Living and Praying in the Code: The Flexibility and Discipline of Indian Information Technology Workers (Iters) in a Global Economy (Ethics OF SCALE: RELOCATING POLITICS AFTER Liberation) (Report‪)‬

The rhythm of Jean Comaroff's Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance is given by the and, the not only, the also; the book follows a mode of inquiry that refuses binaries, instead seeking to examine cultural conjunctions. The and marks the measure of the argument, allowing analyses to build on one another, avoiding origins and endpoints, and instead emphasizing how, in all social life, we take what is given us and re-form it, we make "reconstructions of existing reconstructions" (1985:214). Indeed, Body of Power offers us reconstruction in a double sense--it is both what Tshidi practitioners do when they remake orthodox Christianity within colonialism's contours, and it is what Comaroff is doing when she shapes the historical and ethnographic record to show how Zionism comes over time now to reinforce, now to upend colonial domination. Though mine is a study of Hindu religious worship among Indian Information Technology workers employed abroad, I have found the method of historical, ethnographic and political analysis that Comaroff develops useful in making my arguments. It allows me to shift from thinking about the conjunction between "religion" and programming to focus on religious practices and discourses as sites where diasporic and transnational Indian IT work is embodied. I focus on how Hindu religious traditions become available to ongoing reconstruction, continually subject to reinterpretation and new mobilizations within prevailing economic and social forces as "Hindu" coders shift from one place to another.