Suchergebnisse

Chaos flower : the meaning of family -- Weighing financial opportunities : migration, remittances, or help from the hand? -- Exchanging assets for care : pensions and the transfer of property -- A youngest son called "hope" : virilocal ultimogeniture and the ancestral home -- Health and illness : aging, self, and bodily care -- Shelter or shame? Old folks' homes -- Rebirth : Buddhism, almsgivings and the transmigration of souls -- On beginnings and endings.

Context : religious, historical, and political frameworks -- Without one's right mind : agency, intoxication, and addiction -- We don't say no : drinking and identity -- Jolly drinking : events and taverns -- Home wars : gendered consumption struggles -- Kasippu : the political economics of illicit liquor -- Over the red line : social rules for drunken comportment -- Too much is good for nothing : alcohol dependence -- A goddess of wrath : treatments

Discriminatory assumptions about family structure and care work underlie a 2013 Sri Lankan state regulation, referred to as the "Family Background Report" (FBR), which restricts the transnational labor migration of women with children under the age of five. Since the early 1980s, women from Sri Lanka have worked as domestic servants in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates. A culture of migration has developed, and labourers' remittances sustain family financial strategies. The FBR regulations narrow people's employment options and destabilize long-standing practices of intergenerational reciprocity. Using ethnographic data gathered in 2015, the chapter considers the potential and actual consequences of these rules for migrants and care-giving grandmothers. The focus on women's "emplacement" provides a crucial counterpoint to current theoretical discussion in the migration literature on issues of "deportability." Scholars have convincingly argued that uncertainty around a migrant labourer's right to stay in the host country constitutes a form of structural violence and creates a docile, productive workforce. Compared to the adverse effects migrants experience under threat of deportation (inability to stay in the host country), FBR restrictions (inability to leave the country of origin) creates converse but equally oppressive situations of social suffering and precarity for migrants and their families. The research contributes to discussions in political anthropology about interactions between the family and the state.

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 Lanka's national economy, and in spite of the nation's 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. (Crit Asian Stud/GIGA)

Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger. Arjun Appadurai. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. 153 pp.

Symbolic Heat: Gender, Health and Worship among the Tamils of South India and Sri Lanka. Dennis B. McGilvray. Ahmedabad, India: Mapin Publishing Pvt. Ltd., 1998. 72 pp.Relocated Lives: Displacement and Resettlement in the Mahaweli Project, Sri Lanka. Birgitte Refslund Sørensen. Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1996. 247 pp.Amiable Incoherence: Manipulating Histories and Modernities in. Batticaloa Hindu Temple. Mark P. Whitaker. Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1999. 302 pp.

"This book is framed within the larger political and social context, offering descriptions and comparisons between two regions (southwest vs. eastern coast) and four ethnic communities (Sinhalese, Tamils, Muslims, and Burghers) to illustrate how disaster relief unfolded in a culturally pluralistic political landscape. Approaching the issue from four disciplinary perspectives - anthropology, demography, political science, and disaster studies - chapters by experts in the field analyse regional and ethnic patterns of post-tsunami reconstruction according to different sectors of Sri Lankan society. Demonstrating the key importance of comprehending the local cultural contexts of disaster recovery processes, the book is a timely and useful contribution to the existing literature."--Jacket

Rapid population aging, once associated with only a select group of modern industrialized nations, has now become a topic of increasing global concern. This volume reframes aging on a global scale by illustrating the multiple ways it is embedded within individual, social, and cultural life courses. It presents a broad range of ethnographic work, introducing a variety of conceptual and methodological approaches to studying life-course transitions in conjunction with broader sociocultural transformations. Through detailed accounts, in such diverse settings as nursing homes in Sri Lanka, a factory in Massachusetts, cemeteries in Japan and clinics in Mexico, the authors explore not simply our understandings of growing older, but the interweaving of individual maturity and intergenerational relationships, social and economic institutions, and intimate experiences of gender, identity, and the body