Deirdre McKay

Translocal Subjectivities: Mobility, Connection, Emotion

This special issue is concerned with the complex forms of subjectivity and feeling that emerge through geographical mobility. The mobility of particular interest is that which spans national borders, specifically in the sense of transnational migration, with its dynamics of departure, circulation and extended social networks. In examining the subjectivities that emerge through such movement, our starting point is the now relatively widespread understanding of the self as a relational achievement. From this perspective who we are derives in part from the multiple connections we have to other people, events and things, whether these are geographically close or distant, located in the present or past. This constellation of others may influence us in diverse ways, acting via physical encounter and somatic internalisation, in response to the power of images and narratives, and through the operation of memory and desire. The everyday mannerisms that characterise a person – their rhythms of speech, bodily comportment and taste preferences – are testament to such influences, while also highlighting the complex interplay between inheritance and environment. We can also observe that some events and relational connections have enduring impacts upon the self, such as the resonance of educational opportunity or perhaps the grief of a personal loss. Others touch us only fleetingly, however, and are quickly absorbed in the passing flow of life, seemingly forgotten. Selfhood is thus always a hybrid achievement, emerging out of a diverse

'Sending Dollars Shows Feeling'--Emotions and Economies in Filipino Migration

This paper analyses the conceptualization of gender, relationships, and emotions that underpin ‘care chains’ approaches to Filipino labour migration. In a case study of long‐distance intimacy and economic transfers in an extended Filipino family, I show how contextualizing migration within local understandings of emotion fractures expectations created by care chains accounts. This case instead reveals agency, diversity, and new forms of global subjectivity emerging through long‐distance emotional connections within the translocal field shaped by labour mobility.

Reading remittance landscapes: female migration and agricultural transition in the Philippines

Abstract Geografisk Tidsskrift, Danish Journal of Geography 105(1):89–99, 2005 In the Philippines, female migration for overseas contract work is transforming local agricultural landscapes. Yet the changes in land, labour, crops and cropping patterns that are occurring may not reflect local ecology or economic opportunity as much as they represent gendered versions of local modernity, envisioned at a new global scale. This study links local agricultural change to local interests in global migration and reads local landscapes as reflecting those links. Drawing on interviews and observations from a case study of a community in the northern Philippine province of Ifugao, this paper suggests how women s migration is both a cause and a result of a transition from subsistence to commercial agriculture. Migrating for waged work overseas, women withdraw their labour and knowledge from agriculture. At home, solo fathers usually choose to plant new, in-put intensive crops with the cash remittances they receive from their absent wives. Men s interests in ‘modern’ commercial crops may overdetermine their wives ‘preferences for more secure and ecologically sustainable cropping patterns. Tracing migrants’ remittances into investment in crops and labour, the analysis ties female migration to household land-use decisions, suggesting how such decisions may undermine or enhance longterm agricultural sustainability.

Cultivating New Local Futures: Remittance Economies and Land-use Patterns in Ifugao, Philippines

In the Philippines, female migration for contract domestic work transforms the local landscape. The changes in land, labour, crops and cropping patterns that are occurring may not reflect local ecology or economic opportunity as much as they represent gendered versions of new local futures, envisioned on a new global scale.

Migration and the sensuous geographies of re-emplacement in the Philippines

This paper explores migrant returns to homeplaces, examining affective understandings of place and subjectivity in an intercultural context. Drawing on data gathered in migrant sending communities in the Philippines, it examines how local ‘structures of feeling’ (after Williams 1973) and migrant habitus (Bourdieu 1980) interact with place in the experiences of return for Filipina migrant workers. Practices of re-emplacement are explored in an intercultural context with the analysis examining both the authors own intersubjective encounters with migrant respondents and respondents’ changing understandings of place and emotions. Through this ethnography of intercultural living, the argument drawing out the feeling of the researchers habitus as it intersects with that of the respondents, shows how habitus links emotions to embodied experiences of place and culture.

Translocal Circulation: Place and Subjectivity in an Extended Filipino Community

As migration and mobility produce new subject positions, they transform and extend locality and create both new subjective experiences of place and new subjectivities. This paper explores the culture of circulation that emerges between a migrant sending village in the Philippines and Hong Kong, as it is created through the mobility of female contract workers.

Global Filipinos: Migrants' Lives in the Virtual Village

Acknowledgments On Transliteration Introduction: The Parade 1. Finding the Village 2. Becoming a Global Kind of Woman 3. Failing to Progress 4. New Territories 5. Haunted by Images 6. Moving On 7. Come What May Conclusion: The Virtual Village On Affect: A Methodological Note Notes Bibliography Index

A Transnational Pig: Reconstituting Kinship Among Filipinos in Hong Kong

Migration may offer Filipinos abroad new ways to practice religious faith and opportunities to extend social networks, but many must at the same time sustain and renegotiate kinship ties at home. The obligations of kinship can mean declarations of faith are not always what we may think. Rather than being the good converts or diligent congregation members of their self-descriptions, migrants may continue to be drawn into village ritual at home. The present paper aims to shows how an exchange-based approach to faith persists in the diaspora and enables migrants to renegotiate long-distance forms of kinship.

Introduction: Finding 'the field': the problem of locality in a mobile world

Place is usually considered the backdrop for motion—the ‘where’ that people move to or from. Yet contemporary processes of migration and circulation produce increasingly porous and even mobile places. Mobility offers us new ways to perceive distance—in time, space, society and culture—through what Trouillot calls a ‘fragmented globality’. How can anthropologists theorise this fragmented globality without taking static forms of place as the necessary basis for mobility? The presumed stability of place and locale has long been the ground of anthropological research. Intensified mobility is throwing ‘into disarray pre-existing anthropological assumptions about culture, ethnicity, and territoriality, in particular, the notion of a stable relationship between people and place’ (Ward, in The Australian Journal of Anthropology, vol. 14, no. 1, 2003, p. 80). Locality has itself become a problem for fieldworkers, as social fields and networks widen and fragment and anthropologists have simultaneously found their concepts of place and locality troubled by theorisations emerging from other disciplines and, more recently, from within anthropology itself.

Geopolitics of the visible : essays on Philippine film cultures

An anthology of essays about Philippine cinema which seeks to illuminate issues of transparency of power and power relations. It lays bare the geopolitics of the visible in order to render the almost invisible working operation that makes both visibility and invisibility possible.