Annotation: Gamburd, Michele Ruth. 2000. Kitchen Spoon’s Handle

Gamburd, Michele Ruth. 2000. Kitchen Spoon's Handle: Transnationalism and Sri Lanka's Migrant Housemaids. Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press. The book presents a longitudinal ethnographic study of Naeaegama, a rural village of about 1,000 residents in southern Sri Lanka. Outbound migration from the village to the Middle East began in the late 1960s, and over …

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Annotation: Fouron, Georges and Nina G. Schiller. 2001. “All in the Family: Gender, Transnational Migration, and the Nation-state,”

Fouron, Georges and Nina G. Schiller. 2001. “All in the Family: Gender, Transnational Migration, and the Nation-state,” Identities, 7(4):539-582. The article explores whether gender sustains/creates hirarchies and divisions, or equitable relations between men and women as it is lived across the borders of nation-states. The authors draw on the life stories of three generations of …

Annotations: Collier, Jane F., Michelle Z. Rosaldo, and Sylvia Yanagisako. 1982. Is There a Family?: New Anthropological Views

Collier, Jane F., Michelle Z. Rosaldo, and Sylvia Yanagisako. 1982. Is There a Family?: New Anthropological Views. In, Rethinking the Family: Some Feminist Questions. B. Thorne and M. Yalom, ed. Pp. 25-39. Longman: New York. The authors refute Malinowski's universalizing argument that the family can be characterized by its function of nurturing children. Using as …

Annotation: Roach, Joseph. 1996. Cities of the Dead

Roach, Joseph. 1996. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. Roach uses the term “circum-Atlantic world" to denote a vast “behavioral vortex” (30), in which various spectacles of cultural surrogation can be observed. More specifically, he studies London and New Orleans as spaces for both encounter and exchange, and is interested in the “restless migrations” (xii) …

Annotation: Carsten, Janet. 2004. After Kinship.

Carsten, Janet. 2004. After Kinship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Using a comparative approach, and paying attention to the "close, intimate, and emotional work of kinship beside the larger projects of state and nation," Carsten takes a "long way round" to investigate the many new guises of kinship. The house, gender, personhood, substance, and idioms, include …

Annotation: Mahler, Sarah J. and Patricia R. Pessar. (2001). Gendered Geographies of Power

Mahler, Sarah J. and Patricia R. Pessar. (2001). Gendered Geographies of Power: Analyzing Gender Across Transnational Spaces. Identities, 7(4):441-459  The authors expand on Doreen Massey's concept of “power geometry” to conceptualize gender as a process that “yields a praxis-oriented perspective wherein gender identities, relations and ideologies are fluid, not fixed” (442). The authors develop a …

Annotations: Clifford, James. 1994. Diasporas

Clifford, James. 1994. Diasporas. Cultural Anthropology, 9(3):302-338 Clifford suggests to be wary of using ideal types that describe “diaspora,” as “societies may wax and wane in diasporism, depending on changing possibilities – obstacles, openings, antagonisms, and connections – in their host countries and transnationally” (306). Diaspora involves dwelling, maintaining communities, (having) collective homes away from …

Annotation: Stack, Carol B. 1974. All Our Kin

Stack, Carol B. 1974. All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community. New York: Harper & Row. Using ethnomethodology (i.e. researching without middlemen), Stack studies for three years the cultural and structural adaptations of black families in the poorest quarters of an urban ghetto, which the author fictitiously calls The Flats. Rather than …

Annotation: Marcus, George E. 1998. Ethnography Through Thick and Thin

Marcus, George E. 1998. Ethnography Through Thick and Thin. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Multi-sited research (MSR) is “designed around chains, paths, threads, conjunctions, or juxtapositions of locations in which the ethnographer establishes some form of literal, physical presence, with an explicit, posited logic of association or connection among sites that in fact defines the …

Annotation: Bloch, Alexia. 2011. Intimate Circuits

Bloch, Alexia. 2011. Intimate Circuits: Modernity, Migration and Marriage among Post-Soviet Women in Turkey. Global Networks, 11(4):502–521. Bloch looks at the case of women migrants from the former Soviet Union who seek to engage in unskilled labour in Turkey, to understand the interweaving of intimate practices with transnational mobility (503). In the early 1990s, Turkey's …