Middle-Class Japanese Housewives and the Experience of Transnational Mobility

Sawa Kurotani

The otherwise abstract notion of gurobaruka, or "globalization," often becomes concrete reality to middle-class Japanese families in the form of a job assignment in the United States and other foreign locations. Almost all Japanese workers and managers who are sent out on these foreign assignments are men; therefore, when middle-class Japanese women talk about a possibility of temporary migration to a foreign country "on a job assignment," they are usually referring to their husbands.1 But they also know that, as wives and mothers, they are expected to play a major role during this corporate-driven migration: to create and maintain "Japanese" homes away from home and make a foreign country a livable place for their families. This domestic work of expatriate Japanese wives in the context of Japanese transnational capitalism is the focus of my current discussion. I aim to contribute to the growing body of anthropological literature on global movement and travel in three particular areas. First, I focus on the families of highly mobile transnational professionals whose transnational experiences have received relatively little anthropological attention thus far (cf., Hannerz 1998; Ribeiro 1994; White 1992; Wulff 1998). If the experience of transnationality is class-specific, the mobility practices of those who are relatively affluent and privileged are expected to differ significantly from those who are not — labor migrants and refugees, for example (Friedman 1999). Their mobility practices are often flexible and wide-ranging, utilizing the material resources and privilege granted to many in this category of sojourner/migrants, which defy easy categorization. Somewhere between "sojourning" and "migrating," the study of transnationally mobile Japanese corporate families will shed new light on the increasingly flexible mobility practices and identity formation in the late capitalist world.

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Living in a Bubble

Expatriates' Transnational Spaces

Meike Fechter

It is a cage, cocoon and cradle.
—Former diplomat's spouse on her life abroad with the British Diplomatic Service

Global flows and boundaries
The introductory quote brings to mind the experiences of a group often overlooked in migration discourses: those of privileged mobile professionals such as diplomats or corporate expatriates. It evokes the peculiar spaces that they create and inhabit during their time abroad, which are expressed in metaphors like the "cocoon" or "bubble." In this chapter, I want to explore these spaces and the associated senses of boundedness that often pervade their lives, and consider its implications for notions of transnational spaces more generally.

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Globalization through "Weak Ties"

A Study of Transnational Networks among Mobile Professionals1

Vered Amit

Network Analysis Then and Now
For a discipline such as anthropology that has traditionally anchored its investigations in the observation of day-to-day interactions among small groups, contemporary efforts to examine globalizing processes can pose special problems of definition and scale. But as Alan Smart has noted in a recent article, these are problems that had first been encountered in the early struggles of urban anthropologists to position themselves as ethnographers in large, dense metropolitan settlements (1999: 60). Smart locates these struggles within a primarily methodological challenge of balancing holism and participant observation within these complex urban contexts, a difficulty even more exacerbated when anthropologists had to "cope with the further shock that cities are not themselves contained units, but are parts of regional, national and global systems" (ibid: 61). In response to this methodological problem, Smart proposes the reinvigoration of network analysis, an approach that achieved considerable prominence in the concerted movement between the 1950s and the 1970s to conduct anthropological fieldwork in urban settings.2 In this essay, I want to take up Alan Smart's call for a return to network analysis both for the general anthropological effort at charting transnational relationships and interactions as well as for my own study of a particular set of peripatetic professionals. However drawing on some useful lessons from the past, I want to reorient this renewal away from network-as-method to network-as-paradigm.

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Traveling Images, Lives on Location

Cinematographers in the Film Industry

Cathy Greenhalgh

Introduction
In this chapter I examine the logistical challenges, identifications, and professional expectations that characterize the lives of highly mobile featurefilm cinematographers1. The cinematographer, or director of photography, is a key collaborator with the director, (along with the producer, production designer, editor, and sound designer). He or she "choreographs" the crew in the organization of bodies and technology on location or set, framing, lighting, and moving the camera within the director's "vision" of the film.

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Privileged Travelers?

Migration Narratives in Families of Middle-Class Caribbean Background

Karen Fog Olwig

Introduction
Migration studies have been criticized in recent years for focusing too narrowly on lower-class population movements in search of economic opportunities. This has led to questioning of the relevance of the conceptual framework and theoretical analysis, developed within this scholarship, for research on the movements of more privileged migrants. This chapter argues that class does not refer solely to a group of people who share a certain social and economic position in society. It is also a cultural category that concerns social as well as economic aspects of the livelihoods deemed proper within the middle layers of a society. Through an analysis of life stories related by individuals of two middle-class family networks who have engaged in extensive migratory movements to North America, Europe, and within the Caribbean, the chapter demonstrates how, in a Caribbean context, a middle-class livelihood is closely connected with a colonial European oriented attitude to education, and an associated "cultured," or respectable, lifestyle. For this reason, geographic mobility to places of learning within the Caribbean and abroad, and the maintaining of a lifestyle believed to be consummate with middle-class status, has been an integral aspect of life among migrants of Caribbean middle-class background. The migrant family members' life-story narratives therefore are not merely accounts of movements in time and space, but also foundational stories that seek to assert the rightful place in society that these people wish to establish. This points to the importance of critically examining the ways in which categories employed in migration research may attain particular meaning within the sociocultural contexts in which migration takes place.

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How Privileged Are They?

Middle-Class Brazilian Immigrants in Lisbon

Angela Torresan

During the last two decades of the twentieth century there was an unprecedented shift in the profile of international migration from Brazil. The early influx of migrants from Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, which intensified toward the end of the nineteenth and into the first part of the twentieth century, had reversed in accordance with a worldwide change in the general postcolonial pattern of population movement. At first, in the 1970s, there was the uncelebrated but voluminous crossing of about half a million Brazilian agricultural workers back and forth across the borders of neighboring countries (Sprandel 1992). By the early 1980s, a more conspicuous movement was taking place as diverse sectors of the middle class around the country began forging the overseas paths that others would soon follow. Today, there are an estimated two million Brazilians circulating through migratory networks that reach primarily to the United States, Japan, Western Europe, and Paraguay.1

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Imagined Communitas

Older Migrants and Aspirational Mobility

Caroline Oliver

My husband didn't die out here, it was the one thing he wanted just to get back home. Anyhow when he went back ... he said to the doctor at the beginning of September "when can I go back to Spain?" They said sorry I don't think you can go back. At the crematorium we didn't have hymns, I had "Viva España." It played all the way through, "take me back to sunny Spain." He wasn't a religious person to the extent that he would have wanted to sing "Jerusalem" and all those things that make you cry. So, when "take me back to sunny Spain" started everyone just looked at me, and I felt happy about it ... well, he would have thought, "Reenie, it's only you who would have thought of that." I had really also wanted to drive our car right back [from Spain] to the crematorium [in the U.K.], because I wanted our car up there, and its Spanish number plate — we used to drive it down from Bilbao, through Madrid, stop at a Parador at about 2:00 and the next morning we'd be down here by 12:00 — but my son went "oh no mother, this is one time when you can't."

Doreen, an eighty-one year old Scottish woman told me this account while sitting outside drinking coffee in Easter time in the pleasant surroundings of a town on the Costa del Sol. Having retired to Spain some thirteen years earlier with her husband, and now five years after his death, she was on the verge of moving "home" — to the south of England to be near her family. Her children were pleased she was returning and her young granddaughter was particularly excited at the prospect of having "Nannie Spain" back, the one who "kisses on two cheeks." However, Doreen's children had known better than to interfere in or influence her decision, more accustomed as they were to looking in their diaries to find out where on the globe their parents were at that moment. The year Doreen's husband died, the couple had only shortly returned from a cruise around Alaska, and at the time of our conversation she was excitedly planning a cruise in Australia. For Doreen's part, her arrival in Spain those years ago "seems like yesterday," and she described her time there as filled with exciting experiences of travel and discovery. Although she was happy to be returning to the U.K., she still maintained that she would keep traveling back and forth from Spain: "oh no, no no ... I'm not going back in that sense," she insisted in her rolling Scottish accent. For Doreen, traveling to Spain was the key, she felt, to what kept her alive.

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Privileged Time

Volunteers' Experiences At a Spiritual Educational Retreat Center in Hawai'i

Margaret C. Rodman

Kalani Oceanside Retreat is "an educational nonprofit organization that celebrates Hawaii, nature, culture and wellness."1 Located in a rural area on the big island of Hawaii, it is about an hour's drive from the town of Hilo. Molten lava flows into the sea at the end of the road to Kalani, and Hawaii Volcanoes National Park is a half-day adventure away. Kalani Honua means "harmony of heaven and earth" in Hawaiian. This is a powerful place of bare rocks, starry nights, and big surf on black-sand beaches. A tropical sensorium softens the hard edges: scarlet hibiscus, fragrant plumeria, misty rains, sweet pineapples. Hawaii is synonymous with paradise, and travel to such a destination is easily equated with privilege.
Vered Amit has organized this volume around the scope and implications of the privileged circumstances that accompany certain forms of contemporary mobility. This chapter explores privileged travel to a privileged place. The focus is neither on guests nor staff at Kalani, but on people who are in between those categories. "Resident volunteers" pay a maximum of $500 a month and work thirty hours a week for at least a three-month period at Kalani. How is time a privileged resource in this form of travel? How does travel in the context of volunteering at Kalani foster and yet limit community? What relationships manifest here between time, space, community, and capitalism? What links do volunteers posit between Hawaii as a place and their personal transformation? How do volunteers' inner journeys intersect with their real-world trips to Kalani and to similar destinations on a circuit of retreat centers?

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