Graduate Student, Anthropology
The New School University, Graduate Program for International Affairs
About
In 2010 I completed a year of fieldwork in Sri Lanka. My research is based in the town of Negombo, 30 miles north of the capital along the Indian Ocean coast. My work there focuses on several Catholic fishing villages where people have been moving away -for the last thirty years- from the fishing industry to embark on migrant labor to Italy.
Probably the most important question that guides my ethnographic work is why do people value and cherish so much the idea of return. Many successful migrant families in Italy will go to great extents to bring their children back to Sri Lanka so that they can grow up and be educated in their communities. The ethical value of such a project seems to override any rational calculation concerning the financial well-being of their families. I explore these questions through the lens of cosmopolitanism, religious identity and the anthropology of morality.
