Linked Lives: Elder Care, Migration, and Kinship in Sri Lanka

By Michele Ruth Gamburd

When youth shake off their rural roots and middle-aged people migrate for economic opportunities, what happens to the grandparents left at home? Linked Lives provides readers with intimate glimpses into homes in a Sri Lankan Buddhist village, where elders wisely use their moral authority and their control over valuable property to assure that they receive both physical and spiritual care when they need it. The care work that grandparents do for grandchildren allows labor migration and contributes to the overall well-being of the extended family. The book considers the efforts migrant workers make to build and buy houses and the ways those rooms and walls constrain social activities. It outlines the strategies elders employ to age in place, and the alternatives they face in local old folks’ homes. Based on ethnographic work done over a decade, Michele Gamburd shows how elders face the challenges of a rapidly globalizing world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Nov 13, 2020
• ISBN: 9781978815322

Book preview

Lives

1

Introduction

I spent the last two weeks of December 2017 visiting my friend Kusuma at her home in Melbourne, Australia. Originally from the South Asian country of Sri Lanka, Kusuma and her husband had followed their son and daughter-in-law to Australia about a decade earlier. Kusuma left behind all members of her natal family, including her aging mother. In Melbourne, she cared for her grandchildren when her son and daughter-in-law were at work, and she gradually formed social networks and connections with other immigrant Sri Lankans.

Kusuma is a cousin of my longtime research associate, Siri. Siri lives in a village that I call Naeaegama, a settlement of about 1,250 people near Sri Lanka’s southwest coast. I have known Siri and Kusuma since my family first came to the village in 1968, when my mother was doing research for her PhD in anthropology (G. Gamburd 1972, 2009). I had my third and fourth birthdays in the Naeaegama, where my mom, dad, and I lived in Siri’s family compound. Siri worked as a research assistant first for my mother and later for me, when I returned to Sri Lanka to do ethnographic research for my own PhD in 1992. Siri often fondly recalled that he used to carry me on his shoulders when I was a child. When I visit Naeaegama, I live in his home. For over twenty-five years, he accompanied me to interviews to provide translation and social introductions.¹

Siri’s cousin, Kusuma, married her college sweetheart and taught English for many years in Sri Lanka’s capital city, Colombo, before moving to Australia. Like Siri, Siri’s wife, Telsie, also has relatives in Melbourne, including her niece, Rani. One evening while I was down under, Kusuma and I visited Rani, who had invited us to join her extended family for a birthday party. A half dozen children speaking English played a loud board game in the den, and six adults speaking Sinhala caught up on family news in the kitchen.

Not long after we arrived, our hostess, Rani, suggested that we should phone her aunt, Telsie. But I don’t know the number, Rani said, getting up as if to search for her address book. I do, I said, and provided Rani with one of the few numbers still consigned to my memory rather than to the contacts list in my phone. Rani dialed the number and spoke briefly to her delighted aunt, then passed the phone to me. After speaking with me, Telsie passed the phone to Siri. After Siri and I said our hellos, I passed the phone to Kusuma, who spoke with her cousin. Soon after this conversation ended, Rani’s phone rang; it was Rani’s mother (alerted by her sister, Telsie) calling from Sri Lanka to say hello. We passed the phone around again. International contacts concluded, we ate food catered from a nearby Sri Lankan restaurant and enjoyed birthday cake with ice cream.

Facilitated by the relatively cheap cost of international calls, this extended family bridged the gap between Sri Lanka and Australia, as well as between village-bound elders and emigrant children. Rani told us she also planned to bring her widowed mother to Australia in February. A prior visit had not gone well, but Rani hoped that the warm weather of the Australian summer would buffer her mother’s acclimation to Melbourne. How the grandmother would navigate the streets of Melbourne with her limited English or converse with her grandchildren, who spoke little Sinhala, remained to be seen.

Despite the difficulties of leaving home, many people like Kusuma seek to shake off their rural roots. Siri once compared the residents of Naeaegama to frogs in a well, saying, We jump and jump until the water level is high enough that we can escape. He and others explained to me that people could get by in the village, but the only way to get ahead was to leave.

For working-class men in Naeaegama, avenues for getting by include enlisting in the armed services, working in the tourism industry, driving three-wheel taxis, peeling cinnamon, engaging in day labor, and peddling and making coconut fiber brooms. Working-class occupations for women include laboring in garment factories and engaging in small business activities making and marketing coconut fiber rope. Seeking to get ahead, since the late 1980s, a large number of working-class women have migrated to the Persian Gulf as domestic workers, serving on multiple two-year contracts. Men also work abroad, but until the early 2010s, the majority of migrants from Naeaegama and from Sri Lanka in general were women (Sri Lankan Bureau of Foreign Employment [SLBFE] 2017, 2). In recent years, more men and fewer women have worked abroad. In Naeaegama, at least a quarter of village families have had some experience with transnational labor migration. These numbers mirror national statistics over the years in question (SLBFE 2017).

Although for working-class people, cyclical labor migration provides a way to get ahead, for the middle and upper classes, escaping the well often means either moving to the capital city (Colombo) or leaving the country altogether. People from wealthy, well-respected families may find that many of their relatives have emigrated; Australia and New Zealand are popular destinations. We’re the only ones still here in Sri Lanka, Telsie told me somewhat regretfully, after listing the members of her extended kin network who, like Rani, had left the country for good. Silent testimony to the exodus, many of the big homes in the older, prestigious parts of Naeaegama now stand empty or have fallen down, and some properties have been divided and sold.

When upward mobility means leaving the village or the country either temporarily or permanently, families often find themselves spread across different regions and nations. Long distances challenge their ability to provide care on many fronts—financial, physical, emotional, and ritual. Elders (sometimes poorer, often left behind) find that their care situation does not match what they provided for their own parents and grandparents. They tell nostalgic stories about the past, while voicing disappointment with the present conditions. And members of the sandwich generation, middle-aged individuals such as Rani and Kusuma, find themselves torn between their children, whose futures lie in new cities and countries, and their parents, whether they live in their old village homes or make the difficult transition to new locations.

The Culture of Care in Sri Lanka

In this book, I explore the nexus between migration and aging, especially how practices of care work change in response to emerging social realities in Naeaegama, a Sinhala Buddhist village in a globalizing world.

What does care mean, and what does it mean to care? Six key themes have emerged for me in answer to these questions. First and foremost, care is culturally constructed. People in different places and times practice care in culturally specific ways. Care practices simultaneously reflect pragmatic adaptations to social, political, and economic environments and the playful creativity of generations of thoughtful, inventive carers working within their cultural framework.

Second, care is relational. Almost anywhere in the world, although in different ways, a good old age involves a network of close relatives, neighbors, and friends (Buch 2017, 87; Loe 2017, 223). Within these broad parameters, people’s ideas about care relations vary profoundly, depending on region and culture. Detailed ethnographic work in South Asia explores the importance of the extended family, emphasizing both the joys and the challenges of living enmeshed with kin (Lamb 2000, 46; Trawick 1990). Sometimes care relations are egalitarian and reciprocal; sometimes they are hierarchical and asymmetrical. The dependencies between generations (Whitehead, Hashim, and Iversen 2007, 5) include both cooperation and possible conflicts between family members regarding the exact nature of kin obligations and expectations.

Questions of relationships lead to a third point, that care is gendered. People act (and innovate) within their assigned gender roles. In traditional portrayals of the ideal Sri Lankan family, a man serves as the breadwinner and financial provider, while a woman cooks and cleans (Ruwanpura 2011, 39). And yet the increasing participation of women in the formal workforce (such as the long absences of transnational female domestic workers) takes traditional care-workers out of the home (M. Gamburd 2000), and Sri Lanka’s ongoing demographic transformation toward an older population increases the number and proportion of older women on the island (de Silva 2007, 25). Gender therefore forms a key element in considering the situation of both those who give and those who receive care.

This leads to a fourth point about care: that care work is time-consuming and, if done by market proxies, expensive. Writing of aging in Sri Lanka, Sirisena (2018, 209) suggests that "mahalu kale (old age) is the stage of being looked after." Women and men in the sandwich generation often do care work informally, for younger and older kin. Care work is important for the social reproduction of the family, but it does not pass through the market, garner a wage, or accrue retirement benefits or a pension. Instead, when people who have done care work for family members need care themselves, they rely on that same family. However, changing contexts related to migration and smaller family sizes may cause challenges and require innovations in how Sri Lankans provide care for elders.

Fifth, care is moral. Care evokes an ethical imperative: that one ought to, or must, care (and care well) for someone. In Naeaegama, Buddhist teachings provide a framework within which people understand their care obligations, with an emphasis on parent-child relationships. What counts as good care varies by region and culture, and yet throughout the world, kinship imposes intergenerational rights and obligations (Block 1971; Miles 2018; Stone, 2010, 5; Whyte 2017, 245). Elders who have cared when they were younger for their own parents and children accrue a deep social debt, or entrustment obligation (Coe 2017, 145), with kin who will care for them in their old age. People often say in Naeaegama, Children are debtors.

The depth of care correlates with the intensity of emotion. To care means to worry, as Yvon van der Pijl (2018, 141) notes. Love can motivate intense, self-sacrificing service for family and friends. Conversely, receiving or giving insufficient care can cause social suffering and guilt. A mismatch between expectations and reality may spur nostalgia for the good old days and disappointment in the imperfect present. These observations lead to a sixth point, that care is emotional. Kinship correlates both with moral obligations and, often, with deep feelings. Our moral and aesthetic sense of what is good or bad, right or wrong, runs through the parts of the brain that govern emotion (Ehrlich 2000, 306–310). Ethically, we must care for kin physically and financially because we are bound to them emotionally.

Rites of Passage and the Buddhist Concept of Suffering

Everyone alive is aging. People mark age-related changes with rites of passage that lead into new and different phases of life. Around the world, people celebrate watershed moments such as births, birthdays, and puberty ceremonies. They mark achievements, such as marriages and anniversaries, childbirths, and promotions and retirements, with rituals and festivities. They mourn deaths and perform funerals. Symbolic anthropologists suggest that public recognition of transformations affects people’s identities in wider society (Turner 1967); ritual observations lead people from one phase of life into another.

In Naeaegama, people recognize that change is inevitable. Impermanence (anicca; Rahula 1959, 142) is one of the key tenets of Theravada Buddhism, the type of Buddhism that people practice in Sri Lanka.² While aging has its joys, it also has its share of sorrow and pain, particularly toward the end of life. Theravada Buddhists draw upon a well-theorized discussion of suffering (dukkha) to talk about change.

Dukkha figures prominently in the story of the Buddha, who began life as Prince Siddhattha. At the time of Siddhattha’s birth, prophets said that he was destined to become either a great king or a religious ascetic. Fearing the latter, the prince’s family sheltered him from the sorrows of the world. Siddhattha grew up in great luxury and joy. However, as a young man, he wished to see more of the world. Siddhattha slipped out of the palace. On his first excursion, he saw an old man. On his second, he saw a sick man. On his third, he saw a corpse. On his fourth, he saw a religious mendicant. Having seen suffering through the life course and a path to understanding it, Siddhattha renounced worldly pleasures and left the palace for good to wander as an ascetic.

The story of Siddhattha’s ascetic journey culminates in attaining enlightenment. In his first sermon, the Buddha taught the Four Noble Truths. Suffering is the first of these Noble Truths. The concept of dukkha includes not only physical and mental aspects of pain but also metaphysical concepts of impermanence and imperfection (Rahula 1959, 17). The other Noble Truths explain how suffering arises, how it can cease, and the path to the cessation of suffering. According to Buddhism, suffering arises from attachment (greed and craving), hatred, and delusion. Good luck and misfortune in this life arise from meritorious or sinful acts done in past lives; these energies pass from life to life on a cosmic ledger known as karma. Attachment binds people to endless cycles of birth, death, and rebirth (samsara). Earning merit (pin) and extinguishing attachment lead to the cessation of suffering and the attainment of enlightenment (nibbana).

Kinship is about social attachment, and according to Buddhist philosophy, attachment and resistance to change are the root causes of suffering. At the same time, Buddhism instructs kin to care for each other kindly and generously. Change related to aging can be painful. For example, physical suffering arises from injuries or illnesses, and emotional suffering arises from loss of function in oneself or one’s loved ones. Women are more likely than men to engage in physical care and nurturing, which in Buddhist philosophy makes it more difficult for them to achieve the detachment that they would need in order to cease suffering and attain nibbana. Tensions arise repeatedly between the need to care well for kin and the importance of accepting the inevitability of change. As chapters in this book will illustrate, Buddhist concepts shape how people in Naeaegama think about kinship, gender, suffering, aging, death, and reincarnation.

Structure and Agency

Care, like all other modes of human endeavor, is always in the process of unfolding. Recognizing the inevitability of transformation, this ethnography addresses changing family structures and concepts of care in Sri Lanka, in the context of two wider social realities: ongoing transnational labor migration and the rapid aging of the population. I draw on two traditions of anthropological thinking, cultural constructionism and practice theory, to talk about how individuals and families (actors) live within and adjust to these evolving political-economic dynamics and cultural discourses (structures).

Practice theorists address the relationship between the individual and society and how that relationship changes through time. Scholars such as Sherry Ortner (1989) focus on individuals as agents who have the capacity to act within enframing social structures. In other words, people innovate within culturally constructed bounds (Bourdieu 1977). As practice theory has evolved, it has incorporated more sophisticated understandings of agency; for example, Ortner’s (1996) analogy likening real life to a serious game captures the relational nature of individual actions coordinated with other players on a team, who pursue the same goal or prize. Real life consists of playing multiple serious games simultaneously, with and against different teams. Further refinements to the theory elaborate on the concept of projects that people pursue, alone or in conjunction with others, and the instrumental role of identity politics in helping coerce the weak into supporting the projects of the powerful (Ortner 2006). A focus on actors and their agency on unlevel playing fields captures the dynamic, emerging process of how real people strive to accomplish their aims within their everyday lives.

Attention to agency requires the complementary examination of structures, the bounds that frame people’s choices and actions. In discussing the limits on people’s innovation, practice theorists note that individuals are heavily constrained by internal cultural parameters and external material and social limits (Ortner 1989, 14–16). Internal cultural parameters include social norms and expectations, for example, the subconscious understanding of appropriate gender roles and the moral obligations to care for family. External material limits include physical constants such as the law of gravity, the need for sustenance and shelter, and the inevitable human vulnerability to the predations of age. External social limits refer to the economic and political contexts within which people’s lives unfold. In this case, such limits include Sri Lanka’s reliance on migration and migrant remittances; the political aftermath of Sri Lanka’s civil war (1983–2006); relations with foreign powers such as China, India, and labor-importing countries in the Persian Gulf; and the long-term economic and social effects of population aging.

In the serious game of social reproduction, individuals (particularly people in the sandwich generation) need to figure out how to care for the aged, take care of themselves, and raise their children. Many anthropologists challenge the possibility of thinking of an individual in isolation from his or her social context. For the purposes of considering aging and care work, scholars understand that people live linked lives (Lloyd-Sherlock and Locke 2008) and thus most people play on a team known as family.

Families working to get by and get ahead in Sri Lanka find that the political and economic context in which they live differs from the world as it was a generation ago. As they strive to re-create social structures and fulfill kinship obligations, they find that the changing context requires new strategies and initiatives. For example, people in Naeaegama now balance the need for migrant remittances against the necessity to have someone take care of elders and children. Who has access to well-paid jobs, and where in the global economy are those jobs now located? What government policies regulate the movement of people and money around the globe, and how have they changed recently (M. Gamburd 2020b)? These structures influence whether people engage in tried-and-true forms of social reproduction or whether they innovate instead. As people pursue their projects, they not only follow but also transform the rules of the serious game of life. Adversity and opportunity prompt people to modify ideals and adjust social structures to fit the possibilities of the moment. Social structures constrain what actors can do, but reciprocally as actors adapt to new contexts, they change the structures around them (Sahlins 1981; Williams 1977). Practice theorists and social constructionists thus focus on the importance of practice, noting the significance of ordinary people’s everyday activities in both reproducing and transforming social norms and values.

Because of the wide margins within which actors innovate, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish ordinary variation from emerging trends in social structures. Practice theorists thus emphasize the importance of history. A longitudinal perspective can reveal the results of numerous serious games played out through time, illuminating in particular how the rules of the games have changed. Ethnographic research investigates the meaning and nature of everyday practices, and long-term fieldwork can bring to light how those practices change over time.

Labor Migration and the Demographic Shift

International labor migration forms a key backdrop for thinking about aging in Naeaegama. Although women in the Global North have entered the workforce in large numbers, they remain largely responsible for arranging care for members of their families. And as populations age in developed nations, a larger percentage of people requires care. The demand for elder care is likely to continue to grow in the United States, Japan, and the European Union as neoliberal state policies in labor-receiving countries continue to privatize care work, and women in those countries turn to market proxies to fulfill their own filial duties. Often these proxies are women from minority or migrant populations.³ Similarly, demand for domestic servants remains strong in the Persian Gulf. For example, 90 percent of households in Kuwait employed at least one domestic servant in the late 2000s (Ahmad 2010, 27). Poor countries in the Global South, such as Sri Lanka, export labor to meet the international care deficit. Along with millions of other women, Sri Lanka’s transnational domestic workers currently fulfill care needs around the world.⁴

Sri Lanka depends on migrant remittances for foreign exchange. In 2010 (the last year for which statistics on the total stock of migrants abroad were available at the time of this writing), migrants made up a little less than 10 percent of Sri Lanka’s 20 million population and over 20 percent of the country’s total labor force (SLBFE 2014, 131). The Sri Lankan Bureau of Foreign Employment (SLBFE), the government’s main administrative body regulating labor migration, estimates that 500,000 Sri Lankans (both male and female) worked abroad in 1994; the number doubled to 1 million in 2003 and, by 2010, had increased to nearly 2 million (SLBFE 2014, 131). The number likely has continued to rise. In 2017, 85 percent of Sri Lanka’s migrants went to the Gulf Cooperation Council countries in the Persian Gulf (SLBFE 2018). In 2015, total remittances from migrant workers abroad amounted to US$5.4 billion; 54 percent of this amount, US$2.9 billion, came from the Gulf (SLBFE 2016, 83). In generating foreign earnings, migrants’ private remittances accounted for two-thirds of the country’s total, more than the export of garments, tea, and coconut products combined (SLBFE 2016, 84).

Unlike in other South Asian countries, in Sri Lanka, women make up a significant portion of the transnational labor migrants. In the mid-1990s, roughly 75 percent of the labor migrants were women (SLBFE 2017, 1). In 2008, the percentage of women fell below 50 percent, due mainly to an increase in male migration (SLBFE 2017, 1). A 2013 government policy banning migration of women with children under the age of 5 has sharply reduced migration of women through sanctioned Bureau processes, although studies suggest that women continue to migrate through less official channels (Weeraratne 2014). By 2016, women accounted for only 34 percent of migrant departures (SLBFE 2017, 1).

As I have written about in other publications, Naeaegama residents have for many years participated in transnational migration (M. Gamburd 1995, 2000, 2005). In 2009, about 10 percent of Naeaegama residents had experience working abroad, and roughly 50 percent of the village households had, or had had, at least one person abroad. Three-quarters of these migrants were female. Reflecting national trends, most female migrants from Naeaegama came from the 20- to 45-year age range, had six to nine years of schooling, were married and had two or more children, and had not otherwise worked outside the home (Eelens, Mook, and Schampers 1992; Weerakoon 1998, 102). Data from Naeaegama corroborate studies that suggest that each migrant woman supports an average of four to five members of her family (Weerakoon 1998, 109; Jayaweera, Dias, and Wanasundera 2002, 1).

Labor migration is lucrative. In 2015, transnational domestic workers from Naeaegama earned an average of US$150–250 a month while abroad. Although this amount seems paltry on an international scale, it compares well to local wages. The median monthly per capital income for Sri Lanka was Rs. 7,881 in 2012–2013 (Department of Census and Statistics 2015, 9), or about US$62. This means that a housemaid could earn abroad between 2.5 and 4 times what she (or anyone else working in a working-class family) could earn in Sri Lanka and that a housemaid’s wages equaled or exceed the wages earned by most village