Labour relations in the ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ sectors: Report of a case study in south Gujarat,India. Part 2.

The fate of peasants, agricultural labourers and others who leave the agrarian sector, either temporarily or permanently, to seek employment in towns and cities, must be of great interest to anyone concerned with the peasantry. Yet it is an area about which we are remarkably ignorant. Jan Breman's study of the ‘labour relations’ (or, one might say, the ‘poverty') of those who are, to a significant extent, first‐generation town‐dwellers, or who, indeed, although they seek employment in towns, have not yet severed their connections with the countryside, is extremely enlightening in this respect. Although it is not directly about peasants we publish it as an important contribution to our knowledge of this hitherto ‘dark’ area, in which rural origins or connections are of manifest significance. The author employs the ‘informal'/'formal’ sector dichotomy, with suitable scepticism, to examine in great detail the labour system outside agriculture in the Valsad district of South Gujarat.??     

Social indicators and welfare measurement: Remarks on methodology

The impossibility of measuring social conditions as one overall aggregate has to be recognized: it is only the three distinct ‘'aspects’ of social conditions which can be considered conceptually measurable. They are: (1) demography (2) social relations and (3) welfare. Each of them must be measured in its own way. This paper is concerned with elaborating a methodology of measuring welfare by means of indicators and indices, based on observable and measurable facts. Welfare indices are supposed to serve not only for assessing the results of development but also as targets for development plans.     

Rethinking Police Violence in Brazil: Unmasking the Public Secret of Race

In Brazilian cities, perhaps the most disturbing criminal activity is the violence perpetrated by police officers themselves. This article is an invitation and a provocation to reconsider social scientific thinking about police violence in Brazil. Illustrated by a court decision from a Northeastern city, in which a black man won a case against the state for being falsely arrested and abused by a black police officer on the grounds of racism, this article investigates three paradoxes: Brazilians fear both crime and the police; black police beat black civilians; and government officials disavow responsibility by stigmatizing the police on racial grounds. It then proposes an alternative reading of these paradoxes that opens the possibility for rethinking police reform and argues that democratization in Brazil is deeply intertwined with the future of its darkest‐skinned citizens.