© All rights reserved by Andy Scott Chang
Southeast Asia is very diverse: its eleven countries vary in historical, sociocultural and political economic experiences. Yet, in spite of this diversity the region faces shared demographic challenges related to migration and intergenerational relations, in particular changing patterns of traditional family life, marriage and childbearing, ageing populations and migration for education and work. From 14-16 April 2016 the 5th Southeast Asian Studies Symposium took place at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford. I convened a panel on ‘Migration and intergenerational relations in Southeast Asia’. The panel aimed at bringing together emergent scholars to explore the historical and contemporary dynamics that shape migration in Southeast Asia and to relate these socio-cultural and political-economic processes to relationships between generations. In this way, panel participants illuminated how different patterns of migration shape intergenerational relations at different times and places in history on local, regional and international levels.
Based on fieldwork in Taiwan, Yannis-Adam Allouache (University of Ottawa) gave a paper on migration, gender and the political economy of care. He explained how (after a rapid transition to a post-industrial society) East Asian nations are now confronted with ageing populations, low fertility rates and changes to the traditional reliance on the family to provide social welfare. In response to this socio-demographic and care crisis, the foremost policy response since the 1970s has been the implementation of guest worker programs to attract low or unskilled workers from neighbouring Southeast Asian countries. Allouache discussed the multiple dimensions of exclusion, arguing that Taiwan’s institutional actors are unable to address the rights of foreign live-in caregivers and capitalize on migrant women´s ‘disposable’ labour. His research suggests that, given the general absence of state support, migrants turn for support and solidarity to religious networks such as Muslim communities or the Catholic Church in Taiwan.
Based on his ethnographic fieldwork in Java, Indonesia, Andy Scott Chang (University of California, Berkeley) discussed shifting gender politics of Indonesian labour migration and their effects on left-behind family members. He explained how up until the 1980s mostly young men migrated for work to other countries. However, the increasing demand for female labour and care in East and Southeast Asia has caused a shift from male to female migration, from the 1990s. This feminization of labour emigration, in turn, catalysed a transition in the gender balance of productive labour at home in rural Indonesia: stay-behind men find it increasingly difficult to justify their household contributions. Drawing on his ethnographic data, Chang attends to gender relations in their historical and cultural context and highlights the diverse ways in which immobile men are coping with their declining male privilege, as women relatives have attained higher status as breadwinners, community builders, and ‘foreign-exchange heroes’ for the nation.
Samia Dinkelaker (Freie Universität Berlin) presented a paper on the transformation of gender roles among transnational migrant care workers from rural Indonesia. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with migrant workers, instructors and Indonesian bureaucrats in a training centre in East Java, Indonesia, and in Hong Kong, she explained processes of ‘governing’ Indonesian female migrants. Dinkelaker found these processes target the provision of emotional care, producing servility in migrants, fostering their human capacity to endure separation from their families, and the establishment of bonds with their homeland and nation. She also discussed how women migrants respond to concepts of the ‘ideal migrant’ either by complying with or challenging conventional gender norms, for example through adapting tomboy identities or dying their hair blonde.
Kidjie Saguin (Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy) focused his presentation on the intergenerational effect of Filipino women returning home. He attempts to better understand why Filipino migrant workers’ failure to save causes them to come home broke despite years earning more than in the Philippines. Based on qualitative interviews with female household service workers, Saguin found these women tend to use their income for social reintegration: instead of saving for retirement, they invest their earnings in their families through transnational practices such as sending remittances and regular visits. As they form their identity on coming home, migrant workers find great reassurance in the implicit obligation they have forged among younger relatives: these have vouched to care for them upon their return.
Kunnaya Wimooktanon (University of Manchester) presented a paper about his ongoing research about Thai students´ education in Western universities, and what it reveals about Thai parental authority and the limits of familial obligation. Wimooktanon found that research participants demonstrated insight into how they perceive their relations with their parents and the need to find an ‘acceptable’ means of attaining independence. This need to find ‘acceptability’, in turn reveals patterns of parent-child power relations which are spatially and temporally limited. These require a synchronicity of the ‘habitus’ and the interplay of both parents and children. The paper highlighted the utility of adapting the framework of the philosopher Pierre Bourdieu for the study of changing intergenerational power relations.
As panel convenor I appreciated working with these five new researchers. Their work in progress highlights the value of qualitative research and ethnographic fieldwork in order to better understand how political-economic and socio-cultural factors shape intergenerational relations among migrants at the local, regional and international level of society.
About the Author:
Dr Pia Jolliffe is a Research Fellow at the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing and a Research Scholar at the Las Casas Institute, Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford.
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