Migrant Remittances, Population Ageing and Intergenerational Family Obligations in Sri Lanka

As Sri Lanka’s population ages, its migrant women face a difficult choice: should they work abroad to remit money to provision their families, or should they stay at home to look after elderly kin? Although numerous studies have explored migration’s effects on children, fewer works focus on issues of elder care. This essay presents contextualizing information on transnational migration from Sri Lanka and the rapid ageing that is transforming the country’s population structure from a pyramid with many youth and few elders into a column. Using qualitative ethnographic data gathered from a labour-sending village in southern Sri Lanka, this anthropological essay considers social priorities around remittances and intergenerational family obligations for care work. Villagers make decisions about allocating able-bodied family members’ labour based on key concepts of filial duty, combined with an analysis of a family’s financial and social resources and the vulnerabilities of its members based on their gender and age. Critiquing assumptions about elders’ lack of economic activity, the essay notes their key role in facilitating labour migration. The data reveal the importance of gender roles, educational achievements, and generational shifts in evaluating emerging practices. In the future, intergenerational family obligations to mutual care will persist despite population aging. But as extended families shrink and care work grows more demanding, choices between elder care and migrant remittances will become more challenging

Milk Teeth and Jet Planes: Kin Relations in Families of Sri Lanka’s Transnational Domestic Servants

This essay examines the confluence of local and global dynamics, exploring how transnational migration affects and is affected by gender roles, kinship relations, intergenerational obligations, and ideologies of parenthood. Journeying to the Middle East repeated on two-year labor contracts, many of Sri Lanka’s migrant housemaids leave behind their husbands and children. Women’s long-term absences reorganize and disrupt widely accepted gendered attributions of parenting roles, with fathers and female relatives taking over household tasks. Migrants say that economic difficulties prompt migration, and assess commitment to kin in financial terms. The government also benefits from remittances. Nevertheless, stakeholders (villagers, politicians, and the national media) worry about the social costs born by children. Drawing on interviews with the adult children of migrant mothers in four extended families in the Sri Lankan coastal village of Naeaegama, I examine the long-term effects of transnational labor migration on local households. I look into marital tensions between husbands and wives regarding domestic duties, and I consider emerging changes in intergenerational obligations. The case studies do not support media claims that children suffer abuse and neglect in their mothers’ absence, but do in part support survey information on reduced education, shifting marriage patterns, and paternal alcohol consumption. This paper contributes to the debate on the intersection of globalization and kinship studies, and explores the politics of representation at work in the discourse surrounding the social costs of migration