Be our guest/worker: reciprocal dependency and expressions of hospitality in Ni‐Vanuatu overseas labour migration

Smith, Rachel

doi:10.1111/1467-9655.13029

Cited by 9 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 61 publications

(69 reference statements)

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“…‘She knows how much it means to them’, she said. The sentiments mirror those identified in Rachel Smith's (2019) study of ni‐Vanuatu workers in New Zealand's horticultural guest‐worker scheme. Smith found that both employers and workers invoked ideas of kinship and hospitality to describe and produce their relationality.…”

Section: Good Feelings and Development Dreamssupporting

confidence: 55%

Precarity's reach: intersections of history, life, and labour in the Australian horticultural industry

Stead

2021

Royal Anthropological Inst

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The temporary labour migrations of Pacific Islanders to work in the orchards and packing sheds of the Australian horticultural industry feed the demands for flexible labour that are marks of the precarious present. At the same time, their labour experiences call attention to the diverse, historically situated, and racialized configurations of power and risk that converge in the present moment within particular places and within the intersecting lives and bodies of differently positioned others. Focused on a fruit packing shed in north‐central Victoria, and on the ni‐Vanuatu workers, farmers, managers, and mediating agents who meet there, this article seeks to develop an ethnography of precarity's intersections. Here, the insecurities and fraying reciprocities widely theorized in the context of post‐Fordist, neoliberal precarity articulate with the hierarchies and imaginaries of development regimes, the colonial co‐production of Global North and South, and the always‐precarious rhythms of horticultural production. Precarity, I argue, is neither particular to the post‐Fordist relations of Western Europe, nor an all‐consuming leveller of historical, cultural, and place‐based difference. Rather, it emerges out of the situated convergences of diverse people and histories, and practices of both mobility and containment, producing intersecting but ultimately unequal distributions of risk.

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Section: Good Feelings and Development Dreamssupporting

confidence: 55%

Precarity's reach: intersections of history, life, and labour in the Australian horticultural industry

Stead

2021

Royal Anthropological Inst

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“…The point of rupture that we have called the end of kinship signals for many migrant care workers an undoing of the recognition they sought and gained through care (which is the way our interlocutors expressed their agency in the absence of collective forms of claims‐making). We have argued that comparative ethnographic attention to the unmaking of these kin relationships at particular junctures—how they are anticipated, navigated, and experienced—reveals that the noncontractual elements of these relationships become enmeshed unevenly with their contractual dimensions (Smith 2019). Even if migrants are not owed anything contractually, the intricate emotional and material exchanges, expectations, and claims expressed through the register of kinship are reformulated at the end of employment, when other definitions of the relationship are foregrounded.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Disposable kin: Shifting registers of belonging in global care economies

Amrith

Coe

2022

American Anthropologist

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As is well discussed in the literature, paid domestic workers become like kin through living with and caring for their employers. Exploring two disparate cases, aging Asian domestic workers in Singapore and African eldercare workers in the United States, the article focuses on two critical junctures when these kin relations are disavowed: the care worker's retirement and the death of a patient. We argue that the flexible registers of kinship that characterize care workers' relationships with their employers revert, at the end of employment, to fixed notions of kinship based on blood and marriage.These essentialist understandings of kinship arise around inheritance and the worker's care in older age and in illness, enabling employers, states, and private care agencies to avoid post-employment obligations to domestic workers. The fluctuation between kinship-as-doing and kinship-as-essence marginalizes domestic workers in a globalized economy as disposable kin, denying their belonging as citizens or social equals.

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“…Families practice horticulture supplemented with fishing but also earn money through cash cropping and wage labor. Both areas are experiencing rapid social change due to rural–urban migration, seasonal labor, and the expansion of formal education (see also Miller, 1987 , 1990 ; Petrou, 2017 , 2018 ; Smith, 2018 , 2019 ). Economic development has increased the importance of education in many Melanesian countries.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Adoption, Fostering, and Parental Absence in Vanuatu

Brandl,

Emmott,

Mace

2023

Hum Nat

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Alloparenting, wherein people provide care to children who are not their biological offspring, is a key aspect of human child-rearing. In the Pacific, many children are adopted or fostered by custodial alloparents even when both biological parents are still alive. From a behavioral ecology perspective, such behaviors are puzzling: why parent someone else’s child at your expense? Furthermore, little is known about how these arrangements are made in Pacific Islander societies today, who provides care, and what kinds of outcomes fostered children experience. A better understanding of these proximate factors may help reveal the ultimate drivers behind custodial alloparenting. Here, we report findings from a survey carried out with the caregivers of 282 children in rural areas of Vanuatu, an island nation in Melanesia. Most fostered and adopted children lived with relatives such as aunts, uncles, and grandparents (87.5%) rather than unrelated caregivers, with a strong preference for maternal kin. The most common reasons for these arrangements were that the parents had separated (16.7%), were engaging in labor migration (27.1%), or a combination of both (27.1%). Results for investment in children’s education and their educational outcomes were mixed, although children removed from crisis situations did more poorly than children removed for aspirational reasons. Our findings suggest that custodial alloparenting helps families adapt to socioeconomic transitions and changing marriage practices. Outcomes may depend on a range of factors, such as the reason children were transferred out of the natal home to begin with.

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Be our guest/worker: reciprocal dependency and expressions of hospitality in Ni‐Vanuatu overseas labour migration

Cited by 9 publications

References 61 publications

Precarity's reach: intersections of history, life, and labour in the Australian horticultural industry

Precarity's reach: intersections of history, life, and labour in the Australian horticultural industry

Disposable kin: Shifting registers of belonging in global care economies

Adoption, Fostering, and Parental Absence in Vanuatu

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