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Paper short abstract

This paper explores how Filipino youths' imaginations of contemporary international labour migration intersect with wider repertoires of practice related to travel, sexuality and constructions of the exotic. It draws upon anthropological analyses of ritual, mobility and the life course.

Paper long abstract

In Batangas province, in the Philippines, the possibility of international labour migration, or 'nag-aabroad' (going abroad), greatly influences the worldview and imagined futures of young people in secondary and tertiary education. While students emphasise the financial security that working overseas might bring, this motivation sits alongside a number of other attractions associated with mobility and movement. These include understandings of maturity and progression through the life course that are articulated by migration away from the natal home; the allure of sexual liaisons and romantic attachments facilitated by travel; and associations between movement from rural to urban settings and perceptions of social mobility and 'modernisation'.

This paper is based on extended fieldwork in two schools in western Batangas province with students aged 12-22, their teachers and their families, and with a number of young people who practiced migration within the Philippines for both schooling and labour. By engaging with young people's varied and contested experiences of mobility and migration, the paper aims to contextualise well-documented practices of international labour migration from the Philippines, and to question dominant narratives surrounding the motivation for such migrations.

The analysis incorporates a range of perspectives on dynamics of power and geography in the Philippines and Southeast Asia, and engages with current anthropological debates surrounding mobility and temporality. The paper argues that the dynamics of space and time identified in anthropological analysis of ritual return offer an alternative reading of the interplay between mobility and 'rootedness'.