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Class Identity And The International Division Of Labor: Sri Lanka's Migrant Housemaids, Michele Ruth Gamburd

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

In 1996, 408,000 Sri Lankan women, nearly 10% of the country’s working-age women, worked abroad, many of them in the oil producing countries of the Persian Gulf. In this paper I compare the influence of international migration on local hierarchies of class and gender in two villages in southern Sri Lanka: a Sinhala-speaking Buddhist village where I did my doctoral dissertation research in 1992-4, and a Tamil-speaking Muslim village where I spent some time during the summer of 1997. I discuss the challenges of using ‘class’ as a unit of analysis in a non-Western setting where gender identities, family ties, …