Indian call centres, exploring diverse aspects of work and workers’ experiences in these transnational workspaces. Similarly, the interpretation of the narratives of IT professionals in chapter 3 provides a rather one-dimensional picture, homogenizing the highly varied and conflicted aspirations and experiences of Indian software engineers, which cannot be simply reduced to the themes of marginality and temporariness. The fourth chapter on transnational surrogates is much fuller and nuanced, and here Vora does an excellent job of bringing out the complexities of subjectification and the social relationships that are forged in the context of such intimate labour. For instance, she shows that surrogates are carefully coached to think and speak of surrogacy as a simple contract in which their “empty” wombs are utilized to grow a child for someone else, but “another theory of value and sociality inhabits their narratives of surrogacy” (106). Although surrogates temper this extremely alienating form of labour with their own cultural expectations and notions of giving, the text poignantly brings out their powerlessness to enact the kinds of social relationships that they imagine could emerge from this contract, with the commissioning parents and even with the child that is produced through their reproductive labour.
The effort to encompass these various forms of work within an overarching theoretical framework often leads the author to gloss over their specificities. For example, Vora frames all three kinds of labour as “gendered” and “racialised,” yet does not adequately develop her argument about the gendering of labour in call centres (where at least half the workforce is male), much less in IT companies. Similarly, by collapsing all these instances into the idea of a racialized workforce providing outsourced labour for clients in the West, she overlooks the complexities of identity within the global IT industry, where the circulation of Indian software labour takes multiple forms and produces diverse subjectivities.
Despite these drawbacks, Life Support is an engaging and provocative read that makes a significant contribution to current debates on globalization and labour.
Carol Upadhya
National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore, India
pp. 185-187