Luisa Steur is Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. Her research focuses on  the entanglement of capitalist change and shifting forms of political identification and contestation in the global South. She is a well-known contributor to debates in the anthropology of labor and anthropolitical political-economy as well as on questions of the connection of race, caste, indigeneity and class; and the study of structural racism and caste political economy. The regional focus of Steur’s research concerns the two most resilient remaining “actually existing socialist states” in the global South: Kerala (India) and Cuba.

Steur completed her PhD at the Central European University in 2011and was part of the “Caste Out of Development” ESRC research project at the School of Oriental and African Studies as a post-doctoral researcher, before moving to the Department of Anthropology of the University of Copenhagen in 2012 to work as Assistant Professor. She subsequently moved to the University of Amsterdam in 2016 where she was granted tenure in March 2018.

Steur been published “Indigenist Mobilization: Confronting Electoral Communism and Precarious Livelihoods in Post-Reform Kerala” in 2017 with Berghahn. She has published over 25 articles and chapters in edited volumes and journals including Dialectical Anthropology, Modern Asia Studies, Journal of South Asian Development, and Focaal-Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology, on topics including: the intersection of indigeneity and class, the political economic dynamics of Dalit civil society initiatives, the realist contradictions of the Aam Aadmi Party, the gender and caste politics behind the Sabarimala controversy in Kerala, subaltern political identification in contemporary Cuba and Kerala, Eric Wolf and the political-intellectual dillemas of Marxist anthropology and the role of labor in the debate on racism in contemporary Cuba. Steur also regularly publishes book reviews for journals such as Social Anthropology, American Ethnologist and Journal of Agrarian Change.

Steur has organized over twenty academic seminars and panels internationally, including the international conference on “Decolonizing the Revolution for Our Times: Radical Traditions, Marxist Movements and the Climate Struggle” (June 15-16 2023 at the University of Amerdam and the IISH).

Steur has been a long-time Lead and Managing editor of Focaal-Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology – a journal that is highly regarded in the field of anthropology and is of course peer-reviewed, Web of Science-indexed and moreover Open Access. Focaal has recently published its exciting 100th issue!

Steur also enjoys teaching undergraduate as well as graduate courses such as “Political Anthropology and Ecology: Capitalism, class and climate change” and “Anthropology of Latin America and the Caribbean”.  Since 2014, she has supervised more than twelve MA theses to completion and served on various PhD examining committees. She currently is (co-)supervising seven PhD research projects, the first of which is expected to finish by 2025.  

In the closing decade of the twentieth century, marked by the triumphant global victory of capitalist liberal democracy, social scientists seemed to have lost interest in Marxism, both as a theoretical tradition and as a political current. For millions of people outside the core of the world system, however, this period of Western liberal political hegemony brought intensified precariousness and crisis. No wonder that with the gradual reshuffling of global political hegemony in the first two decades of this century, a renewed momentum has arisen for “decolonization" and many activists again look in admiration at two of the most genuine and resilient remaining cases of “actually existing socialism” in the global South: the Caribbean island state of Cuba and the South Indian state of Kerala.

In both cases, the influence of Marxism is unavoidable but also raises many complicated questions marked by the intertwinement of a Western-dominated capitalist world order with socialisms in the global South and the interrelations between Marxist politics and theory: to what extent can the successes and failures of these Communist governments be attributed to Marxism? Is Marxism in these contexts merely an alien importation from Europe forming a discourse of “class” that superficially covers a political reality that can only be properly understood in more the deep historical registers of race or caste? Is the Marxism that inspired these states to pave out relatively autonomous and egalitarian paths of development - and resist a Western-imposed neoliberal hegemony - at the same time a Eurocentric theoretical obstacle for the liberation of the most oppressed social groups in these societies – Adivasis and Dalits in Kerala and blacks in Cuba? Could a more heterodox or “tropical” theoretical tradition of Marxism instead achieve a more sharp and balanced political understanding of power-laden social processes unfolding in both societies?

These are some of the questions my research grapples with while being anchored in the anthropology of labor. I therefore seek to provide answers to these questions not just by studying intellectual debates and their history in both places but especially by understanding political actors in the context of their biographies and everyday lives. Amongst such political actors, I especially also count ordinary working people because “politics”, for anthropologists of labor, is fundamentally about the relations of power that shape the context in which people make a living. Hence I’m interested to find out how ordinary people – even those who have never participated in a political protest or political party – interpret the existential problems in their lives: why, for instance, have many agricultural workers in Kerala stopped talking about their problems in terms of poverty and instead have started denouncing their oppression as Adivasis or Dalits? And why, on the other hand, do many manual laborers in Cuba say that racism is only a problem when it comes to the realm of marriage and do they attribute most of their existential problems to a loss of collective socialist morality? By answering such questions – through in-depth fieldwork – I seek to contribute reflexive and nuanced insights on ongoing political processes and social changes in Kerala and Cuba as the experiences of these two states hold crucial lessons for current global efforts to rethink development, political theory, and subaltern praxis from a decolonial standpoint.

Indigenist Mobilization: Confronting Electoral Communism and Precarious Livelihoods in Post-reform Kerala

Description: In Kerala, political activists with a background in Communism are now instead asserting political demands on the basis of indigenous identity. Why did a notion of indigenous belonging come to replace the discourse of class in subaltern struggles? Indigenist Mobilization answers this question through a detailed ethnographic study of the dynamics between the Communist party and indigenist activists, and the subtle ways in which global capitalist restructuring leads to a resonance of indigenist visions in the changing everyday working lives of subaltern groups in Kerala.

Reviews:

“The ethnographic material incorporated in the book is vast… But the richness of the material presented precisely offers the book its authority— the multiple conjunctures that led to the rise of indigeneity are detailed with great effort. For young researchers using ethnography as a method, the work could present an example of navigating positionality issues determined by one’s social location through the sheer detail of the evidences collected and the sensitivity with which they are presented… The book is perhaps most important for the theoretical insights it provides.” • Dialectical Anthropology

“This book is recommended reading for those who work with issues of land governance, resource politics, social mobilisation and identity and citizenship, and to students and general readers eager to get an impression of what anthropology at its rigorous best looks like.” • The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology

“Indigenist Mobilization ably shows that indigeneity is not an inevitable let alone natural or essential approach to identity and action but one that, as anthropology has become adept at describing, is built by specific actors in specific circumstances for specific purposes. This lesson is crucial for the discipline as well as for policymakers who must deal with the demands of newly-energized ‘indigenous’ groups.” • Anthropology Review Database

“This is a wonderfully written piece that will raise some eyebrows and generate some wonderful debates. The critique of indigenist “identity” politics has been sorely needed for a long time, and this work helps us assess that context in a more robust and critical fashion without falling into a lackluster, celebratory mode of championing indigenous politics on a pure level of ‘identity’ and ‘rights’.” • Ananthakrishnan Aiyer, University of Michigan

“A summation of outstanding research, and based on ethical, committed, and egalitarian fieldwork, this book has an enormously important contribution to make to a number of fields, including South Asian Politics, Ethnography and History, Social Movement Analysis, International Studies and Environmental Studies.” • Kavita Philip, UC Irvine

Links to book reviews:

-David Eller (Community College of Denver) in Anthropology Review Database

-Sanal Mohan in (Mahatma Gandhi University) in Cambridge Anthropology

-Siddharth Sareen (University of Bergen) in Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology

-Sudheesh R.C. (University of Oxford) in Dialectical Anthropology

-Tommaso Sbriccoli (University College London) in ANUAC

PhD students whose project I have supervised/am supervising:

Raviv Litman (UvA) -"The Price is White? Foreign Teachers in China’s Private ESL Industry". Expected to finish in 2024.

Arati Kade (UvA) - "Nomadic communities, Brahmanical hegemony, and Nationalism from below". Expected to finish in 2025.  

Khidir Prawirosusanto (UvA) - "Pitching Promises, Imagining Futures: The Yogyakarta International Airport and Aerotropolis Development in Indonesia". Expected to finish in 2025.  

Nidhish Sundar (UvA) - "Agrarian change in village Kerala". Expected to finish in 2025.

Sonali Shirke (UvA) – “Caste, housing right struggles, and urban space in Mumbai". Expected to finish in 2026.

Yunhan Peng (UvA) - Spanish language teaching in China. Expected to finish in 2026.

MA students I have supervised/am supervising:

Hugo Bordas - Beyond the "gringo" narrative: The violence of gentrification in Cuauhtemoc

Yujin Chao - Care as a language of contention: The "union solution" in the platform-based ride-hailing industry in China

Garip Onal - "‘Being your own boss': An ethnographic account on self-employment amongst parcel couriers in the Netherlands (UvA, 2022).

Chantal Vissers - Dutch Interns in the Curaçaoan Hospitality Business: Between Diversity and Racialization, the Case of Hipster Restaurant “Bario” (UvA, 2022)

Annamaria Laudini – Empowered by migration? Rethinking agency and gender roles among Indian women in Lazio, Italy. (UvA, 2021)

Linda Lemmen – FARCian family: Liminality and social relations while transforming from a guerrilla group into a political party (UvA, 2019).

Judith van den Velde – Resignation in a revolutionary town: Subalternity in the working-class community of the agricultural and ‘anti-capitalist’ village of Marinaleda (Southern Spain) (UvA, 2019)

Claire Sterngold - Artisanal Exploitation: Craft tequila and the reproduction of class in rural Mexico. (UvA, 2017).

Shahernaz Kargan - Rethinking the riots: Counter-narratives by Brixton’s black youth in the aftermath of 2011 London riots. (UvA, 2016).

Tilde Siglev - "For the health of the neighborhood": Urban Transformation, Local Resistance, and Politics of Development in the Lower Ninth Ward of post-Katrina New Orleans. (University of Copenhagen, 2016)

Marie Emilie Sørensen - Living with the crisis as if it was not there: An anthropological inquiry into young people's engagement with the Greek economic crisis. (University of Copenhagen, 2015)

Sharan Kaur - Between self-sufficiency and survival: Organic farming enterprises, volunteer labour, and the dilemmas of commodification in rural Portugal. (University of Copenhagen, 2015)

Line Bjerregaard - "You have to know how to make the money grow": An anthropological study of the "class race" amongst peri-urban farmers in India. (University of Copenhagen, 2014)

Selection of the courses I teach/have taught:

-Political Anthropology: Capitalistm, Class and Contestation (UvA)

-The Anthropology of Latin America and the Caribbean (UvA)

-Inleiding in the Sociologie der Niet-Westerse samenlevingen (UvA)

-India Lecture Series (IIS, UvA)

-Anthropological Analysis (University of Copenhagen)

-Political Movements (University of Copenhagen)