Mubbashir Rizvi is a doctoral Candidate at the Department of Anthropology, University of Texas Austin. He has conducted ethnographic fieldwork on land relations in Pakistani Punjab along with archival research in the United Kingdom. His dissertation entitled “Masters not Friends: Land, Labor and Politics of Place in Rural Pakistan” draws upon related fields of political anthropology, post-colonial theory and environmental anthropology to understand the vicissitudes of a peasant movement ‘Anjuman Mazaraeen Punjab’ that is struggling to retain land rights over vast agricultural farms controlled by the Pakistan army.
His field research analyzes the cultural significance of land relations and caste/religious identity to understand political subjectivity in Punjab. He posits a relational understanding of ‘politics of place’ that attends to a range of practices from the history of colonial infrastructure projects (the building of canals, roads and model villages), the memory of subsistence farming, and the present day precariousness of migrant labor that sustains many rural households in central Punjab.