Patience is the key to writing impactful ethnographies: following global garment workers from the factory to the village

After winning the Cecil B Currey Award by the Association of Global South Studies, author Professor Sandya Hewamanne, Director of the Centre for Global South Studies reflects on the writing of Restitching Identities in Rural Sri Lanka: Neoliberalism and Politics of Contentment.

This book is based on fifteen years of ethnographic research among former global garment factory workers of Sri Lanka.

I first studied these women when they were working at urban Free Trade Zone factories for my doctoral dissertation (and first book). I revisited them in their villages after they left the factories and then, after they married, their husbands’ villages. I was not particularly looking to start new research, but I was struck by the way they suppressed their newly acquired sense of self once they got home and then engaged in extreme forms of social conformity for a couple of years after marriage. This was too fascinating for me to ignore.

With each visit to these workers in various parts of the island, a clear pattern emerged: the workers were negotiating advantageous positions within their affinal villages by conforming to the village's norms and building supportive social networks. For example, despite privately criticizing their in-laws and laughing at certain social norms, women did publicly follow those norms to the extent of embarrassing the non-migrant women in their communities. They knelt before their in-laws asking for blessings just to go to the grocery store two blocks down. This helped garner the love and support of their husband’s family who in turn brought their own social networks behind their daughter-in-law, which helped the entrepreneurial work along.

While working on other research projects and publications, I continued to visit these former worker friends for few years. When they started entrepreneurial activities (mostly subcontracting for their own former FTZ factories) and leveraging the economic success to become village civic leaders my main research questions for the research were formulated.

This was in 2010. I spent one year researching in 37 former workers’ villages which generated the initial data and I then undertook a 2012 residential fellowship at the National Humanities Centre. This allowed me to draft all the chapters of the book. At the end of this year, the University of Pennsylvania Press, having published my first book offered me an advance contract for this book.

But something kept me back from rushing to publication. I wanted this book to be a true longitudinal study. Furthermore, every year I visited, I saw important changes occurring. For instance, in 2013 Anusha had a thriving business of raising piglets for a Colombo meat-packing company. By the time I visited her in 2014, the village elders and the chief monk had forced her to abandon her business by condemning it as an anti-Buddhist activity. The complexities of being a rural woman entrepreneur — a new role — was not something one can understand via a two-hour interview. Women themselves did not know when things could change for them. One had to wait and see. I had another book in the works and thus had the luxury of waiting, observing, and collecting audio-visual data.

As the country went through one political economic upheaval after another, the dynamics of former worker entrepreneurial activities changed, adjusted, and evolved giving me a fuller picture of how transnational production affects women workers, their families, and rural communities and how it has the unintended outcome of changing village gender norms and social hierarchies. I think my patience in observing over so many years to capture this picture was the reason for the success of the book.

Participant observation was undertaken in workers’ marital homes — I stayed in their houses as their guest. I also took part in their story-telling circles, where village young women gathered at a former worker’s home to joke, sing songs and talk about the colourful times at the FTZ. I also used organised fun trips to scenic areas or religious places as ‘moving social spaces’ which are more open, unmoored from cultural constraints, and relaxed, providing an opportunity to gather crucial data on issues normally shrouded in silence. Video-recording the women’s village political activities also provided invaluable data that enhanced the first chapters of the book.

A few research grants also made it possible to take a research assistant with me on some trips to the villages. I was fortunate in that my research assistant was knowledgeable of rural development projects, skills upgrading, and entrepreneurial activities. She spent time with the curious family and community members, keeping them at bay which allowed me more private time with the former workers.

The book went to the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2019— a very different manuscript to the one I had drafted in 2012. I was in the process of choosing a cover photo when the COVID-19 pandemic broke out. I tried to retrieve the book from the publishing process, wanting to update it further with interesting details on how the global garment industry and its home subcontractors in Sri Lanka negotiated the impact of the global lockdown and the resultant unravelling of the global production networks. However, the manuscript was too far in the production process to be retrieved, and it was printed. In retrospect, I am now thankful for that turn of events as it has allowed me to co-edit a whole volume on the effects of the pandemic on the global garment industry.

Now that the book is written, and has won awards, have I stopped visiting my friends in their villages? Not really. I still correspond with them via WhatsApp, and the occasional greeting card, and visit them whenever possible. Wheels are turning in my head as I see them becoming mature women, and continually negotiating their life-positions in newer and more interesting ways. Aging industrial workers and the norms and peculiarities of aging and gender in South Asia may be my new academic adventure!