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ABSTRACT
As transnational mobilities for health in the Southeast Asian region intensify, this article investigates the everyday socialites that take shape in spaces of medical care. Told through the narratives of Filipino medical workers and caregivers in Singapore, this paper examines the socialities among migrants and locals who work together, and who care for patients in fast-paced public hospitals, as well as nursing homes on the margins of the city. It considers how care and control are simultaneously contested and reinforced through negotiations of authority, profession and hierarchies, as well as through the micro-political and affective interactions and intimacies of the workplace. These transcultural mobilities critically disrupt naturalised and normative assumptions about the region and its ‘values’, and about the locations and substance of care, while also provoking among migrants new ethical articulations and aspirations on the meanings of kinship, faith, home, and life itself.
KEYWORDS:
Acknowledgements
The author thanks the Gates Cambridge Trust for funding the research on which this article is based. She is grateful to Johan Lindquist, Mark Johnson, Nicole Constable and the anonymous reviewer for the very valuable feedback on earlier drafts of this article. This paper also benefitted from discussions at the panel on ‘Moving Southeast Asia: Circulations, Mobilities, and their Contemporary Entanglements’ at the European Association of Social Anthropologists Biennial Meeting in Milan in 2016.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Public hospitals in Singapore are fully owned by the government through a private limited holding company, but are run like private entities that compete with one another, with each having a certain degree of autonomy in terms of its management and operational practices (Gideon Citation2016). Public hospitals have different tiers of subsidised patient care, but they are also for full-paying private patients, such as medical tourists. The holding company has a corporate communications division that focuses on branding.
2 These are likened to the ‘5cs of Singapore’ (cash, credit card, condominium, car and country club membership), known across Singapore as standing for the ultimate realisation of individual and societal aspirations.
3 Philippine Overseas Employment Agency (POEA):http://www.poea.gov.ph/stats/2014%20POEA%20Stats.pdf.
4 Some do, however, move up through these ranks after a number of years.
5 Flor Contemplacion was a Filipina domestic worker who was executed in Singapore in 1995 after being convicted of murder. Her execution triggered a public and diplomatic outcry in the Philippines, and among overseas Filipino workers. Note this fieldwork was conducted before the current government of Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines.
6 Kuya means older brother in Filipino, while Ate is older sister. They are used as terms of respect among siblings and cousins, but also friends, acquaintances and strangers to address someone older in the same generation. Here, Ella is referring to her husband Jay, since I would address him as kuya.
7 Kikon and Karlsson (in this special issue) similarly examine the ambivalence of mobility among young Northeastern Indian migrants in the hospitality industry. On the one hand, their labour opportunities are based on the deployment of racialised stereotypes, and accompanied by experiences of racial harassment. At the same time, there are novel opportunities for migrants to care for the self, and a to find a space of freedom, in spite of new kinds of control that are both enabling and constraining.
8 See Fechter (this special issue) for a parallel example on the breakdown of giver/receiver dichotomy in donor and recipient contexts through the need to ‘feel connected’ in a reciprocal manner. Similarly, Johnson, Lee and McCahill (this special issue) write of migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong and their ‘vision of care and control which speaks to connectedness, mutual concern’ and ‘a relational vision that supports and protects’.