What do you think?
Rate this book
Juki Girls, Good Girls: Gender and Cultural Politics in Sri Lanka's Global Garment Industry
When a government program brought garment factories to rural Sri Lanka, women workers found themselves caught between the pressures of a globalizing economy and societal expectations that villages are sanctuaries of tradition. These women learned quickly to resist the characterization of "Juki girls"―female garment workers already established in the urban sector―as vulgar and deracinated, instead asserting that they were "good girls" who could embody the nation's highest ideals of femininity. Caitrin Lynch shows how contemporary Sri Lankan women navigate a complex web of political, cultural, and socioeconomic forces. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research conducted inside export-oriented garment factories and a close examination of national policies intended to ease the way for globalization, Lynch details precisely how gender, nationalism, and globalization influence everyday life in Sri Lanka.
This book includes autobiographical essays by garment workers about their efforts to attain the benefits of being seen as "good" while simultaneously expanding the definition of what sort of behavior constitutes appropriate conduct. These village garment workers struggled to reconcile the role thrust upon them as symbols of national progress with the negative public perception of factory workers. Lynch provides the context needed to appreciate the paradoxes that globalization creates while painting a sympathetic portrait of the individuals whose life stories appear in this book.
This book includes autobiographical essays by garment workers about their efforts to attain the benefits of being seen as "good" while simultaneously expanding the definition of what sort of behavior constitutes appropriate conduct. These village garment workers struggled to reconcile the role thrust upon them as symbols of national progress with the negative public perception of factory workers. Lynch provides the context needed to appreciate the paradoxes that globalization creates while painting a sympathetic portrait of the individuals whose life stories appear in this book.
296 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2007
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
March 11, 2017
"They creatively fashioned a place where they could be Good girls who were also garment workers. This was not a simple project. Never questioning their deep commitments to their nation, they nevertheless endeavored to make sense of their own ambivalent feelings about their work and to reconcile their pride in the work they did with the stigma attached to it."
(p.240, emphasis mine. Reconciling pride with stigma really resonates with my math-geeky, accordion-playing self; and I'm sure it hits home with other folks in many different ways.)
I had the good fortune to be Caitrin Lynch's student at Olin, and I spent a summer helping to proofread, edit drafts, fill in references, etc. But I had never read the final published version before coming back to it now, a decade later. I didn't continue studying anthropology, so it's hard for me to critique it deeply at a professional level, but I do think it came together quite well.
In a way, it's been timely to read this during & right after the 2016 US election, which focused so much on politicians' roles in creating/sustaining/destroying manufacturing jobs in America, and on how the people keeping/losing those jobs are trying to maintain/reframe their identities. The USA is not always so different from "developing" countries after all! And when reading the parts about how "elite" projects don't always work out as the elites intend, it's hard not to read it as a warning to Democratic leaders against seeming distant and living in an echo chamber...
I *also* can't help relating it to the discussion in Statistics about the "new" fields of Data Science and Machine Learning, and who's shaping the discourse, and how we are being shaped by it. As on p.29, "subjects who are 'forced' to deal with globalization often try to preserve local distinctiveness." Here, our "old" field of Statistics is being forcibly challenged by these newcomers, so we're trying to figure out how (and whether?) we are still distinct and relevant.
Notes to self:
* p.5: "Often politicians, teachers, and professionals take it upon themselves to shape the way others in their society will understand change. But that does not mean that these world-making projects are always achieved in the ways in which the elites intend. Elite projects must be understood and made sense of by people in their daily lives and social worlds."
* p.25: "The term localization here means both how local people make something locally meaningful out of the global, and in so doing often change the global, and how nonlocals embed their global processes and products in local culture."
* p.28: We grumble about how globalization makes the world uniform, but it's not that simple.
"The end goal is the same for investors and managers throughout the world: they all want to shop the order on time and at minimal expense. But what are the means through which production is realized in specific locales? ... 'Wherever workers enter into production, they bring with them their needs for subsistence, the needs of their families, their commitments to other activities outside the workplace, and their ideas of what is right and fair. Because of this, in every site where production touches down, it is instantiated differently. It must work through local institutions and establish the necessary web of social relationships to get the job done.'"
Also sounds like advice that some election-campaign canvassers missed this year...
* p.33: reference to concept of "community of practice" which I want to read more about. As you start a new career, it's not just about you alone; it's about how you become a member of the community of people in/around that career. Also on...
* p.39: "Learning is not simply the acquisition of a static corpus of knowledge. It is rather a social activity and practice through which participants, who are equipped with locally situated understandings of the world, invent and reinvent what constitutes knowledge about that world. ...learning entails the construction of identities within these social relations."
* p.34: "Today many scholars agree that there has long been a common misrepresentation of Third World women as mere victims and not as agents who have motivations for acting as they do... Muslim women who wear headscarves, women who practice female 'circumcision,' or even women whose lifelong aspirations are to be good wives and mothers... We thus get a one-dimensional view of women as victims, but we also need to have an understanding of the way those women attempt to subvert their circumstances."
And closely related:
* p.36: "...how to understand agency when the subjects of research are not enacting what appears to the researcher to be obvious 'resistance.' She asks: What if we think of agency not as a synonym for resistance to domination, but as 'a capacity for action that historically specific relations of subordination enable and create'...? We would then see agency not only in acts that result in progressive change but also in those that aim for continuity and stability."
* p.47: "Village women were thus able to use the idea that they are traditional, docile, and controlled to their advantage within the work environment... using traditional expectations in response to capitalist discipline. This conscious and at times not-so-conscious mobilization of tradition... provides 'an effective tool for modern people to resist the increasingly 'secular, instrumental and objectified... techniques of management and control' exercised by 'modern bureaucracies, large scale capitalist corporations, and the nation-state''..."
That is, tradition isn't just the things we've always done. It's a set of expectations that we can use to our advantage, and a way of framing our actions and arguments, for actively responding to cold hard global/capitalist/national institutions.
But it's not only the common folk who call on tradition to resist The Man. Politicians can also call on tradition to push The Man's own agenda:
* p.56: "President Premadasa was quite careful to cast the program as not just an economic panacea but as a resolution to perceived contradictions between economic development and cultural traditions... Sri Lankans have been concerned that economic liberalization was bringing with it not only econonomic exploitation by the West but also cultural imperialism and homogenizations..."
* p.66-67: Sometimes Premadasa pushed the program as a way to help the educated unemployed; other times, as a way to help the poor regardless of education level. These seem like quite different targets. Was one of them primary over the other? How did it pan out, in practice?
* p.72: "E.P. Thompson wrote a pathbreaking essay in 1967 on the dependence of the Industrial Revolution on a revolution in the European understanding of time. Factory workers must arrive at a uniform time for a production line to function properly, and the laborers and managers must stick to the buyers' production schedules."
So what was "time" like for Europeans before that?
Also, p.73-74 notes that "Many Sri Lankans wear watches, but often they do not keep time." They're symbols of modernity, not timepieces as such.
* p.82-83: "the village is both alluring and repulsive for urban people, who will say it is the locus of the real Sri Lanka, but also that rural people are 'dirty, ignorant, stupid, inarticulate and superstitious." ... villages are 'at once supposedly the home of all that the townsman would want to cherish and much that he would like to deny.'"
This rings true here in the US too!
* p.101: "Contemporary Sri Lankans value sexual chastity and virginity at marriage as Sinhala Buddhist norms, when these are in fact derived from Victorian norms, for precolonial Sinhalas did not have such restrictions on women's sexuality."
So what *were* the standards for "good"/"pure" women? Or was it just not a thing before the British came?
* p.128: Foucault's panopticon metaphor: "because prisoners... do not know whether or not they are being watched (since the guards could be looking anywhere) but assume they must be, they end up monitoring themselves."
I'm currently in grad school, which often feels like a self-inflicted panopticon :)
* p.141: Yes, the factories do bring jobs (and associated benefits) to the rural poor, but dang it, they way investors talk about it is so icky:
"people in the city... they have been to eight or nine factories. They are used to various indisciplines, unionism, all that type of thing. And say when you ask for a certain target, they will say 'no we will give only half that,' thinking that management will increase it tomorrow. But these [village] folks, that was, was like a virgin situation where we could train them into the concepts that we believe were right."
Gross. Remember, creating jobs is a coldly-calculated business decision, not just a respectful humanitarian kind thing to do...
* p.149: "By emphasizing their respectability over that of Colombo [big city] factory workers, they could then gain the social space to do some things not normally allowed to village women. It was as if they were claiming, 'Look, we're obviously good, so, please can we just...' (have a boyfriend, wear a little makeup, go on trips with friends)."
Another angle on an earlier note. Instead of using tradition to fight back against modernity, take one set of traditional mores, and use them to justify your right to bend other traditional rules & partake of modernity.
* p.156: "the content of a message is 'not simply found in that message but is constructed by an audience interacting with that message.'"
This is in the context of romance-novel readers or teledrama viewers. But it's also true more broadly. The message is whatever we can constructively collaboratively agree it is.
* p.162-3: "...she said that... it would have been better if she were at home spending more time with her daughter, but for financial reasons she had to work. She told me, 'I'm sad about not being with her. My son is also small. I really feel sad. When I have to work at night I cry and cry and stay on working. It can't be helped. I have to stay at work. But when that happens I often cry. When I am not allowed to go home I somehow manage to work---but only after weeping.'"
We are so damn lucky in my family's job/financial situation, and in our ability to support our kids and spend time with them!
* p.193-195: Politicians praised the factories' influence on villagers' "development." They were cleaner, eating better, saving money, etc. But there were complaints too, from politicians and parents and others: the girls are spending money frivolously, dressing improperly, etc. For the workers themselves, they did want and value development---but on their own terms, not purely the politicians' or parents' terms.
* p.205-206: Talks about Ford's factory paternalism / welfare capitalism: boost productivity by monitoring (and meddling in) outside-of-work behavior, building company cafeterias, sponsoring sports leagues... Now there's a new generation of this in tech offices, the Googles and Facebooks of today. Is it any different from similar things in past decades? I have to admit I'm creeped out by the drink-the-koolaid aura, even with simple things like "free" meals at the company cafe; nothing's free; they're just trying to buy my loyalty with all these tricks...
* p.215: "it is through constant and recurring arguments that a people establish and perpetuate the shared, usually implicit assumptions that constitute their tradition and that make it possible for them to understand how they disagree with one another."
Sounds just like my experience raising a toddler :) Keep hammering away at the same arguments until you get to a stable point where everyone's expectations are clear. Don't expect immediate success or smooth communication in a new situation!
* p.226: Talks about an argument that started with legitimate worker grievances about labor issues, but soon turned on its head into villagers complaining about one of the critics. "The sexual retorts turned the conversation into a means of talking about something other than the dynamics of capital and labor. What mattered was that women were acting up..." Distract and deflect! Happens all the time.
* p.249: "...the very concept of tradition only emerged in modernity. ...people turn to 'tradition' in their struggles to make sense of social change and to preserve 'self-respect, autonomy, and a life with meaning' ... 'a tool for resisting modern forms of rationalized power.'" But then how did past generations respond to social change, before having this idea of "tradition"? Or was change so slow it didn't need a response, or so traumatic no response could be made?
* p.250: "When factory labor first emerged in England, peasants had to be made into workers... through the use of discipline systems that rewarded and penalized workers."
But today our politicians glorify the "disciplined" hardworking farmers of America's heartland, contrasted with those lazy city slickers. How were rural farmers/peasants viewed back then?
(p.240, emphasis mine. Reconciling pride with stigma really resonates with my math-geeky, accordion-playing self; and I'm sure it hits home with other folks in many different ways.)
I had the good fortune to be Caitrin Lynch's student at Olin, and I spent a summer helping to proofread, edit drafts, fill in references, etc. But I had never read the final published version before coming back to it now, a decade later. I didn't continue studying anthropology, so it's hard for me to critique it deeply at a professional level, but I do think it came together quite well.
In a way, it's been timely to read this during & right after the 2016 US election, which focused so much on politicians' roles in creating/sustaining/destroying manufacturing jobs in America, and on how the people keeping/losing those jobs are trying to maintain/reframe their identities. The USA is not always so different from "developing" countries after all! And when reading the parts about how "elite" projects don't always work out as the elites intend, it's hard not to read it as a warning to Democratic leaders against seeming distant and living in an echo chamber...
I *also* can't help relating it to the discussion in Statistics about the "new" fields of Data Science and Machine Learning, and who's shaping the discourse, and how we are being shaped by it. As on p.29, "subjects who are 'forced' to deal with globalization often try to preserve local distinctiveness." Here, our "old" field of Statistics is being forcibly challenged by these newcomers, so we're trying to figure out how (and whether?) we are still distinct and relevant.
Notes to self:
* p.5: "Often politicians, teachers, and professionals take it upon themselves to shape the way others in their society will understand change. But that does not mean that these world-making projects are always achieved in the ways in which the elites intend. Elite projects must be understood and made sense of by people in their daily lives and social worlds."
* p.25: "The term localization here means both how local people make something locally meaningful out of the global, and in so doing often change the global, and how nonlocals embed their global processes and products in local culture."
* p.28: We grumble about how globalization makes the world uniform, but it's not that simple.
"The end goal is the same for investors and managers throughout the world: they all want to shop the order on time and at minimal expense. But what are the means through which production is realized in specific locales? ... 'Wherever workers enter into production, they bring with them their needs for subsistence, the needs of their families, their commitments to other activities outside the workplace, and their ideas of what is right and fair. Because of this, in every site where production touches down, it is instantiated differently. It must work through local institutions and establish the necessary web of social relationships to get the job done.'"
Also sounds like advice that some election-campaign canvassers missed this year...
* p.33: reference to concept of "community of practice" which I want to read more about. As you start a new career, it's not just about you alone; it's about how you become a member of the community of people in/around that career. Also on...
* p.39: "Learning is not simply the acquisition of a static corpus of knowledge. It is rather a social activity and practice through which participants, who are equipped with locally situated understandings of the world, invent and reinvent what constitutes knowledge about that world. ...learning entails the construction of identities within these social relations."
* p.34: "Today many scholars agree that there has long been a common misrepresentation of Third World women as mere victims and not as agents who have motivations for acting as they do... Muslim women who wear headscarves, women who practice female 'circumcision,' or even women whose lifelong aspirations are to be good wives and mothers... We thus get a one-dimensional view of women as victims, but we also need to have an understanding of the way those women attempt to subvert their circumstances."
And closely related:
* p.36: "...how to understand agency when the subjects of research are not enacting what appears to the researcher to be obvious 'resistance.' She asks: What if we think of agency not as a synonym for resistance to domination, but as 'a capacity for action that historically specific relations of subordination enable and create'...? We would then see agency not only in acts that result in progressive change but also in those that aim for continuity and stability."
* p.47: "Village women were thus able to use the idea that they are traditional, docile, and controlled to their advantage within the work environment... using traditional expectations in response to capitalist discipline. This conscious and at times not-so-conscious mobilization of tradition... provides 'an effective tool for modern people to resist the increasingly 'secular, instrumental and objectified... techniques of management and control' exercised by 'modern bureaucracies, large scale capitalist corporations, and the nation-state''..."
That is, tradition isn't just the things we've always done. It's a set of expectations that we can use to our advantage, and a way of framing our actions and arguments, for actively responding to cold hard global/capitalist/national institutions.
But it's not only the common folk who call on tradition to resist The Man. Politicians can also call on tradition to push The Man's own agenda:
* p.56: "President Premadasa was quite careful to cast the program as not just an economic panacea but as a resolution to perceived contradictions between economic development and cultural traditions... Sri Lankans have been concerned that economic liberalization was bringing with it not only econonomic exploitation by the West but also cultural imperialism and homogenizations..."
* p.66-67: Sometimes Premadasa pushed the program as a way to help the educated unemployed; other times, as a way to help the poor regardless of education level. These seem like quite different targets. Was one of them primary over the other? How did it pan out, in practice?
* p.72: "E.P. Thompson wrote a pathbreaking essay in 1967 on the dependence of the Industrial Revolution on a revolution in the European understanding of time. Factory workers must arrive at a uniform time for a production line to function properly, and the laborers and managers must stick to the buyers' production schedules."
So what was "time" like for Europeans before that?
Also, p.73-74 notes that "Many Sri Lankans wear watches, but often they do not keep time." They're symbols of modernity, not timepieces as such.
* p.82-83: "the village is both alluring and repulsive for urban people, who will say it is the locus of the real Sri Lanka, but also that rural people are 'dirty, ignorant, stupid, inarticulate and superstitious." ... villages are 'at once supposedly the home of all that the townsman would want to cherish and much that he would like to deny.'"
This rings true here in the US too!
* p.101: "Contemporary Sri Lankans value sexual chastity and virginity at marriage as Sinhala Buddhist norms, when these are in fact derived from Victorian norms, for precolonial Sinhalas did not have such restrictions on women's sexuality."
So what *were* the standards for "good"/"pure" women? Or was it just not a thing before the British came?
* p.128: Foucault's panopticon metaphor: "because prisoners... do not know whether or not they are being watched (since the guards could be looking anywhere) but assume they must be, they end up monitoring themselves."
I'm currently in grad school, which often feels like a self-inflicted panopticon :)
* p.141: Yes, the factories do bring jobs (and associated benefits) to the rural poor, but dang it, they way investors talk about it is so icky:
"people in the city... they have been to eight or nine factories. They are used to various indisciplines, unionism, all that type of thing. And say when you ask for a certain target, they will say 'no we will give only half that,' thinking that management will increase it tomorrow. But these [village] folks, that was, was like a virgin situation where we could train them into the concepts that we believe were right."
Gross. Remember, creating jobs is a coldly-calculated business decision, not just a respectful humanitarian kind thing to do...
* p.149: "By emphasizing their respectability over that of Colombo [big city] factory workers, they could then gain the social space to do some things not normally allowed to village women. It was as if they were claiming, 'Look, we're obviously good, so, please can we just...' (have a boyfriend, wear a little makeup, go on trips with friends)."
Another angle on an earlier note. Instead of using tradition to fight back against modernity, take one set of traditional mores, and use them to justify your right to bend other traditional rules & partake of modernity.
* p.156: "the content of a message is 'not simply found in that message but is constructed by an audience interacting with that message.'"
This is in the context of romance-novel readers or teledrama viewers. But it's also true more broadly. The message is whatever we can constructively collaboratively agree it is.
* p.162-3: "...she said that... it would have been better if she were at home spending more time with her daughter, but for financial reasons she had to work. She told me, 'I'm sad about not being with her. My son is also small. I really feel sad. When I have to work at night I cry and cry and stay on working. It can't be helped. I have to stay at work. But when that happens I often cry. When I am not allowed to go home I somehow manage to work---but only after weeping.'"
We are so damn lucky in my family's job/financial situation, and in our ability to support our kids and spend time with them!
* p.193-195: Politicians praised the factories' influence on villagers' "development." They were cleaner, eating better, saving money, etc. But there were complaints too, from politicians and parents and others: the girls are spending money frivolously, dressing improperly, etc. For the workers themselves, they did want and value development---but on their own terms, not purely the politicians' or parents' terms.
* p.205-206: Talks about Ford's factory paternalism / welfare capitalism: boost productivity by monitoring (and meddling in) outside-of-work behavior, building company cafeterias, sponsoring sports leagues... Now there's a new generation of this in tech offices, the Googles and Facebooks of today. Is it any different from similar things in past decades? I have to admit I'm creeped out by the drink-the-koolaid aura, even with simple things like "free" meals at the company cafe; nothing's free; they're just trying to buy my loyalty with all these tricks...
* p.215: "it is through constant and recurring arguments that a people establish and perpetuate the shared, usually implicit assumptions that constitute their tradition and that make it possible for them to understand how they disagree with one another."
Sounds just like my experience raising a toddler :) Keep hammering away at the same arguments until you get to a stable point where everyone's expectations are clear. Don't expect immediate success or smooth communication in a new situation!
* p.226: Talks about an argument that started with legitimate worker grievances about labor issues, but soon turned on its head into villagers complaining about one of the critics. "The sexual retorts turned the conversation into a means of talking about something other than the dynamics of capital and labor. What mattered was that women were acting up..." Distract and deflect! Happens all the time.
* p.249: "...the very concept of tradition only emerged in modernity. ...people turn to 'tradition' in their struggles to make sense of social change and to preserve 'self-respect, autonomy, and a life with meaning' ... 'a tool for resisting modern forms of rationalized power.'" But then how did past generations respond to social change, before having this idea of "tradition"? Or was change so slow it didn't need a response, or so traumatic no response could be made?
* p.250: "When factory labor first emerged in England, peasants had to be made into workers... through the use of discipline systems that rewarded and penalized workers."
But today our politicians glorify the "disciplined" hardworking farmers of America's heartland, contrasted with those lazy city slickers. How were rural farmers/peasants viewed back then?
March 21, 2008
Ethnography of garment workers in Sri Lanka...
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews