Stitching Identities in a Free Trade Zone: Gender and Politics in Sri Lanka
Anthropologist Sandya Hewamanne spent time in a Sri Lankan free trade zone (FTZ) working and living among the workers to learn about their lives. "They were poor women from rural areas," Hewamanne writes, "who migrated to do garment work in transnational factories of a global assembly line. Their difficult work routines and sad living conditions have been examined in detail. When I was with them I often wondered whether anyone noticed the smiles, winks, smirks, gestures, tones of voice, the...
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By analyzing how Sri Lankan free trade zone factory workers claim political subjectivity and revealing a vibrant subaltern political universe where they can express alternative perspectives, Stitching Identities in a Free Trade Zone challenges conventional notions about marginalized women at the bottom of the global economy.
1 Introduction 12 Nation, Modernity, and Female Morality 213 On the Shop Floor 524 Loving Daughters and Politically Active Workers 925 Politics of Everyday Life 1346 Performing Disrespectability 1787 FTZ Clothes and Home Clothes 2148 Made in Sri Lanka: Globalization and the Politics of Location 225Epilogue: Cautious Voices 234Notes 249Bibliography 267Index 275Acknowledgments 285
\ From the Publisher"A first-rate ethnography that will appeal not only to professional social scientists but to everyone concerned about the impact of global capitalism on the lives of ordinary people, especially women in the developing world."—Gananath Obeyesekere, Princeton University\ "Hewamanne succeeds in meeting her primary objective, which is to tell us the story of these women in a way that we can see and partially apprehend the complexity of their lives through her writing. Few ethnographies are as passionate, confident, intimate, and evocative as this one."—American Ethnologist\ \ \
