Michele Ruth Gamburd

Advocating for Sri Lankan Migrant Workers: Obstacles and Challenges

Nearly a million Sri Lankan women labor overseas as migrant workers, the vast majority in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries in West Asia. They are poorly paid and vulnerable to a wide variety of exploitative labor practices at home and abroad. Despite the importance of worker remittances to Sri Lankas national economy, and in spite of the nations history of organized labor and active political participation, migrants have received only anemic support from the state, labor unions, feminist organizations, and migrant-oriented nongovernmental organizations. The article contextualizes Sri Lankan migration within larger-scale economic dynamics (such as global capitalist policies and processes) and local-level ideological formations (such as local political histories and culturally shaped gender norms). The author argues that political freedoms in destination countries have a significant effect on organizing activities in both host and sending nations. Comparing the Sri Lankan and Philippine situations, the author contends that the vibrant activism in the Philippines correlates with the liberal organizing climates in the European Union and in East and Southeast Asia, while the paucity of organizing in Sri Lanka correlates with the strict repression of guest workers in the GCC. Compared to other destinations, the GCC countries give workers (particularly women) less chance for autonomous activities, are less open to labor organizing, and are less responsive to political protest.

Migrant Remittances, Population Ageing and Intergenerational Family Obligations in Sri Lanka

In the early decades of the 21st century, countries are increasingly participating in the global economy. Many developing nations, such as Sri Lanka, send not only goods but also labourers into international markets. Since the late 1970s, working-class Sri Lankans have sojourned in West Asia as guest workers in ever-growing numbers.1 In 2009, when the data that are analysed here were gathered, Sri Lanka had a population of 20 million, and roughly 1.8 million transnational migrants worked abroad (SLBFE, 2010: 4, 142). Migrants thus constituted 9 per cent of the population, and over half of themigrants were women (SLBFE, 2010: 6). Some 89 per cent of these sojourner women worked as domestic servants, most of them in the Gulf (SLBFE, 2010: 11). Female migrants’ most often stated goal was to earn money abroad, buy land and build a house in Sri Lanka and improve their family’s status. Recently, members of the younger generation (often well-educated children of the older labour migrants) have been going abroad, heading not only to the Gulf but also to more desirable destinations, such as Korea, Cyprus, Malaysia, Israel and Italy, sometimes with the hope of settling permanently in their host country.

Unforgotten: Love and the Culture of Dementia Care in India, by Bianca Brijnath

complex relationship to emotion is critical. Interestingly, memory here takes the form of a phantom, such as in Merleau-Ponty’s ‘phantom limbs’ (p. 104), and for Vijaya her own personal memories of loss are relived through the dimensions of a phantom or ghost. Ram explains: ‘A society that understands emotions as “ghosts” rather than as “psychology” comes closer, I would suggest, to understanding the phenomenology of emotions’ (p. 105). The qualities of performance and possession are also woven together in the detailed ethnographies of Dalit women such as Mutamma and Mary. Ram critiques Butler’s approach to gender as performance where she uses the trope of ‘masquerade’, positing that the application of such a model based on a hyper-conscious sovereign subject is inadequate for subaltern subjects afflicted by possession (p. 163). She offers an alternative understanding of subjectivity crystallised through the intersection of past and present, temporality and spatiality, body and consciousness. She analyses mediumship as a slow temporality of accommodation and settlement, and uses Bourdieu’s notions of habitus and Merleau-Ponty’s notion of ‘body of habit’ (p. 177) to explain mediumship and possession as a kind of attunement developed through emotional intimacy, interdependence, and affections. Observing the performance of a medium as a village goddess cast in the role of a pre-colonial divine ruler in his court, Ram shows that the injustices suffered by the subjects in this court of justice are not about patriarchy, caste, or capitalist exploitation, as one might expect; the complaints revolve around failure of the family, kinship, and marital relations to provide the subjects with security and love. This book is a significant contribution to the literature on spirit possession and the understanding of human agency. Moreover, it also convincingly shows that the lived experiences of the body need to be seamlessly integrated with consciousness to have a full picture of culture and its human subjects.

Unforgotten: Love and the Culture of Dementia Care in India, by Bianca Brijnath: (New York: Berghahn, 2014), ISBN 978-1-78238-354-3, 240 pp., US

complex relationship to emotion is critical. Interestingly, memory here takes the form of a phantom, such as in Merleau-Ponty’s ‘phantom limbs’ (p. 104), and for Vijaya her own personal memories of loss are relived through the dimensions of a phantom or ghost. Ram explains: ‘A society that understands emotions as “ghosts” rather than as “psychology” comes closer, I would suggest, to understanding the phenomenology of emotions’ (p. 105). The qualities of performance and possession are also woven together in the detailed ethnographies of Dalit women such as Mutamma and Mary. Ram critiques Butler’s approach to gender as performance where she uses the trope of ‘masquerade’, positing that the application of such a model based on a hyper-conscious sovereign subject is inadequate for subaltern subjects afflicted by possession (p. 163). She offers an alternative understanding of subjectivity crystallised through the intersection of past and present, temporality and spatiality, body and consciousness. She analyses mediumship as a slow temporality of accommodation and settlement, and uses Bourdieu’s notions of habitus and Merleau-Ponty’s notion of ‘body of habit’ (p. 177) to explain mediumship and possession as a kind of attunement developed through emotional intimacy, interdependence, and affections. Observing the performance of a medium as a village goddess cast in the role of a pre-colonial divine ruler in his court, Ram shows that the injustices suffered by the subjects in this court of justice are not about patriarchy, caste, or capitalist exploitation, as one might expect; the complaints revolve around failure of the family, kinship, and marital relations to provide the subjects with security and love. This book is a significant contribution to the literature on spirit possession and the understanding of human agency. Moreover, it also convincingly shows that the lived experiences of the body need to be seamlessly integrated with consciousness to have a full picture of culture and its human subjects.