Anne-Meike Fechter

Examining ‘Expatriate’ Continuities: Postcolonial Approaches to Mobile Professionals

In recent years, the interdisciplinary fields of colonial and postcolonial studies have been enriched by nuanced analyses of the ways in which racialised colonial identities (cross-cut by gender, class and sexuality) have been enacted in particular settings. Nevertheless, the quantity and quality of knowledge about the lives of European colonials and settlers can be held in stark contrast with the relative scarcity of studies of those who might be regarded as their modern-day equivalents: contemporary ‘expatriates’, or citizens of ‘Western’ nation-states who are involved in temporary migration processes to destinations outside ‘the West’. These contemporary expatriates are rarely considered through a postcolonial framework. As a corrective, this special issue of JEMS draws together eight articles, each of which explicitly engages in different ways with this theoretical concern. In this introductory paper we argue for the significance of the past in shaping contemporary expatriate mobilities and note postcolonial continuities in relation to people, practices and imaginations. While discussing the resonances across various geographical sites, we emphasise the need to also consider the particularity of postcolonial contexts. Finally, we suggest that we need to broaden the current, somewhat myopic focus on Western expatriates, to understand them in relation to other groups of migrants, particularly in globalising cities, and to include the perspectives of locals.

The Other stares back: Experiencing Whiteness in Jakarta

Discussions of whiteness often focus on the ‘invisibility’ of whites. I suggest, though, that the situation of whites in non-white environments contributes a crucial dimension to concepts of whiteness. In particular, I examine the case of white Euro-American expatriates living in Jakarta. These corporate expatriates have been posted to Indonesia by their companies, and they often experience being ‘racially marked’ for the first time. This takes place through the ‘gaze of the Other’; being looked at by Indonesians in the street, and by being called bule, an Indonesian term for ‘white person’. While many regard these practices as unpleasant and offensive, expatriates are unwilling to acknowledge their political implications. They often refuse to recognize their status as a ‘race’, thus highlighting the persistence of the notion of whiteness as unmarked, even when confronted with situations which suggest otherwise.

Gender, Empire, Global Capitalism: Colonial and Corporate Expatriate Wives

This paper takes as a starting-point the striking disjunct between the wealth of historical studies on ‘gender and empire’, and a comparative lack of work that examines corresponding issues in the present. I suggest that discussions of gender and global capitalism are shaped by a focus on poor women, producing limited perspectives. The paper asks if analyses of colonial women could be used to elucidate the positions of a group that shares some of their characteristics, namely corporate expatriate wives. This is illustrated through the pejorative discourses surrounding colonial and contemporary expatriate wives. I argue that such discourse serves to both downplay and legitimise womens incorporation into imperial and commercial enterprises. While it has been demonstrated that women perform substantial emotional labour, I argue that their ideological labour within these projects tends to be overlooked. Expatriate women can thus become the embodiment of their exploitative nature, which problematises the tendency to conceptualise, for example, global capitalism as an inherently masculine enterprise. Recognising expatriate wives as postcolonial subjects also significantly broadens the concept, in the sense that they live in the context of imperial legacies which have been much less examined.

Aid work as moral labour

This paper argues that some of the engagements and practices of international aid workers can be productively understood as forms of moral labour. Taking Hardt’s concept of ‘immaterial labour’ (1999) as a point of reference, the paper examines the moral practices that aid workers engage in the course of their work and personal lives. Much of the relevant literature focuses on the humanitarian imperative – that is, the implied moral responsibility of better-off nations and individuals to assist others in need. Less extensively, some development literature has adopted the understanding of aid and development assistance in moral frameworks of the gift, or ‘doing good’. What happens, though, in terms of experienced and practiced moralities in the concrete situations and scenarios generated by such helping imperatives? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among aid workers in Cambodia, the paper examines some of the perhaps inevitable moral entanglements which these workers find themselves in, and have to negotiate. The analytical benefits of framing these efforts as ‘moral labour’ include a broadened understanding of how morality matters in aid beyond the helping imperative, as well as a recognition that the significance of this labour does not rest on products that may result from it, but lies in the performance of the labour itself.

'The good child': Anthropological perspectives on morality and childhood

Currently, there is no clearly delineated field that could be described as ‘the anthropology of morality’. There exists, however, an increasingly visible and vocal interest in issues of morality among anthropologists. Although there has been a lack of explicit study, it has become clear that anthropologists have, in fact, been concerned with issues of moralities all along. The purpose of this special issue is to bring this interest to ethnographic studies of childhood, and explore how and why children or young people act in a particular way and are making certain choices, how these are valued or contested by their families, peers, and communities. The papers in this special issue highlight the contestations that arise as multiple moralities collide, and the effects this may have for the persons involved. Collectively, the papers illustrate a notion of moralities as multiple, contested, and mobile, and the consequences this may have in a globalising world.

Interrogating child migrants or ‘Third Culture Kids’ in Asia: An introduction

Research on children and youth involved in migration in Asia is predominantly—and understandably—concerned with those move to improve their livelihoods. This includes those young people who move with their families as well as the effects on those ‘left behind’. Substantial routes and streams include rural-to-urban migration to the burgeoning factory work sector in China in the context of industrialization (Murphy, 2002; Pun, 2005); Filipino women moving to globalizing cities, such as Hong Kong and Singapore, in the domestic work sector (Constable, 1997); Indonesian workers migrating to Malaysia or the Gulf, lured by prospects of higher wages in rubber plantations or on constructions sites (Lindquist, 2010); young Chinese moving to Japan to work or study (Coates, 2013); and young people from Myanmar crossing the border into Thailand in search of more stable and promising futures (Ball and Moselle, 2015). In addition, significant numbers of Asians migrate to the US, Canada, Australia, the Gulf countries and Europe. The processes that engender these diverse movements extend beyond Asia, however: the global flows of capital and their consequences also spark the movements of banking staff from other parts of the world to financial hubs such as Singapore (Beaverstock, 2002); transnational corporations move staff into subsidiaries across Asia; and those disaffected by what they perceive as the daily grind of life in high income countries seek temporary reprieve in the warm climes of beach resorts in Goa and Thailand (Thang et al., 2012). Further, the relatively low-income status of, for example, Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar channels an influx of international aid agency staff into these countries.

An excess of goodness? Volunteering among Aid professionals in Cambodia

This article explores the meaning of volunteering among professional aid workers. While they experience disenchantment in their daytime work, volunteering provides them with benefits lacking in their paid jobs. At the same time, a compensatory model does not capture the complex dimensions of this relationship. One motive behind their professional work – bringing about positive change for others – is also the driving force behind their voluntary practices. Such excess of doing good may be indicative of their overall commitment. If aid workers make sense of their actions within a framework of alienated labour, rendering their waged aid work as a commodity, volunteering emerges as a remedial response. At the same time, their paid and unpaid work is animated by the impulse of giving. Such co-existence implies that gifts and commodities are not mutually exclusive; or indeed that both can be understood, following Parry (1986), as emerging from a highly developed capitalist system.

Between privilege and poverty: The affordances of mobility among aid worker children:

Contemporary research on children affected by migration in Southeast Asia has examined the impact of mobility on their life chances, choices and overall welfare. Extending this concern, this article seeks to address these questions in the context of privileged migration. Specifically, it asks how the mobility of children whose parents work for aid agencies in low-income countries shapes the way they understand and negotiate experiences of privilege, as well as their everyday encounters with poverty. Based on ethnographic research with young people and their families in Cambodia, the findings suggest that parents and children may envisage their international mobility as a chance for personal growth, specifically as manifest in the form of ‘open-mindedness.’ Such positive discourses are complicated, however, by a simultaneously engendered sense of superiority toward those who are less mobile. They are also intertwined with practices of ‘bracketing’ possible frictions arising from their interactions with children of local elite members. While the young people’s proximity to poverty provides opportunities for locally-based service-learning activities, connections with their parents’ work can remain abstract. The article therefore suggests that this form of international mobility may not, in itself, enable a critical engagement with poverty or with their own and others’ privilege.