Money That Burns Like Oil: A Sri Lankan Cultural Logic of Morality and Agency

New labor opportunities have drawn Sri Lankan women to work as domestic servants in the Middle East. Many migrants complain that their remittances "burn like oil," disappearing without a trace. The gendered discourse on burning remittances both draws on and contradicts an older cultural system that fetishizes money. The emerging logic provides symbolic resources for women to spend their remittances on advancements for the nuclear family, distancing themselves from other kin. (Migration, remittances, fetishism, Sri Lanka, Middle East) ********** During an interview in May 2000, Nilani, who had worked for five years as a domestic servant in the Middle East, passionately remarked, "The money you earn abroad--you have to use it right away, or it will just disappear. That money burns like oil!" She explained that because employers begrudged paying their servants' wages, their ill will and dislike tainted the housemaid's money. Many such Sri Lankan labor migrants felt that unless a woman and her family used the money quickly, something bad would happen to take it away from them. Since the early 1980s, labor migration from Sri Lanka has burgeoned, reaching nearly one million individuals in 2002 (SLBFE 2003). In 2003, the Sri Lankan Bureau of Foreign Employment (SLBFE) estimated that 680,000 women were working abroad, over 80 per cent of them as housemaids in the Middle East (SLBFE 2003). (2) For the past dozen years, I have conducted ethnographic fieldwork in the village of Naeaegama, situated near the main coastal highway in southern Sri Lanka. (3) Many married and some unmarried women from Naeaegama go abroad repeatedly on two-year contracts, leaving behind husbands, children, and other family members, to whom they remit money. Over the years, the Sri Lankan government has grown increasingly dependent on labor migration to relieve local unemployment and bring in much-needed foreign exchange. Consequently, individuals, communities, and political institutions develop ever-more intricate and binding ties to the global economy (Gamburd 2003). As they pursue these labor opportunities, Naeaegama women attribute new sorts of agentive force to fate, emotions, and money. Local people approach the phenomenon of burning remittances with degrees of literalness, ranging from a metaphoric sense of alienation (as if the worker's social circumstances took away her control over her wages) to an attribution of lifelike power and agency to the money itself. Migrants and their families currently use discourses about the agency of money (both metaphoric and fetishized) to justify new financial strategies and decrease their obligations to distant kin. An older discourse about exchange correlates with a local social structure of extended family solidarity, which provides social insurance but levels out individual advancement. The emerging discourse about exchange retains many of the social and moral components of the older system, including an attribution of agency to money and emotions, but changes several key elements. The new discourse supports emerging financial practices oriented to the advancement of the nuclear family. This essay explores the shifts in social and moral norms embedded in emerging local views of agency. A spirited debate in the literature focuses on how integration into the international economy influences social relations. Few disagree that gender roles and family structures change in the wake of new economic opportunities and challenges (Fernandez-Kelly 1983:177-94; Harrison 1997; Constable 1997:vii-xiv, 17-39). Some scholars suggest that boundless human inventiveness will create coherent lived realities out of the chaos of postcolonial, postmodern society (Anderson 1994; Clifford 1994; Gupta 1992). Others feel that the capitalist market will generate an inauthentic or hyperreal culture crafted for the tourist gaze, or even a homogenized world free of local color (Garnham 1993; see also Crain 1996; Volkman 1990). …