Intimacy in a Transnational Era: The Remaking of Aging among Indian Americans

Intimacy in a Transnational Era:The Remaking of Aging among Indian Americans1 Sarah Lamb (bio) Sarah Lamb Brandeis University Sarah Lamb Sarah Lamb is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. She is the author of White Saris and Sweet Mangoes: Aging, Gender, and Body in North India (University of California Press, 2000) and co-editor, with Diane Mines, of Everyday Life in South Asia (Indiana University Press, 2002). Some of her articles are "Being a Widow and Other Life Stories: The Interplay between Lives and Words" (Anthropology and Humanism, 2001); "The Making and Unmaking of Persons: Notes on Aging and Gender in North India" (Ethos, 1997); and "The Beggared Mother: Older Women's Narratives in West Bengal" (Oral Tradition, 1997). Notes 1. The research on which this article is based was supported by a post-doctoral fellowship in the Medical Anthropology Program at the University of California—San Francisco and by a Mazer Award for Faculty Research and the Louis, Frances and Jeffery Sachar Fund at Brandeis University. Previous research in India that informed this piece was funded by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and the American Institute of Indian Studies. I would like to thank several friends, colleagues, mentors, and editors for perceptive comments and insightful discussions that sharpened the arguments presented here: Ed Black, Amy Borovoy, Jennifer Cole, Jean Comaroff, Kathleen Hall, Robert Hunt, David Jacobson, Nita Kumar, Harikrishna Majmundar, McKim Marriott, William Mazzarella, Diane Mines, Linda Mitteness, anonymous reviewers for Diaspora, and Diaspora editor Khachig Tölölyan. Most of all I am indebted to the Indian American persons and families who enabled me to work among them. To protect privacy, the names used in this paper are all pseudonyms. 2. See Lamb, "Aging, Gender"; "Beggared Mother"; "Being a Widow"; "Growing"; "Love and Aging"; "Making and Unmaking"; White Saris. 3. Other discussions of transnational, global, or diasporic "intimacy" include Chang and Ling's work on "regimes of labor intimacy (RLI)," which they see as a key, yet little considered, dimension of global restructuring. Labor intimacy involves the low-wage, low-skilled menial services provided by mostly female migrant workers—"who perform intimate, household services: e.g., caring for the young and elderly, cleaning house, washing clothes, preparing food, and generally providing domestic comfort and care" (27). Svetlana Boym explores "diasporic intimacy" among Soviet Russian exiles in the United States—the "very personal," "innermost" thoughts, feelings, memories, and constructions of home, which in the diaspora cannot be "an unmediated emotional fusion but a precarious affection—no less deep, while aware of its transience" (499). 4. Notable theoretical works on transnationalism, globalization, and diaspora include Appadurai ("Disjuncture", "Global"); Appadurai and Breckenridge; Clifford; Foner; Glick Schiller, Basch, and Blanc-Szanton, "Transnationalism"; Gupta and Ferguson ("Culture"; "Discipline"); Hannerz ("Notes"; "World"); Itzigsohn; Kearney; Marcus; Portes, Guarnizo, and Landolt; Shukla; Tölölyan; and Vertovec ("Conceiving"; "Three Meanings"). 5. See, e.g., Basch, Glick-Schiller, and Szanton-Blanc, "Transnationalism"; Constable; Freeman; Gamburd, Gardner; Georges, Levitt, Mountz and Wright; Ong and Nonini; Rothenberg, Rouse, "Making Sense," "Mexican Migration." 6. Carla Freeman makes a similar observation: "If, as Lutz 1995 has so provocatively argued, one of the very definitions of theory is signaled by the assumption that the writing reflects a wide variety of instances rather than a single case and most ethnographies, by design, focus on a single locality/case, the implication is that ethnographic treatments of globalization are not theory" (1011 note 7). 7. There is no uniformly accepted term to refer to people from the Indian subcontinent living in the United States. "South Asian," the term in widest use within academic circles, refers to people from the contemporary countries of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Bhutan (although masking often deeply felt differences of language, nationality, religion, etc.). People of Indian descent living in the United States refer to themselves by a variety of labels, including "Indian American," "Indo-Amencan," and simply "Indian." Since 1980, "Asian Indian" has been the official US Census category. See George (52 note 3); Kibria; Leonard (South Asian 93-4; "State, Culture"); Nelson; Natarajan; Prashad; Radhakrishnan, and Shankar for further discussions of these labels...