“Searching for ‘Luck’: An Ethnography of Filipino Migrants and their Affective Ties”(Akashi Press, 2019)
Naomi Hosoda(Associate Professor, School of Global Humanities and Social Sciences, Nagasaki University)
I am deeply honored to receive this prestigious award from the Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Foundation.
This ethnography is based on my doctoral dissertation which investigated cultural meanings of migration in a Philippine context. The Philippines is well-known for sending millions of workers worldwide. The previous literature has revealed that such a high rate of outmigration of Filipino people results from the internal and international economic disparity, close family ties, their fluency in English and so on. While acknowledging these socioeconomic factors influencing their outmigration phenomenon, I wanted to explore how they themselves make sense of their act of migration in their own words within the regional context. When I conducted my fieldwork in a village in the central Philippines, I came across the local notion of suwerte (broadly translated as “luck” in English), and thought that their act of migration could be explained as one of their ways to pursue suwerte. Thus, in this ethnography, I carefully delineated the meaning of suwerte in relation to the region’s history, livelihood, notion of space, people’s life courses, religious practices, kinship relations, generational and class differences and so forth, so that I could demonstrate how these dimensions are interrelated and make “migrants.”
Today, the world is witnessing the accelerating movement of people across the borders, and an increasing number of countries need to deal with the issue of how to manage migrants and refugees. Under such circumstances, it is special to me to receive an award from the Memorial Foundation of former Prime Minister Masayoshi Ohira, who vigorously contributed to the international solidarity and cooperation for the development of the Pacific Rim. I sincerely thank the selection committee members and all others in the foundation who made this happen. I would also like to express my heartfelt gratitude to all the people who generously helped me conduct research and publish the book. This esteemed award has given me great encouragement. I will continue to devote myself to the advancement of the Philippine studies and migration research.
Profile
Naomi Hosoda graduated from the Department of Comparative Cultures, Sophia University, Japan, in 1991, and received her master degree from the Graduate School of Political Studies, Queen’s University, Canada, in 1994. She worked as news reporter of Daily Manila Shimbun in the Philippines, and as JSPS research fellow at the Graduate School of Asian and African Area Studies (ASAFAS), Kyoto University, Japan. She received her Ph.D. degree from ASAFAS in 2007. She was a lecturer of Kagawa University, Japan, and an assistant professor of Kyoto University, before joining Nagasaki University as associate professor in 2019. She published several books on contemporary labor migration including her edited volume, Migrant Workers in the Arab Gulf States: Growing Foreign Population and their Lives (Akashi Shoten, 2014).
