City, Environment, and Transnationalism in the Philippines: Reconceptualizing “the Social” from the Global South

Description

Seki presents an ethnography of uncertainty and precarity experienced by people in urban, rural, and transnational, communities in the Philippines as a case study of social protection without the possibility of a robust welfare state. He deals with topics including urban poverty, environmental degradation, and transnational migration. Throughout these chapters, Seki elaborates on the modes of security and protection that people living at the margins of global capitalism create through mobilizing their sociality and networks. He traces the emerging configuration of "the social," a collectivity and connectedness that ensures a sense of security in life among people. The social can be defined as an idea or institution, which had enabled formal and impersonal solidarity such as that which provided the underpinnings of the modern welfare states of the West during the mid-20th century. In the twenty-first century the social in this context is experiencing a fundamental reconfiguration as it faces deepening insecurity, risk, and the precariousness of the post-Welfare State or post-Fordist regime. What are the contours of the social emerging in an "unlikely place" of the Philippines amid contemporary insecurity and precariousness? A vital resource for scholars of the Philippines, and of anthropology and social policy in the Global South more widely. Cover Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Contents List of Figures List of Pictures List of Maps List of Tables Preface 1. Introduction: Towards the “Vernacular Public Sphere” in the Global South PROLOGUE TO PART I: Urban Poverty and Clientelism 2. Association Eroded? Land Tenure Programme for Slum Residents and the Clientelistic Connection 3. “Investments in Human Capital” Adrift: Conditional Cash Transfers and the Clientelistic Connection PROLOGUE TO PART II: Conservation and Emergent Community 4. A Community Disciplined: The Institutionalisation Process of Coastal Resource Management 5. Emergent Community: The Process of Contextualising the Coastal Resource Management Regime 6. Crafting Livelihood under the Neoliberal Eco-governmentality: Life History of a Visayan Fisherman PROLOGUE TO PART III: Mobility and Connectedness in Transnational Social Field 7. A Woman and the Community of Empathy: Life History of a Widow of an Overseas Migrant Worker 8. Migration as Practice of Differentiation: Focusing on the Identity of the Middle-Class Professionals 9. “The Family” in Contestation: Identity Construction of 1.5-Generation Filipino Children in the United States 10. Transient Solidarity: A Case of the Movement to Revise the “Migrant Workers and Overseas Filipino Act of 1995” 11. Conclusion Bibliography Index