1st Edition

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

By Koki Seki Copyright 2022
    262 Pages 43 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    262 Pages 43 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    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.

    1. Introduction Part I: Urban Poverty and Clientelism Prologue to Part I 2. Association Eroded?: Land Tenure Program for Slum Residents and the Clientelistic Connection 3. "Investments in Human Capital" Adrift: Conditional Cash Transfers and the Clientelistic Connection Part II: Conservation and Emergent Community Prologue to Part II 4. A Community Disciplined: The Institutionalization Process of Coastal Resource Management 5. Emergent Community: The Process of Contextualizing the Coastal Resource Management Regime 6. Crafting Livelihood under the Neoliberal Eco-governmentality: A Life-History of Visayan Fisherman Part III: Mobility and Connectedness in Transnational Social Field Prologue to Part III 7. A Woman and the Community of Empathy: The 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

    Biography

    Koki Seki is Professor of cultural anthropology and Southeast Asian studies at the Graduate School of Humanities and Sciences, Hiroshima University, Japan.