Convenor
Yumiko Tokita-Tanabe
Global Collaboration Center, Osaka University
Co-convenors
Yosuke Shimazono
Global Collaboration Center, Osaka University
Haripriya Narasimhan
Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad
Abstract
This panel looks at ways in which relationships of care are reassembled in contemporary contexts of globalization. Gender, family and generational relations are often taken for granted as the sites of care-giving and care-taking. However, with the rapid movement of people transnationally and translocally due to effects of globalization, new patterns of relatedness and connectedness are emerging that both challenge and complement pre-existing notions and practices of gender, family and generational relationships. Conventional ideas of globalization and modernization tend to consider changes in gender, family and generational relations in terms of a uniform process of individuals becoming ‘free’ from the so-called traditional gender roles, family commitments and obligations to elders and extended kin. Such notions are related to the assumption of inevitable breakdown of joint families into nuclear units as one of the prominent features of modernization. Regarding generational relations, old people are often seen to be abandoned in old-age people’s homes and institutions by their children who fail in their filial duties to look after their parents due to corrupting influence of westernization. All these assumptions presuppose that globalization and modernization lead to atomization and individualization of persons resulting in and concomitant with increase in individual choices and opportunities for people previously embedded in and tied to conservative gender, family and generational relationships. In this panel, however, we aim to focus upon detailed anthropological and sociological case studies where such conventional views of globalization and modernization do not hold. People are connected transnationally, translocally, and transpersonally in new relationships of care and protection in which they are by no means isolated or alienated individuals who make consistent, context-free choices.
The panel aims to investigate how people are connected transnationally, translocally and transpersonally in new relationships of care in contexts of globalization that lead to 1) changing meanings of gender, family and generational relations in media representations as well as real-life situations; 2) outsourcing of productive and reproductive labor; 3) new medical technologies, and consider how people in these relationships balance and/or fail to balance conviviality and conflict in the various processes of reassembling of relationships of care.