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Sri Lankan migrant women between Kalpitiya & Kuwait: aspirations for wellness (suham). Re-constructions of 'migrants' health'

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posted on 2023-06-09, 00:17 authored by Sajida Ally
For decades, Sri Lankan Muslim women have been migrating for domestic work and contributing to their families’ welfare and the national economy. Despite their significance and the often-­-arduous conditions endured, women are largely understated about their wellness, they are stigmatized for being mobile and supposedly promiscuous, and their health is not prioritised within humanitarian interventions surrounding them. Taking these discrepancies as its starting point, this thesis examines how ‘wellness’ (suham) and ‘health’ are intersubjectively experienced and constructed by Sri Lankan Tamil-­-speaking women as social agents. It focuses on the transnational circuit between Sri Lanka—where gendered, kin and communal relations and poverty shape migrants’ aspirations— and the Arab Gulf, which hosts them as temporary, live-­-in domestic workers. This circuit provides both material conditions of livelihood, housing, sponsorship and limited welfare, and immaterialities of embodied senses of comportment, place, morality and faith, that integrally shape wellness. This thesis explores how migrants’ health and wellness is constituted as a field of intersubjective experience and ‘policy intervention’. In this field, it is argued, migrant women experience health around notions of morality and kinship, and their constructions intermingle with shared classifications of ‘migrants’ health’. Drawing on Sarah Willen’s and Robert Desjarlais’ critical phenomenology, the politics of life of Didier Fassin, and a growing body of ethnography on morality, the thesis explores migrants’ experiences through various interfaces in which wellness is experienced and constructed. The probing of these interfaces—of kin relations, ‘community’, employers, recruitment agents and state officials—drew on an extended field site, where research was primarily carried out in Kalpitiya, Sri Lanka and also in Kuwait. Throughout, the thesis highlights how the insufficiencies of kin relations and the migrant-­-care industry contour women’s experiences, yet how women act and channel into social praxis a will to make meaning out of their lives.

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File Version

  • Published version

Pages

244.0

Department affiliated with

  • Anthropology Theses

Qualification level

  • doctoral

Qualification name

  • phd

Language

  • eng

Institution

University of Sussex

Full text available

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2016-02-12

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