Suchergebnisse

Khmer Women on the Move offers a fascinating ethnography of young Cambodian women who move from the countryside to work in Cambodia's capital city, Phnom Penh. Female migration and urban employment are rising, triggered by Cambodia's transition from a closed socialist system to an open market economy. This book challenges the dominant views of these young rural women--that they are controlled by global economic forces and national development policies or trapped by restrictive customs and Cambodia's tragic history. The author shows instead how these women shape and influence the processes of change taking place in present-day Cambodia. Based on field research among women working in the garment industry, prostitution, and street trading, the book explores the complex interplay between their experiences and actions, gender roles, and the broader historical context. The focus on women involved in different kinds of work allows new insight into women's mobility, highlighting similarities and differences in working conditions and experiences. Young women's ability to utilize networks of increasing size and complexity allows them to move into and between geographic and social spaces that extend far beyond the village context. Women's mobility is further expressed in the flexible patterns of behavior that young rural women display when trying to fulfill their own "modern" aspirations along with their family obligations and cultural ideals

AbstractCambodian migrant workers in the Thai fishing industry are increasingly portrayed as the new 'victims of trafficking' and as 'sea slaves' who are 'forced to fish,' but are at the same time considered to be unruly and mobile workers who squander their earnings. Instead of being a result of separate migration streams or distinct groups of migrants, this article shows that these contradictions are inherent to the processes in which essentially mobile workers are immobilised at the place of destination. These immobilisation processes take place at different levels and should be understood in relation to the specificities of work in the fishing sector in general as well as the particular (migrant) labour system that has developed in certain sectors of the Thai labour market, leading to the creation of a flexible, disposable workforce that is bound to the work on Thai fishing vessels.

AbstractThe introduction of this special issue takes up the questions: Why 'bonded labour'? What do we mean by it? And, why focus on 'bonded labour' now? Answers to these questions require an effort of definition, as well as contextualisation, of a phenomenon that, though long expected to disappear with societal and economic developments, has persisted or re-emerged in the wake of current processes of transnational migration and globalisation. The introduction briefly discusses longstanding theoretical debates on bondage in past and present Asia, as well as new insights derived from a Swiss research project focusing on 'Contemporary Forms of Bonded Labour in Southeast Asia.'