Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam: Family in the Knowledge Economy

Abstract

Scholarship on migration and transnationalism has documented the central place of familial ties and kinship networks in enabling transnational migration and ethnic enclave-based economies.¹ Even migrations of the highly skilled, as AnnaLee Saxenian demonstrates, build on and bolster ethnic, regional, and national ties. A dominant framework for understanding transnational migrations of the highly skilled, and the social and cultural transformations that these entail, has been that of the ‘knowledge economy’: a set of interrelationships between knowledge, experts, and mobility under contemporary capitalist configurations.² The knowledge economy, Aihwa Ong argues, must necessarily be understood as a ‘new ecology of belonging’ in which the very bases of social citizenship are rearticulated, such that intellectual capital and technomanagerial skills increasingly replace political and ethnic loyalty as its key attributes.³ Against this backdrop, I ask, what is the everyday experience of such profound sociocultural shifts? What kinds of anxieties and disruptions do they provoke? How are they organized and managed in everyday life? And, most directly relevant to the themes of this volume, how does the family, a fundamental organizing unit of modern societies, shape these transnational mobilities? In what ways do the contours of the family shift in the process?