Feminised Migration: The Empowerment Paradox

In 2011, The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) estimated that the number of international migrants in 2008 rested at 214 million, having increased from 150 million people in the year 2000, amounting to 3.1% of the world’s population. The immense economic consequence of these labour flows are made evident in the fact that in 2009, approximately $414 billion were sent as remittances, $307 billion of which were sent to developing countries, double the official aid and nearly two-thirds of foreign direct investment. As made evident from the sheer volume of not only migrants but significant remittances, particularly to the developing world, through the employment relationship of migrant labourers, the incentives for migration are visibly economic.

Despite the growth of permissive economies where human capital flows have become a significant feature, issues of citizenship and national sovereignty directly affront the optimism of international treatises, particularly within the informal sector. International organisations have become the stern-faced puppets of geopolitical powerhouses, owing to rising differences in wealth, power and security hand in hand with economic liberalisation.

Within an inclined geopolitical playing field, both wealthy and lowly nations were able to benefit from the need for labour, however, what must be interrogated is, at what cost to the labourers themselves and whose responsibility is their safety?

Global Care Economies: An Empowerment Paradox?

Care as a socially-reproductive form of labour, has been identified to sustains human beings as distinct from commodities and products, involving biological reproduction and/or socialisation processes such as childcare or housework. Care, much like other service sectors, has become assimilated into the globalisation project, as a low-cost service sector as what has been dubbed as the ‘hidden labour market’. Women’s labour, particularly in those sectors that are regarded as inherent to their biology, are rendered invisible and thus valueless. These also manifest as unregulated, economic spaces particularly in the realm of the domestic, where national laws or international promises for equality cannot be honoured.

Within a globalised world, where wealthier women needed the support of carers to look after matters of house and children while they engaged in their own employment, or simply out of unwillingness and the ability to afford domestic labour, a new trend of feminised migration was instigated. This need for care-giving as both a formal and informal service within the developed world, saw a rapid incline in the number of unskilled female migrants, who were incorporated as domestic labour into the most intimate microcosm of the global production chain; the household. The category of unskilled was thus inherently tied to womanhood, which engenders domestic labour, by which women continue to be compelled to commoditise their patriarchally-reinforced social role as mothers or wives.

The inequalities of wealth play a crucial role in this flow of labour, for unskilled women who are unable to gain employment within national labour markets, through the thinning boundaries of globalisation and an attractive wage differential, are able to leave their home countries for employment opportunities overseas. Although economic independence is an attractive incentive for women, they are compelled into an employment relationship that preys on their gender as a skills-qualification. Through globalisation and the care economy of domestic labour, women are confined into roles that underline their subordination and highlight patriarchal social biases bolstering a gendered separation of the labour market which disallows mobility or the gaining of other productive skills. Moreover, the informal nature of the domestic sphere marked by grave racialised prejudices also creates a uniquely liminal space where national or international labour  conventions and laws cannot be monitored or enforced, making female migrant labourers exceptionally vulnerable to abuse and discrimination that victimise their most intimate forms of self-identification such as gender, ethnicity and nationality.

Cheap Labour in the Middle-East

Working conditions of labourers in the Middle-East have been consistently marked by a lack of protection, clearly defined rights, ineffective local legal systems, a complete dependence on the good will of their employers and the ever-present possibility of deportation. Furthermore, an ethnic and national stratification was in place informally, whereby European expatriates were paid the most, other Arabs and Asians occupying a middle-rung and Bangladeshis and Sri Lankans getting paid the least. What began as a tide of male migration, soon led to a demand for domestic labour in the prosperous Arab households, owing to the very low participation of Arab women in the labour market as a consequence of social and ad religious customs that restricted females working outside the home.

Thereby, cheap domestic labour from South Asia and beyond was funneled into the Arab states, where the even more vulnerable category the female servant was laid over the plethora of existing biases and constraints that marginalised the male workers. These women often remained isolated in private households where they had no access to any form of external protection or any legal recourse in the event of employer abuse. Moreover, existing national labour laws specifically excluded domestic work from its sphere of influence that made reporting harassment or maltreatment virtually impossible.

Although Sri Lanka has been marked as a developing nation that has fared well in matters of human development, economically it has consistently faltered. In the 1984, with a per capita income of $360, it was among the 30 poorest countries in the world having succumbed to very high inflation and unemployment rates in the 1970s. The demand for labour in the Middle-East proved to be a beneficial solution to the Sri Lankan government, which was able to solve some of its worst economic problems and also enable an income and alleviate unemployment. Sri Lanka, having advertised itself internationally has having the cheapest labour in Asia, proved to be an attractive source for Arab employers owing to higher wage differentials, regional proximity, liberalised economic policies that encouraged labour flow out of the country and its comparative regional advantage for not having imposed restrictions on female labour over issues of culture or religion. Many of the women were unskilled outside the domestic sphere which made them pertinent candidates for housekeeping and child-rearing. Given that there was no possibility of them being paid this amount with similar jobs at home, the wage differential was the single most influential ‘pull factor’ in the feminisation of Sri Lankan migration to the Middle-East.

Since the 1980s, Sri Lanka maintained itself as a rich labour resource for the Middle-East, which has sustained its economy throughout as second largest earner of foreign exchange in the Sri Lankan economy. According to the Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment (2009), there are approximately 1.7 million Sri Lankans working overseas (amounting to nearly 10% of the country’s population) remitting Rs. 382,801 Million (47.03% of total foreign exchange earnings of the country) back to Sri Lanka. During the past decade 70% of labour had been exported in the category of unskilled sector of which nearly 66 % had been female domestic workers who formed 89% of the total female migrant workers. Given the low levels of female employment in Sri Lanka alongside its economic and political instability in the civil war years, migration as domestic labour was motivated almost solely by dire financial necessity among respondent women. Poverty is also tied to the pursuit of social and economic status including ambitions such as building a house, purchasing land, paying off family debts or educating children.

Abuses and Violations

The economic promise of domestic labour in the Middle-East is virtually unequivocally bound to the high probability of abuse.

HRW (2007) reports that not only are women victim to wage exploitation, unpaid or underpaid salaries, heavy workloads, excessive hours of work, food deprivation, inadequate living conditions, confiscation of passports, forced confinement, restricted communication, forced labour, prohibitions on returning home and a series of exploitative practices by recruitment agencies in both Sri Lanka and the Arab States, but also violent physical, psychological and sexual abuses. In Lebanon, the abuses are often centred on racial and ethnic prejudices and ensuing stereotyping that creates a hierarchy of nationality and interlinked wages appropriate for domestic labour, but also categories for recruitment basing nationality as an indication of trust or degradation. Racial slurs and offensive stereotyping are a manifestation of symbolic violence that negate and debase the identities and personhoods of these women. Not only are the human and civil rights of unskilled migrant labourers constantly challenged, and their existence marginalised through these practices, their citizenship becomes a burdening category of identification.

Whose Responsibility?

Universal standards of living are prescribed and marginalised social groups are given legal protection through documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) that recognises ‘the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world’. However the existence of such idealised and optimistic provisions does not account for the lack of support by human rights or humanitarian organisations in the realms of ‘hidden labour markets’ not simply in the Middle-East, but beyond.

Inter-governmental understandings and solidarity in policy formulation could possess a positive impact on these relations in the long-run although relevant legislation has been slow in implementation.

HRW (2007) states, ‘International human rights law places positive obligations on states to protect the rights of individuals against acts, including ill-treatment and discrimination, committed by private persons or entities. States must take appropriate measures (in some places referred to as “due diligence”) to prevent punish, investigate, or redress the harm caused to individuals’ rights by private persons or entities. States must also provide effective remedies to those so harmed.’ Given that much of the abuses taking place in the domestic sphere, face very legitimate problems of reporting and monitoring, efforts have been made to account for the process of migration itself.The Sri Lankan government has been increasingly wary of abuses in the system through recruitment agencies and has introduced a stringent system of licensing for regulation (Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment, 2009; HRW, 2007). Similarly, the establishment of embassies and consuls in the recipient countries has played a considerable role in providing registration services for labourers and sanctuary for women who manage to escape oppressive domestic relations.

However, the process of creating bi-lateral understandings with the Arab States which have very little to gain besides the cost of implementing mechanisms for monitoring labour within the private homes, has been very slow. The core nations’ dependence on the Arab Gulf for oil and its remarkable financial capital, helps maintain its interests within potential threats from international laws. Although a space for civil society activism has opened up in the form of NGOs within these countries where women are given advice and shelter if needed, the problem of abuse and forced labour within the households remains a persistent problem as news reports of violence against female domestics gather momentum, and the expectation of violence becomes grotesquely normalised.

As stated by HRW (2007) the Arab governments remain notably inactive in this sphere, and the critical importance of remittances to Sri Lanka’s economic strategy for poverty alleviation implies that, it too is reluctant to enforce any major restrictions on labour migration. Thereby, what must be questioned is even though globalisation in its neoliberal economic manifestation has become a successful flow for securing employment overseas and interlinked financial independence and gains in socio-economic status owing to high wage differentials, at what disjunctive cost to human dignity and life must these financial incentives be pursued?

Rights and Sovereignty in the Household

Saskia Sassen posits, highlighting the declining sovereignty of states over their economies, posits that global markets created a space for legal regimes that mediated between national autonomy and the transnational practices of economic players.For example, Human rights are not dependent on nationality, overriding political, social and civil rights which elude those categorised as aliens.  However the existence of such idealised and optimistic provisions does not account for the lack of support by human rights or humanitarian organisations in the realms of domestic labour not simply in the Middle-East. These debates on legality and citizenship in relation to migration must be re-examined in relation to enforcement in the liminal, hidden space of the domestic sphere where the employment of domestic labour, the international and national have begun to intersect with the private.

In these spaces and beyond, human rights violations, exist in reality much like the thought experiment of a falling tree in a forest, crimes that did not take place unless it is reported and acted upon.

Relevant Reads:

Abu-Habib, L. (1998). The Use and Abuse of Female Domestic Workers from Sri Lanka in Lebanon. Gender and Development , 6 (1), 52-56.

Anthias, F. (2000). ‘Metaphors of Home. Gendering New Migrations to Southern Europe’. In F. Anthias, & G. Lazaradis, Gender and Migration in Southern Europe. Women on the Move. (pp. 15-47). Oxford: Berg.

Athias, F., & Yuval-Davis, N. (1992). Racialised Boundaries: Race, Nation, Gender, Colour and Class and the Anti-Racist Struggle. London: Routledge.

Bannerjee, D., & Goldfield, M. (2007). Labour, Globalisation and the State: Workers, Women and Migrants Confront Neoliberalism. Oxford and New York: Routledge.

Brochmann, G. (1990). Middle East Avenue: Female Migration from Sri Lanka, Causes and Consequences. Oslo: Institute for Social Research.

Human Rights Watch (HRW). (2007). Exported and Exposed: Abuses against Sri Lankan Domestic Workers in Saudi Arabia,Kuwait, Lebanon, and the United Arab Emirates. Human Rights Watch.

Moukarbel, N. (2009). Sri Lankan Housemaids in Lebanon: A Case of ‘Symbolic Violence’ and ‘Everyday Forms of Resistance’. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Sassen, S. (1998). Globalisation and its Discontents. New York: The New Press.

Sassen, S. (1996). Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globalisation. New York: Columbia University Press.

Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment. (2009). Annual Statistical Report. Colombo, Sri Lanka: Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment.

Yeates, N. (2009). Globalising Care Economies and Migrant Workers: Explorations in Global Care Chains. Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Nations for Sale: How Much Is that Cheap Labour in the Window?

The North-South divide possesses powerful signification within labour structures, creating diminishing hierarchies and reshaping inequality on a tilted global scale.The factory fire in Bangladesh and its aftermath highlights a real predicament caused by the inequalities perpetuated by globalisation.

Cross over to The Platform Blog for my thoughts.

 

 

Thuppaki (The Gun) : Why You Shouldn’t Mess with India

In an effort to be less predictable and acquire a bit of street cred, the name of social anthropology, I found myself in Cinecity, Maradana (call me a newbie and make what you will of this, but a cinema atmosphere unlike anything I’ve previously encountered. We’re talking whoops, whistles, claps and cheers after every and I mean every scene of arguable significance- including a close-up of the hero’s biceps- i.e. every few minutes).

I am a relative stranger to Tamil cinema, its gloriously-kitsch-frolicking-on-Swiss-mountainsides-dishoom-dishoom-aesthetic occupying an entirely ignored periphery of my cinematic interests.

Thuppaki (The Gun) is essentially an action flick centered on a terror plot to destroy Mumbai, with a sub-plot of modern Indian romance and marriage (aptly summarised in the most inventive lyrics I have encountered: ‘(Girl) are you an Apple product?’ and the sage advice: looks fade, so marry a guy who makes 200,000 a month, even if he looks like a toad).

A young Tamil, Indian army officer named Jagdish (emphasis on Indian Army in all it’s multi-coloured, multi-ethnic, multi-religious badass, song and dance glory) returns to his family in Mumbai on vacation, where his parents and sisters take him straight from the train station to the home of a potential bride, Nisha. Jagdish discards Nisha assuming that she is an old-fashioned girl (meaning demure, sari-clad and neck tattoo concealed by chaste braid). He later finds out that she’s a father-slapping, short skirt wearing, red-wine drinking experimental smoker who plays every sport imaginable aside from being a pro boxer, which inevitably ends up in an irrational and comedic arranged marriage  triangle (cue song: ‘Why does my heart slide on Antarctic ice? Are you a penguin? Are you a dolphin?’) and ultimately undying love, as is usually the case. Easy peasy.

The main storyline revolves around a terrorist plot, by an Islamist terrorist group (trendy) with vague (completely unexplained) motivations to blow things up and create chaos in Mumbai.

Fabulously outlandish plot. Gloriously-kitsch-frolicking-on-Swiss-mountainsides (More progressive song lyrics: ‘I ran a search on google and found no one crazier than him’)-dishoom-dishoom-with Matrix-style slow-mo fight scenes, expert assassinations and explosions at sea. A ‘cold-blooded murderer’ of a hero who ‘extensively tortures’ the baddies (chopped off fingers, forced suicides- the works) and can single-handedly take out an entire armed terrorist cell and rescue five girls (one of them on the knife’s edge of a Youtube execution) with the help of a retired police dog and one gun.

What’s not to like, right? Right.

Contrived Portrayal of Diversity:

Representing ethnic, racial, linguistic, cultural diversity hand in hand with sexuality, stereotyping, typecasting are hot topics within the entertainment industry, where films and largely (American) television shows are being actively analysed and critiqued for their mono-everything casts.

I’m all for diversity, but Thuppaki is so consciously (and consequently unnaturally) diverse.

The Indian army, a central symbol of strongman virtue (including apparently a no-strings-attached license to torture and kill at the whimsy of individual operatives) is composed of all varieties of Indians imaginable, to the point of laboured. The last scene of the film, where the hero’s army train departs to Kashmir, the Muslims (identifiable by skullcaps, beards, covered heads- all typical expectations fulfilled) stand out on the platform (token, human white flags to all the Muslims they offended in the first 2 hours and 20 minutes of the film by saying, HEY the Indian Army adores Muslims, they are our loyal cold-blooded, torturing highly-trained assassins, and they are fighting for our consciously-portrayed-as-diverse-and-united-India against extremist Muslims with Jihadist tendencies. Yes.)  A major plot point in the film also revolves around a wardrobe revelation, the coat and tie attire typical to the Christian wedding (diversity for the win?) that helps the terrorists identify the Indian army assassins, who cannot be identified but the fact that they were in suits is common knowledge and where do people wear suits to? Naturally, Christian weddings- get me a list of all the Christian weddings in Mumbai (population a gazillion) so that I can identify and avenge with speedy success.

Extensive Torture? No big deal:

I may have been appalled by the casual and sometimes comedic tone the representation of torture was dealt with in Thuppaki. Jagdish apprehends Terrorist #1, beats him up, chops off his fingers, locks him up in his closet (yes, right behind those dress shirts) and shoots him?  Apparently this is completely unacceptable behaviour from a highly-trained Indian Army intelligence type, who will have to answer to no one about his public killing spree. This and the assassination of people in malls, cinemas, boats etc., more torture, using one’s sister as bait to annihilate terrorist cell, etc. You know, the usual.

It is true that films sometimes cast things in black and white, the existential questions and metaphysics puzzles of the grey an irksome inconvenience to the whooping-clapping-whistling masses. But how okay is such light-hearted portrayal of torture? Are we saying we will die and kill for our countries, the greater good of an artificial filmic celebration of diversity?

Perhaps it is a warning of geopolitical significance, You Shouldn’t Mess with New India. Especially not the Indian Army- they will shoot you right between the eyes, if they’re not locking you up in a closet and torturing you first.

Have you seen Thuppaaki? Thoughts?

Sri Lanka, Reconciliation and Lessons from Polanyi

Polanyi. Markets. Coase. Firms. Olson. Collective Action. Ostrom. Tragedy of the Commons. Knight. Social Conflicts. Chambers. Poverty. Kabeer. Gender. Akerlof. Identity.

Analysing Institutions in development was the bane of my existence a year ago. From social hierarchies to the bureaucracy of aid, endless readings and long-winded essays on how economic principles meet and mesh with social realities do not feel distant enough just yet. Being in the business of development however, has provided an intriguing counterpoint to this labyrinth of policies, practicality and the ‘packaging’ of jargon and its potential for social change in a manner that can be widely understood.

Numbers games are easy enough.  State-sponsored extortion covers fuel, electricity, potatoes and otherwise. Pay hikes compelled by union action culminates in a few blokes swinging off the Lipton Circus Fountain and the police getting trigger-happy with teargas. Wages are increased and prices go up since Western powers are after all conspiring to pack Sri Lanka back off to the Third World where fly ridden children are sucked into the neo-colonial aid machine, catalogued, photographed as the face of an organizational calendar and paid in awareness leaflets and oversized teddy bears from First world primary school pen pals. $9.99 a month salvation and one less distended-bellied child. Praise be!

The relevance of social and political context informs Polanyi’s conception of the market’s “embeddedness” which suggests that economy is integrated into society. This view inevitably challenges good ole’ Adam Smith’s description of man’s “propensity to barter, truck and exchange one thing for the other”. This subordination of the economy to politics and social relations underscores what Polanyi further asserts as the need for the government to play a role within the economy through the imposition of sanctions protecting national interests, rather than relying on the intangible economic theories of self-equilibration. While the markets of the world play the number games of hunger games, what of social change? Polanyi tells us that the market cannot be disembedded from society, but do the same gold standards and price tags apply? Can we measure social change in numbers or achieve it through lingo-heavy policy recommendations?

Policy design in Sri Lanka resembles something akin to a Smithian free market; the disembedded marionette strung by the ‘invisible hands’ of political and legislative powers. An uncanny automaton awkwardly flailing amidst real people and real social problems, one that’s trying to get these people, their politics and their problems in line with repeated mechanical recitations of the equality-for-all constitution.

Within development, the predicament of the numbers game (or the epic failure of economists as the rest of us social scientists like to believe) is being noticed. Mostly because the IMF and World Bank’s history of basic needs approaches and structural adjustment programmes caused more problems than they solved. The call for the integration of the global into the local forms an oxymoron of a one-size-fits-all square scheme being shoved into the triangle of a local market. The international development apparatus’s failure to account for the social and political embeddedness of local institutions and recognise that these institutions are not necessarily socially efficient and calibrated to fit into the neat boxes of a monitoring and evaluation report has proved to be detrimental to achieving any real development. Or do I mean empowerment and upward mobility?

After my automaton-like flailing (anthropology strings attached) amidst a group of economists versed the finer points of Keynes, I realise that within the framework of institutional analysis, what becomes significant is the agency of human behaviour and choice that economic theories limit as a set of axioms upon which predictions might be based. Much like policy yes? Wordy promises that fail in localised implementation initiatives. The development apparatus too is reluctantly learning from its mistakes and doing bold, hippie things like qualitative studies that are no less patronising in obtaining quotes on what it’s like to experience poverty from a ‘poor woman in India’ (calendar girl photo included). It is also looking at institutional analysis as a means of tailoring solutions to ground-level, social problems, by examining social institutions with an ethnographic astuteness that I promise you will herald significant positive changes towards achieving development goals like ending poverty and creating world peace (anthropologist’s bias, savvy?).

As far as reconciliation in Sri Lanka goes, a policy automaton is being ‘perfected’ (I suppose) in the hallowed halls of ministries with long names and shallow goals. The three-year mark since the end of the civil war in 2009 is creeping up on us and little progress has been made towards implementing anything tangible.

The LLRC was (should have been?) Sri Lanka’s institutional analysis; a document of ethnographic thoroughness that addresses the social minutiae through a broad-based consultation process that considers the deficiencies, hierarchies and limitations which are hindering the country’s progress towards reconciliation. Douglas North suggests that if an institution is made up of humanly devised regulations and enforcement, one must also consider the human limitations that factor into the creation and maintenance of these institutions, particularly the perpetuation of hierarchies and creation of ideologies by those in power. Within the more specific example of ethnicity (which I don’t believe requires too much explanation as a key agent in Sri Lanka’s social, economic and political landscape), Posner suggests that if ethnic politics serves the purpose of coalition building to gain greater advantages by virtue of a shared ethnicity, policy design will mirror these imbalances. Thereby, what can be questioned is whether a valid institutional analysis can be conducted from within an institution comprised of those positioned within the institution to serve a public mandate within for example, a democratic political system or a governmental one such as the LLRC?

A panel of old timers in talcum wigs failed or perhaps inadvertently (too optimistic?) brushed over this necessity, producing 400 odd pages of carefully selected (repetitive and sometimes contradictory) statements and legal gobbledygook. Thus we arrive at a familiar stalemate: the one-size-fits-all scheme square that attempts to fix a veritable Rubik’s cube of social problems pertaining to ethnicity, conflict, affirmative action and a return to square one policy capable of instrumenting social change. Yes that is two-dimensional ink on paper apologetically recommending more two-dimensional ink on paper legal and constitutional changes. What must be considered also is that institutions themselves are able to further inculcate the social divisions from within which they arise.

So, what now? Mandates, imbalances, validity and all? Invite the sticky-fingered West in for a ‘independent investigation’?

Civic responsibility comes to mind, but civil society and policy are equally bland in these parts. No collective action zing, until those marginalised by poor policy and a majority’s apathy return to a repetition of armed conflict. Fight for your rights, yes? ‘Che Guevara want you to rebel!‘ The sticker on a tuk-tuk I see every morning proclaims.

Upon realising this, we must question and challenge (covered under broad-based public consultation yes?) its limitations. Given the sheer number of people who are so clearly aware of/care about foreign intervention, should care enough to get some local awareness intervention going? Ha.

It is necessary that legal and constitutional fairness is in place, but implementation cannot succeed as shining idealization in an ink on paper promise.

It must be methodical, meticulous; examining social, political and economic bodies as ideologically founded and politically motivated institutions that function in their own right. It is necessary that the social “embeddedness” of these are thoroughly scrutinized and not reduced to a series of series of bureaucratic interactions of exchange, but as those subject to the tides of human prejudices, society and politics. The need lies in identifying the social divisions, issues of integration, not as our now proverbial free market independent from the social and political context. Reconciliation in Sri Lanka does not simply require state of the art policy perfection sparkling with idealist jargon and a mention of South Africa thrown in, but a thoroughly localised examination of the social and political realities upon which institutions are built. It requires analysing the powerful social divisions of ethnicity that draw on the potency of language, history, heritage and culture, how it features deeply and pervasively within the formal institutions of politics and governance. What must also be acknowledged is that Sri Lanka’s history has been mapped on what Posner (2005:2) identifies as the ‘formal rules, regulations and policies that structure social and political interactions’ and how these institutions in turn have shaped people’s identity choices, where ethnic politics can be viewed as a form of coalition–building for greater political and economic advantage. Policies and politics which led to ethnic groups acting in their own self-interest as they could only receive knowledge or human capital from members in their own group resulting in a phenomenon of ‘ethnic capital’, which subsequently leads to income differentials between groups.

Easterly  suggests that good institutions are founded to provide minorities with legal protection and ‘constrain the amount of damage one ethnic group could do to another’, but what of institutions that are inherently tilted? What we can hope for is a worthy effort as both state and civil society to fix the tilt. Where many a nation is plagued with the challenges of establishing sustainable democracies or combating ethnic inequalities, the least we can do is strive to genuinely understand what made us this way.

Readings:

Easterly, W. 2001. ‘Can Institutions Resolve Ethnic Conflict’ in Economic Development and Cultural Change, 49, 4.

Knight, J. 1992. Institutions and Social Conflict, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

North, D.C. 1995 ‘The New Institutional Economics and Third World Development’, in Harriss, Hunter, and Lewis (eds), The New Institutional Economics and Third World development. London and New York: Routledge.

Olson, M., 1971, The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Ostrom, E., 1990, Governing the commons: the evolution of institutions for collective action, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Polanyi, K. 1944. The Great Transformation: The Political Origins of Our Time, Boston MA: Beacon Press.

Posner, D. N. (2005). Institutions and Ethnic Politics in Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mind Your Language?

Remember that old British show from the 70s aired in Sri Lanka decades later, successfully sending adults and children of the 4-TV-channels-only-1990s-island into fits of laughter?

Marked by hilarity and all kind of politically incorrectness, the show thrived on the comedy of caricatured national and language stereotypes. For those unfamiliar with the show’s premise, it focused on the miscommunications and ensuing amusement in straight-laced Mr. Jeremy Brown’s English as a foreign language class. There were the kerfuffles that followed the quarrelsome Indian and Pakistani, the teasing coquette Francaise and a series of other parodied characters from Spain to China.

Funnily enough like most shows that egg laughs out of ethnic or national stereotypes (Outsourced,  The Kumars at No. 42 and Goodness Gracious Me), the show was probably funnier to the very people that were made fun of. Much like how desi jokes that make fun of brown people are so much funnier to other brown people (Outsourced,  The Kumars at No. 42 and Goodness Gracious Me, Russell Peters: I’m looking at all of you). This probably goes to show that we are indeed puppets of a devious colonial puppet-master ideology subscribing to complex theories of racial stereotypes, the colonisation of the mind and asymptotic mimicry as suggested by Homi Bhaba. That or optimistically, we possess the necessary ability to laugh at ourselves. You decide.

However, the truth is that while ex-coloniser audiences shift uncomfortably in their seats at race, nationality or accent related jokes in this post-politically-correct world (one assumes), the rest of us poor sods  giggle and hoot in agreement about Indian Standard Time, lecherous desi men (Rasmalaaaaiii) or many a mangled idioms coupled with brilliant comedic timing that the writers of Outsourced were particularly skilled in (cold chicken anyone?).

‘What’s to be did when the happen comes?’*

Even a rambling blog post could not possibly succeed in analyzing Sri Lanka’s language debate: highlighting the need for bilingualism, trilingualism, changes in state policy, society and beyond. Which is why, this is not ultimately a discussion on those particular politics, but rather a whole other social circus.

Having been raised in Colombo, I come from a fluidly trilingual house where English dominated and Tamil and Sinhala followed, a feature more common as a bilingual variant to many other people I know here. The grandchildren of a colonial hangover, we were taught the intricacies of Shakespeare, Eliot and Austen assisted by a turn of the century Longman’s English Grammar Book. Our language education was subject to particular thoroughness coupled with an overwhelming sentiment of shame attached to any mistakes or linguistic faux-pas- pronunciation in particular. Somehow, it was ingrained that mistakes were comparable to indelicate and ultimately unacceptable social blunders. So we grew up with vernacular English language skills, another generation of unwitting neo-colonised with elocuted enunciation and privy to quippy little Sri Lankanisms; like a series of private jokes about how we are so cleverly able to subvert the language of our colonisers. The blackguards!

Among friends and family, burgeoning in our tight little school girl cliques, our discussions flowed almost exclusively in English forging harmless, unmalicious boundaries in those years. The only point I am making with that statement is that it is just the way things were and I suppose, still are. Maybe it was different in other schools, or even for boys, but for us, I reiterate it was just the way things were.

So what does this mean in the grander scheme of things?

When I left Colombo to Britain 5 years ago, there was constant surprise. ‘HOW do you speak English so fluently ‘without an accent’ no less?’

The question, one that I find rather insulting, dogs me around at most introductions. ‘Your English is wonderful.’

Yes, it is. Because it is what I’ve always known, no different from you.

Upon returning to Colombo a few months ago, I begin to notice an even odder phenomenon. The assumption at most introductions that I cannot speak either local language, hand in hand with labels I don’t care to examine here.

The mushrooming of international schools and the popularity of English language education in Colombo (especially) has produced a generation of kids (and salespeople- I’m sorry but this is true) with dizzying accents. These young people have had little exposure to their mother tongues thanks to parents who are desperate to give their offspring a fighting chance in this doggy-dog world. Because English matters in the Sri Lankan job market. It really, really matters.

‘You can follow Sinhala right?’ I am often asked. Tamil is not even a question. I find this irksome, especially where assumptions are simply made with no questions or consultation. You can’t speak Sinhala, or worse, you think you are too good to speak Sinhala.

In these instances, I do not even bother to correct the typos on the labels that have already been pasted.

Much of my own serious education was in English, the language I am thus most comfortable in expressing my thoughts academically and otherwise; something, I do not feel the need to apologise for, particularly given the illogical disdain and labels I frequently encounter. Lately, I have been preoccupied with whether I am unintentionally disparaging people by either making them feel compelled to speak in a language they are uncomfortable with or worse not communicate at all? But truth is, despite my ability throw around an easy colloquialism in either local language, I am able to respond in whichever local language I am addressed in, and surely this is no inadvertent sin?

Language has been a hotly contested issue in Sri Lanka, encompassing decades of political debate and social discussion laying the foundations for inequality and prejudice within the ethnic conflict.

From education, employment and social relationships, language informs stereotypes, forging connections and sometimes-illogical prejudice.

However, when shades of the same language inspire such irrational divides, what hope do we have for achieving any form of cohesion beyond the ethnic issue?

Can we thus aspire to a cohesive bilingual or trilingual Sri Lanka?

* A line from an old Sri Lankan English snobbery joke. And yes, there are many.

White Skin, Black Masks

There is a particular violence in Frantz Fanon’s polemic on race and decolonisation.

Both ‘Black Skin, White Masks’ (1952) and ‘The Wretched Earth’ (1961) controversially deliberated the inferiority complex of blackness in a white world, examining the psyche of colonisation and pugnaciously advocating a cleansing violence. The thoughts in this post were largely inspired by this paradox of black skins and white masks that marks how race is perceived by both the self and the other. Although, I feel the age of political correctness is perhaps behind us (As made evident by virtually any episode of 30 Rock)- are we so optimistic that race in cinema is immaterial, or is it still insidiously informing orientalist stereotypes of otherness?

Race and violence in cinema have been as multifaceted and complex as the colonial experience, where differences of race, ethnicity and nationality – with a healthy dose of villainised Eastern Bloc rasps in the cold war decades and breathy Middle-Eastern whispers in the post 9-11 years – have been conflated with cinematic identities of wickedness. Save for the psychokiller genre that focuses most exclusively on deranged white men or Charlize Theron, baddies come with accents, bred from the irrational evils that oppose wholesome Western do-gooding (Or do I mean American hegemony?) and maniacally seek world domination. Of course the dashing American hero (unless of course it’s Bond, James Bond with his wicked smooth British vowels) will save the world, a stunning empowered heroine and perhaps even a bright-eyed, quippy child from  unspeakable evils or a nuclear holocaust. Blue sky and sunshine unless there’s a sequel involved.

Have colonial race politics set the precedent for how race is represented along caricatured stereotypes in cinema?

D.W Griffiths’ epic Birth of a Nation (1915) (although extremely cinematically significant, it is the vilest piece of racist fecal matter in existence aside from being painfully long) that details the heroism of the Ku Klux Klan. If you haven’t seen it, yes, you did read right- the heroism  of the KKK in the pro-confederacy American South during the civil war against aggressive African-American men (played by white actors in blackface).

So does evil come with an ethnic/racial identity? Often I believe it isn’t a stretch to admit that it does.

Perhaps one of the most intriguing and interrogating portrayals of race in cinema, which plays with the construction and deconstruction of African-American identities like a clever kitty (or a cool cat) with a ball of rainbow yarn, is found in Spike Lee’s Bamboozled (2000). A biting satire centered on a modern-day minstrel show featuring black actors in blackface, and the violence that ensues is a truly marvelous and intelligent piece of cinema.  Blackface forms a common thread in both Birth of a Nation and Bamboozled, despite the many decades and racial and political ideologies that separate the films. Bamboozled deals with the offensiveness and Fanonesque racial inferiority complex of the makeup phenomenon that originated a caricature of blackness as a racial identity in minstrel shows and Vaudeville.

I watched The Devil’s Double (2011) last week, featuring Dominic Cooper in an exceptional double role as the tortured political decoy Latif Yahia and the sadistic playboy Uday Hussein, the son of America’s ex-Public Enemy Number One, Saddam Hussein. I’m not going to deliberate the successes and fails of the film- it was quite excellent as far as Dominic Cooper’s performance goes and worth watching.

However, what I would like to draw attention to the less than Iraqi (Or well a broad umbrella of middle-eastern or a narrower Arab?)  cast that won critical acclaim for playing an entirely Iraqi cast (Ok so the female protagonist Sarrab was Lebanese, played unconvincingly by French actress Ludivine Sagnier). Don’t  get me wrong here, Dominic Cooper deserved every bit of the praise. His performance as the swarthy Uday Hussein was particularly arresting. However, what exactly does this fluidity of race, ethnicity and nationality mean? Particularly when the gradients of colours and inflections only believably turn darker?

Ultimately, this post isn’t an argument on cinema and race politics, but rather a query.

We have the great insult of blackface in cinema stirred by historical productions such as Birth of a Nation or satirical critiques such as Bamboozled. We have seen further fluidity of race on cinema as seen in Lawrence of Arabia (1962)  (and so on) with Peter O’ Toole and Alec Guiness flouncing about the desert in yet another epic bit of film. Today, we have an English actor convincingly playing the psychopathic son of an Iraqi dictator.

I suppose the question is, are we post-race where the best man does the job? Or are we harking back to an insulting precedent when racial politics permeated the cinema screen? After all, the reverse wouldn’t be entirely convincing- for then we would have White Chicks (2004), The Sequel.

Does villainy still have a colour and an accent?