Events

Jointly organized by Asia Research Institute, and Department of Sociology and Anthropology, National University of Singapore.

CHAIRPERSON

Dr Theodora Lam, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

Friendships between low-wage migrant workers can be sources of mutual support and information, as well as mistrust, suspicion, jealousy, and competition. Ethnographers of friendship broadly agree that trust and reciprocity underlie this relationship across contexts, while showing that migrant friendships, as part of “communities of convenience,” can be more instrumental than affective. Drawing on ethnographic research with Indonesian and Filipina migrant domestic workers in Chile, I examine counter-intuitive social relations where, despite never fully resolving previous or ongoing conflict over money, men, or reputations, women continue to attend to new emergencies and provide significant economic, practical, or emotional support to one another. Hostile friendships that endure despite open wounds highlight the intimate effects of socio-economic inequality and structural precarity in migrant women’s lives. However imperfect or inconvenient, these friendships play central roles in sustaining women’s lives in confronting structural exclusions and everyday forms of violence that women face in other relationships with employers, intimate partners, in-laws, and state actors.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Carol Chan is an anthropologist and Assistant Professor at the Society and Health Research Center, Universidad Mayor (Chile). She is the author of In Sickness and in Wealth: Migration, Gendered Moralities, and Central Java (Indiana University Press, 2018), and co-author of Chineseness in Chile: Shifting Representations in the Twenty-First Century (2022, Palgrave MacMillan). Her work has focused on gendered migration, racialization, inter-ethnic conviviality, and forced labor. Her current research is funded by the Chilean National Agency of Research and Development (Fondecyt 11200270).

REGISTRATION

Registration is closed, and instructions on how to participate in this hybrid talk has been sent out to registered attendees. Please write to aritm@nus.edu.sg if you would like to attend the event.