Claiming Ūr: Home, Investment, and Decolonial Desires on Sri Lanka's Tea Plantations

Between Work and Labor: Valuing Action in South Asia

“…For example, Elizabeth Dunn (2004) has shown how Polish understandings of motherhood and care inflect newly capitalist factory work; Sarah Besky (2014) has highlighted how models of kinship and intergenerational care organize relations between workers, supervisors, and plants on Darjeeling tea plantations; and Attiya Ahmad (2017) has demonstrated how South Asian female domestic workers in Kuwait navigate the double burden of reproducing both the households they work in and their households of origin. In such accounts, the analytical distinction between a heterogeneous world of work and an abstracted one of labor draws attention to the crucial yet subtle ways in which particular histories of gender, caste, race, place, religion and cultural experience come to animate what could be glossed as purely economic actions (Besky 2014; Harvey and Krohn‐Hansen 2018; Jegathesan 2018; Kelly 1992).…”

State-industrial Entanglements in Women’s Reproductive Capacity and Labor in Sri Lanka

“…In Nuwara Eliya district, for instance, the heart of the plantation sector and the district with the highest density of Hill Country Tamil residents in Sri Lanka, the percentage of overseas domestic workers increased from 2.67 percent of the country's total domestic worker labor force in 2008 to 4.01 percent of country's total overseas domestic worker labor force in 2012 (Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment 2012, 2012a). Recent anthropological research has demonstrated that overseas migration is a desired means of income generation on the estates, and has induced changes in estate household and kinship dynamics and residential landscapes (Gunetilleke 2008;Balasunderam, Chandrabose, and Sivapragasam 2009;Jegathesan 2011;Jegathesan 2018). Given the economic crisis and the state's interest in sustaining the tea industry, the plantation clause's timing and subtle inclusion compels due reflection.…”