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Abstract
Domestic and international migration provide the point of entry for an investigation of social and economic transformations that are altering the function and functioning of the household at two sites in rural Sri Lanka. Based on a survey questionnaire of one hundred households complemented by interviews with a subsample of fifty migrants or their families, the article views migration not as just connecting people and places but being constitutive of those places. Domestic migration is shown to be an “escape” strategy, whereas international migration is pursued as part of a household livelihood strategy undertaken for the sake of the family. In the former, an individualization of activity occurs as young women and men become partially independent wage earners, whereas in the latter migration raises the bargaining power and status of the migrant but in the context of the household, rather than separate from it. We look inside the household to illuminate the status, place, and role of migration and keep doing so as household–migration interactions evolve. Taking this approach, we seek to explain a series of conundrums relating to migration.
La migración doméstica e internacional sirven de punto de entrada a una investigación sobre las transformaciones sociales y económicas que están alterando la función y el funcionamiento de los hogares en dos sitios del área rural de Sri Lanka. Con base en un estudio con cuestionarios aplicados en cien hogares, complementado con entrevistas a una submuestra de cincuenta migrantes o sus familias, el artículo visualiza la migración no solo como la conexión de gente y lugares sino como elemento constitutivo de esos lugares. La migración doméstica es vista como una estrategia de “escape,” mientras que la migración internacional se la utiliza como parte de la estrategia de vida del hogar en bien de la familia. En el primer caso, ocurre una individualización de la actividad cuando mujeres y hombres jóvenes se transforman en jornaleros parcialmente independientes, en tanto que en el otro caso la migración eleva el poder de regateo y estatus del migrante pero en el contexto del hogar, más que fuera de éste. Miramos dentro del hogar para iluminar el estatus, lugar y papel de la migración, y seguimos haciéndolo a medida que evolucionan las interacciones hogar–migración. Al adoptar este enfoque, buscamos explicar una serie de acertijos relacionados con migración.
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Acknowledgments
The authors are grateful to the British Academy for its generous financial support (grant code SG-45093). In addition we would like to acknowledge the time and hospitality provided by the villagers, tea factory workers, tea factory managers, and government officials interviewed during the research.
Notes
1. In this article, we use Global South as denoting the developing, less developed, or Third World—or the South (see Rigg 2007, 3).
2. This tension was also explored at length in Lynch's (2007) study of migrant factory workers in Sri Lanka.
3. These village names are pseudonyms, as are the names of all the individuals mentioned in the article.
4. shows that female migrants from Kumburegama South outnumbered men by only a small proportion. Most studies indicate—or assume—that women dominate such migration streams (see CitationErfurt 2005; Lynch 2007), and most academic attention has been directed at women factory workers. In this regard it is worth noting that the actual numbers belie this balance of scrutiny and attention. In 2005, taking into account employment in all of Sri Lanka's export processing zones and industrial parks, the respective employment figures for women and men were 92,124 and 34,929, with men therefore making up 28 percent of the total labor force (Hancock 2006).
5. We interviewed two tea factory managers who reported that two thirds of their combined workers were nonlocal.
6. The area began to be settled in the mid-1970s as individuals and families from other parts of the district and beyond began to move into the forest. The government did not prevent this process of invasion and settlement, and the authorities have since given their tacit support to the village by regularizing such things as schooling and putting it under the auspices of the Division Office. On this basis, villagers hope that in time the government will recognize their rights and give them ownership of the land.
7. Eighty years later, Cebula and Vedder (1973) opened their paper by writing, “We begin by postulating a theoretical framework in which the decision to migrate is treated as an investment decision” (205).
8. Several interviewees noted that it was possible to earn more working in the village than in a garment factory.
9. Another factory worker interviewee in Kumburegama South estimated that the costs of boarding house rental and meals amounted to around 6,000 Rs per month, representing a very significant slice of take-home income. At the time of the research, US$1 = 115 Rs.
10. One garment factory, 21 km from Kumburegama South, operated a daily bus service picking up workers from the village and other settlements in the vicinity.
11. Juki is the brand name of a Japanese manufacturer of industrial sewing machines commonly used in garment factories in Sri Lanka and the female workers in our research sites are often called “Juki girls,” as they are in Lynch's (2007) study. Other names used in our research sites include garment kello, garment keli, garment badu, and garment baduwa. All these terms are demeaning to the workers.
12. In a study in rural China, women were said to favor men with migration experience because they had “more in their heads than soil” (Murphy 2002, 113).
13. For another study of the challenge of negotiating “shame,” see Lindquist's (2004) work on Indonesia.
14. For a broad background to the political economy of Sri Lanka's international migration, see Sriskandarajah (2002).
15. This social gap that arises following migration is not dissimilar to that noted earlier with regard to domestic factory work. The key difference is that in the case of married international migrants it is reflected back into the household, creating tensions that cannot be easily accommodated.
16. Nuwan's wife worked in Kuwait from 2002 to 2005 and left for a second sojourn in 2007. At the time of our interview with Nuwan, she was still absent.
17. In five other cases it was evident that women had taken up work in the Middle East against their husbands’ and families’ wishes.
18. With regard to her research in rural China, Murphy (2002) wrote, “the values internal to rural society that inform rural spending practices are continually reinvented to suit emerging social and economic contingencies, and many of these contingencies are precipitated by migration” (91). “[M]igration and remittances promote change not only by infusing cash and modern goods into the countryside but also, and more significantly, by transforming the shared values and social practices that are associated with spending on life-cycle goals”(103).