For the sake of my family : Sri Lankan female return migrants

Abstract

Sri Lankan Female Return Migrants is a thesis that analyses the context of female migration in Batticaloa, Sri Lanka. The women who appear in this thesis migrate temporarily to the Middle East to work as housemaids in the homes of complete strangers. Many women spend as much as 10 years away from their family. Information has been collected throughout a six months fieldwork carried out in 2010. Participant observation and interviews conducted during fieldwork constitutes the basis for the empirical descriptions. The overall question that this thesis suggests an answer to is: What factors are in play when women on the East coast of Sri Lanka decide on domestic work migration? Throughout the thesis I will discuss the goals, the concerns and the priorities of the migrant women. That women migrate to make money is quite clear, however, one goal with this thesis is to discuss what the money is spent on. During the fieldwork dowry emerged as one of the most important factor of migration. The thesis therefore discusses the correlation between migration and dowry as it appears in this particular context. I will ask questions such as; why is dowry so important and what functions does it have in the society? I will also ask how migration affects relationships within the family. I argue that both invisible and visible structures are important in accounting for when analysing women’s migration. Several ethnographers have argued that migration cannot merely to be understood in economic and political terms, but also as a sociocultural process mediated by gendered and kinship ideologies, institutions and practices. (Kottegoda 2004:177; Grasmuck and Pessar 1991, Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994, Matsuoko and Sorenson 1991 referred to by Mahler and Pessar 2006:33.) This framework has been important for my analysis of migration. I have used a combination of migration theories and gender approaches as the analytical framework. The approaches opened up for an interpretation of migration as something that is connected with numerous other factors in the community, such as the family, the household and gender ideologies. I have found that women are encouraged to migrate as housemaids to a larger extent than before; this is shown through the expansion of training centres and a pre-payment that is not connected to the future salary. In Sri Lanka more than 50 percent of the international work migration is female; out of this almost 90 percent migrate as housemaids. This is a unique and a very large number of housemaids and make Sri Lanka a particularly interesting place for studying international female work migration.