Gendered Self-Improvement: Autonomous Personhood and the Marriage Predicament of Young Women in Urban China

How does gender shape the experience and imaginaries of self-realisation? This article explores practices of self-improvement among young women in China, namely workshops for interpersonal skills. These practices direct participants to express themselves as autonomous persons, disembedded from social hierarchies and familial responsibilities. Unmarried women who attend workshops conceive of marriage as an unavoidable impediment to their self-realisation. This is due to a prevailing gender inequality in marriage, as well as the ongoing expansion of an ideal of individual autonomy in China through economic reforms. In this article, I do not centre my analysis on a cultural clash between this ideal and local cultural practices. Instead, it is the possibility of this ideal, which is always shaped and restricted by socio-economic imperatives, that induces women’s frustration with their local culture. The fact that this ideal promises universal attainment highlights for women the gender roles that limit their autonomy.     

The Power of Imagination in Transnational Mobilities

At the roots of many travels to distant destinations, whether in the context of tourism or migration, are historically laden and socioculturally constructed imaginaries. People worldwide rely on such imaginaries, from the most spectacular fantasies to the most mundane reveries, to shape identities of themselves and others. These unspoken representational assemblages are powerful because they enact and construct peoples and places, implying multiple, often conflicting, representations of Otherness, and questioning several core values multicultural societies hold, by blurring as well as enforcing traditional territorial, social, and cultural boundaries. What are the contours of power, agency, and subjectivity in imaginaries of transnational mobility and the intersecting social categories those visions both reify and dissolve? Ethnographic studies of human (im)mobility provide an innovative means to grasp the complexity of the global circulation of people and the world-making images and ideas surrounding these movements. As a polymorphic concept, mobility invites us to renew our theorizing, especially regarding conventional themes such as culture, identity, and transnational relationships. This article critically analyzes some preliminary findings of an ongoing multisited research project that traces how prevalent imaginaries of transnational tourism to and migration from the “global South” are (dis)connected. I suggest anthropology has unique contributions to make to the current debate in the social sciences by ethnographically detailing how mobility is a contested ideological construct involving so much more than mere movement.     

“Now I am also Israeli”: From Illegality to Legality ‐ Life experiences and identities of migrant workers’ children after receiving civil status in Israel

In 2006 and 2010, following demands from local and international civil society organizations, Israel granted civil status to approximately 1500 undocumented migrant workers’ children. This was considered a “one time humanitarian gesture,” not to be repeated. Thousands of other children, who did not fulfill the required criteria, were left without civil status. Within the context of Israel, the homeland of the Jewish people, this mixed‐methods study explored how the children's life experiences have been constructed and reconstructed since the inception of their new civil status. According to the findings, 80 per cent of migrant workers’ children reveal a high degree of belonging to Israeli society, defining themselves as Israelis. For them, receiving civil status has four practical implications: being able to serve in the Israeli army; the ability to travel abroad; better access to the job market; and freedom from fear of deportation. Our study also revealed difficulties due to their religious and ethnic identities, reflected in the children's understandings of what it means to be Israeli. The complex manifestations of their newly acquired civil status is embedded in the concept of “freedom,” i.e. to do and to be what they really want to be.     

The linear imagination,stalled: changing temporal horizons in migrant journeys

In this article, I engage with a growing interest in questions of time in the study of migration to consider how changing temporal horizons in migrant journeys play an important role in shaping multilocal migration imaginaries. I draw on two ethnographic cases with migrant care workers from the Philippines, of different generations and at different points of their migration journeys, to examine how initially held linear imaginaries of migration become confounded and stuck over time. Snapshots of migrant lives at these different points of the journey – ‘(pre)‐departures’, ‘stepping stones’, ‘settling’ – reveal how migrants’ temporal horizons shift as a consequence of changing state and political‐economic conditions, as well as migrants’ own dynamic subjective and affective engagements. New uncertainties, possibilities and dilemmas unfold and initial linear imaginaries give way instead to those that are open‐ended and asynchronous. A temporal perspective reveals that mobilities are not marked by a beginning and an end but rather involve ongoing, multiple and provisional journeys across locales and over time and the life course.     

Geometries of ‘global’ evangelicalism

In this article, I explore the power dynamics at play in religious place‐making. I critically discuss the uneven co‐configurations of imaginaries of the ‘local’ and ‘global’ within global evangelicalism. Specifically, I analyse the recent recording of a live album by the famous charismatic Australian band Hillsong United (of Hillsong Church) at various locations in Israel‐Palestine, which was followed by a concert tour in Israel. Palestinian evangelical Christians were critical of this endeavour, for they felt that it marginalized and excluded them from their global evangelical faith family. The frictions between the Palestinian evangelical community and Hillsong United illustrate how dominant evangelical actors create an imagination of the ‘local’, which enters the imaginary of global evangelicalism (and bears material consequences). In the article, I thus argue that privileged financial and cultural resources and travel regimes lead to specific notions of geometries of power in global evangelicalism.     

Women's Studies

In this article I consider recent policies on care provision in Japan, including the employment of immigrant workers. My discussion is framed by Michel Foucault's concepts of ‘biopower’ and ‘biopolitics’: a mode of governmentality focused on the management of populations. In the current age of economic globalization, however, biopolitics also crosses national boundaries. Raewyn Connell has described a ‘global gender order’ whereby gender relations are shaped by power structures which transcend the level of the nation-state. This involves the connections between different local gender orders and gender orders which transcend the scale of the nation-state. The migration of care workers involves gendered structures in both sending and receiving countries, in interaction with other dimensions of difference, including class, caste, ethnicity and racialized positioning. In order to understand the relationships between the providers and receivers of care, it is necessary to bring together the insights of the nation-focused concept of biopolitics and the multileveled perspective of the ‘global order of inequality’ and the ‘global order of difference’. Between the local and the global, there are also regional orders of inequality and regional orders of difference; care work involves relationships which are put into practice at local, intimate, interpersonal and embodied levels.     

FROM EL CAMPO TO EL BARRIO: MEMORY AND SOCIAL IMAGINARIES IN SANTO DOMINGO

In the social imaginaries of the Dominican Republic, national culture has its origins in el campo, the countryside. Country spaces and country people are viewed as embodying the past in the present, making them authentic contemporary carriers of national culture and moral order. By contrast, the city has long been viewed as the site of a modernity that takes its inspiration from outside of the nation but also as a site of social degeneration. In recent decades, representations of poor barrios as a threat to the city's moral order have intensified in reaction to rising crime rates and a series of economic crises. First generation migrants from the country to the city find that their status as carriers of culture and morality is compromised. They evoke positive memories of their rural pasts to position themselves as moral beings transposed to a corrupt urban milieu. At the same time, they develop urban identities that incorporate aspects of rural life while rejecting others. I argue that migrants' memories of their rural past resist their emplacement while allowing for the transformation of their present structural position.     

Medical tourism in the Caribbean

Although travel for medical reasons has a long history, it has more recently evolved from a cottage industry to a worldwide enterprise. A number of countries are positioning themselves to attract visitors who are willing to travel to obtain health services that are more accessible, less expensive, or more available than in their countries of origin. This has in turn given rise to medical packages that combine tourism with health. Several Caribbean nations - including Cuba, Barbados, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico - hope to expand their revenues in this new market. Each country has selected specific service niches and promotes its services accordingly. While Cuba has been promoting its services to other countries for several decades, medical tourism is just beginning in the other islands. Ultimately, these nations' economic success will hinge on their comparative advantage vis-à-vis other options, while their success in terms of improving their own health care depends on the extent to which the services for tourists are also available to the islands' populations.     

But the kids are okay: motherhood, consumption and sex work in neo-liberal Latin America

Although sex work remains highly stigmatized around the world, its relatively high value (when compared to other kinds of work available for low-income women) allows sex workers to attain some level of economic, if not social, mobility. This article challenges the idea that sex work in 'third world' settings is always about mere subsistence. Instead, it suggests that sex workers in Costa Rica's tourism sector work to survive, but they also demonstrate significant personal ambition and aim not only to increase their own consumption levels, but crucially to get ahead. Women are clear about what sex work enables for their families and themselves: not the maintenance of the status quo, but rather a level of consumption otherwise unavailable to them as low-income and poor women. Sex work offers an opportunity to consume and to get ahead that these women have been unable to attain in other kinds of employment, primarily domestic and factory work. Furthermore, sex work allows women to think of themselves as particularly good mothers, able to provide for and spend important quality time with their kids. The article argues that survival, consumption, and motherhood are discursively deployed, in often contradictory and conflicting ways, in order to counteract the effects that stigma has on sex workers. It also suggests that sex workers may very well be the quintessential subjects of neo-liberalism in Latin America, in their embrace of entrepreneurial work and consumption.     

From Global Cities to the Lands’ End: The Relocation of Corporate Headquarters and the New Company Towns of Rural America

Since the 1970s, a number of major corporations have located their corporate headquarters in rural and non-metropolitan areas. I interrogate this phenomenon, based on a case study of Lands’ End, a global apparel firm in Wisconsin. Much research has exposed how firms insulate themselves from claims made by workers and communities through organizational and spatial distance (i.e. global sourcing, casualization of employment structures). Corporate headquarters relocation presents a paradox, bringing key decision-makers in the global economy into new, face-to-face relationships with workers and communities. Negotiated against a radical transformation of local class structure, I argue that new forms of social regulation are emerging—in particular, a hybrid version of the Fordist-era company towns.

Socio‐economic stratification of English in globalized landscapes: A market‐oriented perspective

Globalization has dramatically altered the urban societies of Amsterdam and Brussels over recent decades, with intensified socio‐economic inequality, unprecedented levels of multilingualism and the increasing importance of English. In this paper, I examine the use of English in the linguistic landscape of socio‐economically stratified commercial shopping streets in these two second‐tier global cities. I adopt a market‐oriented, contextualized approach to quantitative and qualitative variability in how English emerges in these particular commercial ‘linguistic markets’. McDonaldization in midscale shopping streets occurs alongside downscale and upscale uses of English which are more susceptible to local commercial dynamics, in particular in Brussels. As such, global English in these single city contexts emerges as a heterogeneous and scaled phenomenon shaped by specific local commercial and linguistic market conditions.     

The Problem People and the Hard Workers: whiteness and small town response to economic decline

This paper explores the role of race and class in post-industrial economic decline and revitalization in a predominantly white town in the northeastern United States. Ethnographic research in this small town revealed that residents commonly identified lazy, welfare-dependent substance abusers as the source of local problems. At the same time, they lauded workers, drawing on a national white hard worker mythology. Poor and underemployed workers themselves thus negotiated between the problem people and white worker ideals. I argue that the white worker myth provides a symbolic escape hatch, which reinforces hegemonic whiteness and the US racial order despite the lack of material payoff for economically marginalised white workers. As such, I call for a shift away from measuring degrees of white privilege towards an analysis of how people in various classed and gendered positions mobilise or contribute to white power differently.     

‘Germany Has Become Mohammedan’: Insurgency,Long-Distance Travel,and the Singapore Mutiny, 1915

Abstract

The mutiny that took place in Singapore in February 1915 is usually dismissed as a footnote in the history of empire. One reason why it is marginalized is because the mutiny does not conform to a politics that seeks the formation of an independent territorial nation-state as its inevitable conclusion. This article returns to that initial moment of insurgency to argue that the mutiny offers a unique window into the political imaginaries of British Indian soldiers, seen as military migrant workers. A close reading of soldiers’ letters against the Rowlatt Committee's Sedition Report suggests a politics of equality and emancipation uncontaminated by the desire for national liberation. Two kinds of insurgency thus become visible: international space as an unsettled zone of attraction and desire and a nascent political subjectivity that rejects the disciplines of imperial military labor. The primary causes of these transformations, I argue, are the insurgent effects of long-distance travel.     

Philippine Women on the Move: Marriage across Borders

This paper discusses how Philippine transnational marriage migration is intertwined in complex and paradoxical ways with global, local and personal matters. My argument will blur the artificial and still dominant analytical division between marriage migrants (wives or "mail order" brides) and labour migrants (workers – mainly domestic workers). Focusing on the life histories of different Filipina women, the paper illustrates the intersections and multiplicity of their roles as wives, mistresses, workers, mothers, daughters and citizens in a transnational migratory space.
Furthermore, I go along with those scholars who argue that women do not only marry in order to migrate, but that they also migrate in order to marry, as marriage is seen as an important aspect of social fulfilment. By carefully investigating these emerging transnational or even global marriage-scapes, I analyze the different motives, logics and desires that come into play. While women from the Philippines may look for "modern husbands" and "modern marriages" because of local constraints on their marriage opportunities, many western men turn to Asia and the Philippines for "traditional" wives whom they imagine to be more "conservative" and "less demanding." Both often discover that their gender stereotypes are more imagined than real.
The stories illustrate how Filipina migrants use different socio-cultural and socio-economic situations across transnational space – and at times against local gender constructions – in order to renegotiate and reclaim a respectable and desired marital status. On the one hand, these women are subject to manifold localised, legal and religious-moral definitions as women and wives. On the other hand, they creatively and actively utilise structural differences and new opportunities across transnational space to redefine themselves. The stories thus show both the women's agency and the importance of structural factors.     

The Economic Value of Bilingualism for Asians and Hispanics1

This study examines how bilingualism affects the wages of Asian and Hispanic workers using 2000 Census data. In contradiction to the general belief that bilingualism can provide a competitive advantage in the labor market, we find no evidence that 1.5‐generation and U.S.‐born Asian and Hispanic bilingual workers generally have higher wages than their English monolingual co‐ethnics; in some cases, in fact, their wages are significantly lower. In search of specific circumstances under which bilingualism might provide an economic advantage, we also examine interactions of language with such variables as education, employment in the public rather than the private sector, and the size of the population of mother‐tongue speakers. With limited exceptions, we find no sign of greater economic returns to bilingualism. Since bilingualism requires considerable effort to maintain across generations in the United States, we conclude that the virtual absence of economic rewards for it creates pressure for linguistic assimilation.     

Captured by the Game: Might a Focus on the ‘Therapeutic Relationship’ Diminish the Attention We Give to the Client's Intimate Network?

A recent project sought to clarify how psychotherapists and mental health workers understand psychosocial health and pathology. In this enquiry, I paid particular attention to the client's interpersonal networks: did the professionals actively consider, and if so to what extent, ‘intimate social and family relationships’ in constructing their understanding of the presenting problem and in the process they used for goal setting. Twenty‐two semi‐structured interviews were undertaken, eleven with psychotherapists and eleven with mental health workers. Across both groups, interviewees tended not to see their clients as embedded, relational entities, but primarily, often quite exclusively, as autonomous beings. Second, interviewees accorded a high value to the importance of ‘the therapeutic relationship’. Is it possible that the emphasis practitioners place on ‘the therapeutic relationship’ has the effect of marginalising the attention that is given to the client's significant‐other network?     

Cultural archaeology and historical geographies of the black presence in rural England

This paper focuses on the exclusion of black peoples from the English countryside. It particularly considers how white imaginaries of the English rural have ignored historical geographies of the black presence. Firstly the paper reflects upon the heritage of Englishness as represented in and through the rural tradition. It then presents some cultural excavations of black history undertaken by academics, community scholars and local history groups and asks how the histories they reveal challenge ideas of rural histories of England. The paper then considers how historical geographies of anti-racism may complement these new takes on rural heritage and provide a counter narrative to ’traditional’ English rurality.     

Unequal Englishes in the Philippines

In this paper, we show how the notion of unequal Englishes can be deployed as an alternative way of accounting for the global spread of English. Through our data, we show how call‐center agents in the Philippines espouse conflicting ideologies in the workplace that invoke unequal Englishes. On the one hand, they espouse ideologies of privilege by seeing themselves as being able to exploit the resources of English in the call‐center workplace, thus celebrating themselves as proficient users of the language. On the other hand, they also espouse ideologies of delegitimization borne out of pressures to subscribe to American Standard English and the belief in the inherent superiority of ‘native speaker’ Englishes and their varieties. By mobilizing the paper towards unpacking inequalities of Englishes as invoked in the statements of call‐center agents, we hope to contribute to critically engaged discussions of the role of English in the world today.     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">Si,Se Puede</Emphasis>: Organizing Latino Immigrant Workers in South Omaha’s Meatpacking Industry

Faced with declining union membership and a growing immigrant workforce, the US labor movement has started to realize the importance of organizing immigrant workers. Yet the conventional wisdom among many within the movement is that immigrant workers are “unorganizable.” Based on a case study of a collaborative effort between the United Food and Commercial Workers Union and Omaha Together, One Community to organize an estimated 4,000 Latino immigrant meatpacking workers, I demonstrate not only the “organizability” of immigrant workers, but also the fact that they have been organizing themselves, with the help of a community-based organization, in the absence of union efforts. This case study suggests that in order to facilitate successful organizing campaigns among immigrant workers, unions need to reach out to community-based organizations and institutions that have established relationships with immigrant workers.

Hip‐hop Imaginaries: a Genealogy of the Present

In this article, I track the emergence of Hip‐hop imaginaries in the enunciatory present, focusing on three disparate scenes: democratic change in Bolivia, cultural resistance in Hawaii, and the foundations of Hip‐hop that emerged from New York City. I position Hip‐hop as a mode of cultural expression that gives resistant form to marginalized existences abjected from dominant society through political and economic exclusion. I trace the origins of Hip‐hop in New York in order to show how the idea of existential resistance provides a useful interpretive framework in which to theorize the relationships between cultural resistance and political change. I utilize this framework by looking at Hip‐hop in two disparate locations, first analyzing the music of Hawaiian Hip‐hop group Sudden Rush and contextualizing it within the contemporary Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement. Second, Bolivia’s newly emergent Hip‐hop scene amidst a turbulent culture of political protest provides a useful contrast to that of Hawaii’s. In the end, I argue that Hip‐hop imaginaries in Hawaii and Bolivia demonstrate inter‐related strategies of national and cultural decolonization which carry distinct political implications.