Sampreety Gurung

SAMPREETY GURUNG, then a graduate student at Cornell Univeristy, Ithaca, New York, was awarded funding in October 2018 to aid research on “Provisioning Life: Food and the Ethics of Care amongst Nepali Migrants in Malaysia,” supervised by Dr. Marina Welker. This ethnography studies transnational labor migration between Nepal and Malaysia and examines how Nepali men and women come to understand work and care within an un/free migrant labor regime. Despite repeated commitments by state and private agencies to remove recruitment fees, migrants continue to rely on kin-and-broker networks to find stable waged labor abroad and pay fees — often referred to as ‘laagat’ (cost) or ‘lagaani’ (investment) — that offer insurance against risks that accompany “direct” recruitment such as the likelihood of not being selected in interviews presumed to be already rigged; delays in visa processing; and inability to hold familiar individuals accountable should things go awry. Once in Malaysia, migrants continue to rely on private actors as they encounter new freedoms and challenges. From raising funds for injuries to organizing credit groups to navigating state bureaucracies — be it for labor grievances, legalization, making passports or returning home — migrants look inwards towards fragile and uneven networks of care comprising of friends, kin, brokers and countless Nepali migrant associations. Such learned acts of “self-reliance” draw on a cultural repertoire that has emerged from histories of state neglect, neoliberal governance and migrant disposability, constraining and enabling possibilities for life and claim-making.