Suchergebnisse

AbstractTaking migration as the point of departure and biographical narratives as the entry to the formation of the religious self and the texture of religious life, I draw from four key narratives – one each from the Christian, Islamic, Hindu and Chinese religious/Buddhist traditions – to examine how religion intersects with migration in migrant and religious journeys. I conceptualize migration as an intergenerational process, transcending the physicality of the actual move through lived experience in the web of collective narratives, transmitted through family memory on the one hand, and official state narratives on the other. Hence, I also draw these four narratives from different migrant generations, located in different registers of migrant temporality and state policies and politics. In exploring their attempts to make sense of their migrant lives in the changing contexts of time and place, specific migrant generations use specific religious idioms to create particular narratives of the religious migrant self. In the article, I highlight the encounter with other gods in the making of the religious self, as well as differences in the way religion travels. This portability of religion in a world of migration has been one reason, I suggest, for the failure of the secularization thesis to gain traction in the contemporary world.

Foreigners constitute 15 percent of the population and over 20 percent of the labor force in Singapore. They are bifurcated into the highly-skilled, high end as well as the unskilled, low end of the labor market. This large foreign labor force is managed by a comprehensive and highly selective foreign labor policy, which is described in this paper. The strict enforcement of a guestworker policy of transience on the one hand, and the liberal encouragement of settlement on the other, are the twin pillars of this policy. Seen originally as a dispensable appendage to a labor-scarce economy, foreign labor has now become integral to the economic and increasingly, population policy of the country, as evidenced by the recent announcement of a national policy to "attract foreign talent."

This paper discusses the regulatory and economic context of Filipina migration into domestic waged labor in Singapore. It places this migration in the history of female rural-urban migration as well as the history of domestic labor in Singapore. Finally, it raises the question as to why domestic waged labor has persisted in the global capitalist economy.