Restitching Identities in Rural Sri Lanka: Gender, Neoliberalism, and the Politics of Contentment (Contemporary Ethnography) - Hardcover

Book 26 of 26: Contemporary Ethnography

Hewamanne, Sandya

 
9780812252408: Restitching Identities in Rural Sri Lanka: Gender, Neoliberalism, and the Politics of Contentment (Contemporary Ethnography)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0812252403 ISBN 13: 9780812252408
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020

Synopsis

Sandya Hewamanne's Stitching Identities in a Free Trade Zone analyzed how female factory workers in Sri Lanka's free trade zones challenged conventional notions about marginalized women at the bottom of the global economy. In Restitching Identities in Rural Sri Lanka Hewamanne now follows many of these same women to explore the ways in which they negotiate their social and economic lives once back in their home villages. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted over fifteen years, the book explores how the former free-trade-zone workers manipulate varied forms of capital—social, cultural, and monetary— to become local entrepreneurs and community leaders, while simultaneously initiating gradual changes in rural social hierarchies and gender norms.

Free trade zones introduce Sri Lankan women to neoliberal ways of fashioning selves, Hewamanne contends. Her book illustrates how varied manifestations of neoliberal attitudes within local contexts result in new articulations of what it is to be an entrepreneur as well as a good woman. By focusing on how former workers decenter neoliberal market relations while using their entrepreneurial and civic activities to reimagine social life in ways more satisfying to them and their loved ones—what the author calls a politics of contentment—the book sheds light on new political possibilities in contexts where both reproduction of neoliberal economic relations and implementation of alternatives co-exist.

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About the Author

Sandya Hewamanne is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Essex. She is the author of Sri Lanka's Global Factory Workers: (Un)Disciplined Desires and Sexual Struggles in a Post Colonial Society. Her Stitching Identities in a Free Trade Zone: Gender and Politics in Sri Lanka is also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

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Publisher
University of Pennsylvania Press
Publication date
2020
Language
English
ISBN 10 
0812252403
ISBN 13 
9780812252408
Binding
Hardcover
Number of pages
224