Economic Exchanges, Intimacies, and Moralities in Asian Contexts

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

This panel explores the close interactions among intimacy, economic exchanges, and morality in contemporary Asian contexts. Existing literature has long demonstrated that economic exchanges, in forms of gift exchange or monetary transaction, are deeply embedded in social relations, including kinships and other forms of intimate relations. The interplays of social relations and economic exchanges would not take place without sets of available values and cultural assumptions to give meaning to and justifications for these actions. At the same time, such interplays reconfigure existing norms and cultures. The rising Asian economy and its intense border-crossing activities with the rest of the world have brought dynamic changes in local, national, and transnational intimate relations within and beyond the region. How are changing intimate relations products of shifting associations between intimacy and economic activity locally, nationally, and transnationally? What are the norms and cultural assumptions aiding such associations and how are existing moral discourses and cultures reshaped by the negotiation between intimacy and economic activity? Our four papers investigate these questions through looking at different forms of economic activities, including housing, remittances, and gifts, and cover various intimate relations across geographical borders, including young urban Chinese’s marital relations, Vietnamese marriage migrant women’s involvement in the sex industry in Taiwan, transnational mother and child relationships in China and France and between overseas Filipino workers and their left-behind families in the Philippines. Through our diverse cases, this panel will provide insights into changing intimate, economic, and social life in Asia.

Area of Study

• Interarea-Border Crossing

Session Organizers

• Hsunhui Tseng, Chinese University of Hong Kong

• Hsiu-hua Shen, National Tsing Hua University

Chair

• Cheryll Alipio, University of Queensland

Individual Presentations

• Gender and Moral Economy of Contemporary Chinese Love and Homeownership - Hsiu-hua Shen, National Tsing Hua University

• Negotiation of Morality for Marriage Migrant Women Serving as Hostesses in Taiwan - Hsunhui Tseng, Chinese University of Hong Kong

• Complex Evaluations of Social Mobility: Social Prestige and Migration Justifications of Chinese Divorced Mothers in France - Florence Levy, EHESS

• Migrant Heroes and Model Children: Morality-in-Motion and Migration-as-Development among Overseas Filipino Workers and their Left-Behind Families in the Philippines - Cheryll Alipio, University of Queensland

Discussant

• Trang Ta, Australian National University