Engaging in Trans-local Management of Households: Aspects of Livelihood and Gender Transformations among Sri Lankan Women Migrant Workers

Abstract

Accounting for 70 percent of Sri Lankan migration to West Asia, women migrant workers in domestic services have today become the principal income earners of many households. Using data collected from a group of returned migrants in three communities in the area of Kandy in Sri Lanka, this article adds a new dimension to theorizing about migration as livelihood diversifi cation. It shows that the spatial separation of migrants from their families has meant that issues of resources use and management are taken outside the confi nes of the household. This results in the separation of earner from manager, and creates spatially separated parallel power centers within the transnational family space with the manager of income as the center of power in local family/household space and earner of income (woman migrant) as the center of power in the new livelihood space. Gender and kinship are two important factors in determining the selection of the manager while the earner is away, and in shaping supportive social networks to support the basis of relative strength of the two main actors.