The spirit in the machine: Towards a spiritual geography of debt bondage and labour (im)mobility in Cambodian brick kilns

Abstract

This paper draws on evidence from debt bonded brick workers in Cambodia to explore how animism and formal religion are articulated to retain workers in dangerous and difficult conditions. The paper shows first how factory labourers, owners, and local religious figures actively articulate spiritual beliefs by legitimising workers’ confinement to the kiln through moral recourse to Buddhist notions of merit, character, and destiny. Secondly, it shows how informal animist beliefs play a key role in shaping interpretations of, and responses to, the extreme physical conditions of the kilns. Thus, by exploring how superstition and religious beliefs work to co-constitute labour (im)mobility in the country’s brick kilns, it makes a case for linking the geographies of labour, mobilities, and spirituality. More broadly, by highlighting the role of locally articulated spirituality in immobilising workers, our paper provides a counterpoint to predominant narratives of spiritual and animist agency as resistance, demonstrating instead how such agency may serve in the workplace as a means of coercion, restriction and control.