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This piece was selected as one of the winners of the AAA’s AnthroDay Student Unessay Competition. This year’s competition was inspired by the Annual Meeting theme, “On the Verge.”
My film explores the lives of migrant stone crushers and their families in the Balason River Basin in North Bengal, India, workers who labor daily amid silica dust and flying stone fragments without protective equipment, formal contracts, or institutional safeguards. Through visual storytelling, I examined what it means to live and work “on the verge.” For these workers, being on the verge is not symbolic but embodied: on the verge of silicosis and respiratory disease, on the verge of financial collapse after a single injury, and on the verge of invisibility within systems meant to protect laborers. Drawing from my independent ethnographic research, including interviews and participant observation, the film highlights how anticipation and uncertainty shape everyday life, waiting for wages, waiting for policy change, waiting for symptoms to surface.