Patrick Beckhorn

Patrick Beckhorn is interested in the anthropologies of work, migration, and gender. His topical area of focus is North India where he studies men who migrate to Delhi to work as cycle rickshaw pullers. His dissertation explores how these migrant laborers reconcile competing pressures from their families and wives to be both proper financial providers and good lovers. Alongside these considerations, his dissertation also focuses on the instances of, and limitations to, homo-social bonding and place-based solidarities that cycle rickshaw pullers sometimes perform across communal and religious lines. Overall, his research suggests that male migrant laborers cannot be reduced to workers, rather their labor is related in complex and problematic ways to their gendered lives which stretch from the workplace to their villages-or-origins.