Michele Ruth Gamburd
Biographic Data
| ID | 115157 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Michele Ruth Gamburd |
| GIVEN NAMES | Michele Ruth |
| FAMILY NAME | Gamburd |
| SIGNATURE | GAMBURD M R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Portland State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2131-547X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 32 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 15 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1995 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
"Migration craziness!" Financial Turbulence and Transnational Families in Sri Lanka
This article analyzes Sri Lanka's post-2022 "migration craziness" through ethnographic case studies of transnational families. Combining household histories with national crisis dynamics-currency collapse, austerity, inflation, and political unrest-it explains why middle-class professionals and skilled youth are emigrating to Australia, New Zealand, and Europe. The analysis foregrounds shifting intergenerational obligations ("kinsurance"), the re…
Sama in the Forest: Directed by Carlos G. Gómez, 2023, 75 minutes, color. Distributed by Documentary Educational Resources
Sama in the Forest rivetingly shows that folklore provides a catalyst for social change.This creative, colorful film reveals how women use storytelling to contest gender roles in South Asia.For this project, anthropologist and producer Coralynn Davis draws
Transitions and Transformations: Cultural Perspectives on Aging and the Life Course
Rapid population aging, once associated with only a select group of modern industrialized nations, has now become a topic of increasing global concern. This volume reframes aging on a global scale by illustrating the multiple ways it is embedded within individual, social, and cultural life courses. It presents a broad range of ethnographic work, introducing a variety of conceptual and methodological approaches to studying life-course transitions …
Linked Lives: Elder Care, Migration, and Kinship in Sri Lanka
When youth shake off their rural roots and middle-aged people migrate for economic opportunities, what happens to the grandparents left at home? Linked Lives provides readers with intimate glimpses into homes in a Sri Lankan Buddhist village, where elders wisely use their moral authority and their control over valuable property to assure that they receive both physical and spiritual care when they need it. The care work that grandparents do for g…
Unforgotten: Love and the Culture of Dementia Care in India , by Bianca Brijnath
People like me who have served as caregivers for beloved family members suffering from dementia will quickly realise that Bianca Brijnath ‘gets it’. More than once this extraordinary book moved me
Tsunami Recovery in Sri Lanka: Ethnic and Regional Dimensions
Part 1: Overview and Context 1. Introduction Michele R. Gamburd and Dennis B. McGilvray 2. Building the Conflict Back Better: The Politics of Tsunami Relief and Reconstruction in Sri Lanka Alan Keenan 3. Conflict, Coastal Vulnerability, and Resiliency in Tsunami-Affected Communities Randall Kuhn Part 2: Ethnographic Materials 4. The Golden Wave: Discourses on the Equitable Distribution of Tsunami Aid on Sri Lanka's Southwest Coast Michele R. Gamb…
Sri Lanka's Post‐Tsunami Recovery: Cultural Traditions, Social Structures and Power Struggles
Keywords: commentary, disaster, tsunami, Indian Ocean, Sri Lanka, ethnicity, development, ecology and environment, Southern Asia
Breaking the Ashes: The Culture of Illicit Liquor in Sri Lanka
Money That Burns like Oil: A Sri Lankan Cultural Logic of Morality and Agency
New labor opportunities have drawn Sri Lankan women to work as domestic servants in the Middle East. Many migrants complain that their remittances burn like oil, disappearing without a trace. gendered discourse on burning remittances both draws on and contradicts an older cultural system that fetishizes money. emerging logic provides symbolic resources for women to spend their remittances on advancements for the nuclear family, distancing themsel…
In the wake of the Gulf War: Assessing family spending of compensation money in Sri Lanka
Between 1997 and 2000, the United Nations Compensation Commission delivered US$4000 apiece to roughly 87,000 Sri Lankan citizens who suffered displacement and loss of employment due to Iraq's military actions in Kuwait during the Gulf War. Using qualitative ethnographic data, this essay examines 11 case studies of Kuwait returnees in the village of Naeaegama, in southern Sri Lanka. Like the majority of Sri Lankans caught in the Gulf War, these re…
The Kitchen Spoon's Handle: Transnationalism and Sri Lanka's Migrant Housemaids
Symbolic Heat: Gender, Health and Worship among the Tamils of South India and Sri Lanka.; Relocated Lives: Displacement and Resettlement in the Mahaweli Project, Sri Lanka.; Amiable Incoherence: Manip…
Symbolic Heat: Gender, Health and Worship among the Tamils of South India and Sri Lanka. Dennis B. McGilvray. Ahmedabad, India: Mapin Publishing Pvt. Ltd., 1998. 72 pp. Relocated Lives: Displacement and Resettlement in the Mahaweli Project, Sri Lanka. Birgitte Refslund Sørensen. Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1996. 247 pp. Amiable Incoherence: Manipulating Histories and Modernities in. Batticaloa Hindu Temple. Mark P. Whitaker. Amsterdam: VU Uni…
Violence Studies: An Introductory Curriculum
Class Identity and the International Division of Labor: Sri Lanka's Migrant Housemaids
Wearing a dead man's jacket: State symbols in troubled places
A village rumor concerning the attempted theft of a uniform from the corpse of a Sri Lankan army soldier supplies the subject matter for this paper. In May 1993, soon after the assassination of President Ranasinghe Premadasa, a spectacular local funeral for a Low Country Sinhalese soldier killed in the civil war near Trincomalee provided a space for the display of state symbols, the voicing of patriotic rhetoric, and the exhibition of the precisi…
"Sri Lanka's "Army of Housemaids: Control of Remittances and Gender Transformations
When the mass labor migration of women to the Middle East began in the early 1980's, many Sri Lankan social scientists predicted a revolution in gender equality and a greater participaton by women in political and economic decisionmaking as a result of employment abroad. Noting that gender rarely correlates in predictable ways with social change, and questioning the dominant teleological ideology that change always happens for the better, this pa…
Money That Burns like Oil: A Sri Lankan Cultural Logic of Morality and Agency
New labor opportunities have drawn Sri Lankan women to work as domestic servants in the Middle East. Many migrants complain that their remittances burn like oil, disappearing without a trace. gendered discourse on burning remittances both draws on and contradicts an older cultural system that fetishizes money. emerging logic provides symbolic resources for women to spend their remittances on advancements for the nuclear family, distancing themsel…
"Sri Lanka's "Army of Housemaids: Control of Remittances and Gender Transformations
When the mass labor migration of women to the Middle East began in the early 1980's, many Sri Lankan social scientists predicted a revolution in gender equality and a greater participaton by women in political and economic decisionmaking as a result of employment abroad. Noting that gender rarely correlates in predictable ways with social change, and questioning the dominant teleological ideology that change always happens for the better, this pa…
In the wake of the Gulf War: Assessing family spending of compensation money in Sri Lanka
Between 1997 and 2000, the United Nations Compensation Commission delivered US$4000 apiece to roughly 87,000 Sri Lankan citizens who suffered displacement and loss of employment due to Iraq's military actions in Kuwait during the Gulf War. Using qualitative ethnographic data, this essay examines 11 case studies of Kuwait returnees in the village of Naeaegama, in southern Sri Lanka. Like the majority of Sri Lankans caught in the Gulf War, these re…
Class Identity and the International Division of Labor: Sri Lanka's Migrant Housemaids
"Sri Lanka's "Army of Housemaids: Control of Remittances and Gender Transformations
When the mass labor migration of women to the Middle East began in the early 1980's, many Sri Lankan social scientists predicted a revolution in gender equality and a greater participaton by women in political and economic decisionmaking as a result of employment abroad. Noting that gender rarely correlates in predictable ways with social change, and questioning the dominant teleological ideology that change always happens for the better, this pa…
Wearing a dead man's jacket: State symbols in troubled places
A village rumor concerning the attempted theft of a uniform from the corpse of a Sri Lankan army soldier supplies the subject matter for this paper. In May 1993, soon after the assassination of President Ranasinghe Premadasa, a spectacular local funeral for a Low Country Sinhalese soldier killed in the civil war near Trincomalee provided a space for the display of state symbols, the voicing of patriotic rhetoric, and the exhibition of the precisi…
Violence Studies: An Introductory Curriculum
Class Identity and the International Division of Labor: Sri Lanka's Migrant Housemaids
Symbolic Heat: Gender, Health and Worship among the Tamils of South India and Sri Lanka.; Relocated Lives: Displacement and Resettlement in the Mahaweli Project, Sri Lanka.; Amiable Incoherence: Manip…
Symbolic Heat: Gender, Health and Worship among the Tamils of South India and Sri Lanka. Dennis B. McGilvray. Ahmedabad, India: Mapin Publishing Pvt. Ltd., 1998. 72 pp. Relocated Lives: Displacement and Resettlement in the Mahaweli Project, Sri Lanka. Birgitte Refslund Sørensen. Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1996. 247 pp. Amiable Incoherence: Manipulating Histories and Modernities in. Batticaloa Hindu Temple. Mark P. Whitaker. Amsterdam: VU Uni…
The Kitchen Spoon's Handle: Transnationalism and Sri Lanka's Migrant Housemaids
In the wake of the Gulf War: Assessing family spending of compensation money in Sri Lanka
Between 1997 and 2000, the United Nations Compensation Commission delivered US$4000 apiece to roughly 87,000 Sri Lankan citizens who suffered displacement and loss of employment due to Iraq's military actions in Kuwait during the Gulf War. Using qualitative ethnographic data, this essay examines 11 case studies of Kuwait returnees in the village of Naeaegama, in southern Sri Lanka. Like the majority of Sri Lankans caught in the Gulf War, these re…
Money That Burns like Oil: A Sri Lankan Cultural Logic of Morality and Agency
New labor opportunities have drawn Sri Lankan women to work as domestic servants in the Middle East. Many migrants complain that their remittances burn like oil, disappearing without a trace. gendered discourse on burning remittances both draws on and contradicts an older cultural system that fetishizes money. emerging logic provides symbolic resources for women to spend their remittances on advancements for the nuclear family, distancing themsel…
Breaking the Ashes: The Culture of Illicit Liquor in Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka's Post‐Tsunami Recovery: Cultural Traditions, Social Structures and Power Struggles
Keywords: commentary, disaster, tsunami, Indian Ocean, Sri Lanka, ethnicity, development, ecology and environment, Southern Asia
Tsunami Recovery in Sri Lanka: Ethnic and Regional Dimensions
Part 1: Overview and Context 1. Introduction Michele R. Gamburd and Dennis B. McGilvray 2. Building the Conflict Back Better: The Politics of Tsunami Relief and Reconstruction in Sri Lanka Alan Keenan 3. Conflict, Coastal Vulnerability, and Resiliency in Tsunami-Affected Communities Randall Kuhn Part 2: Ethnographic Materials 4. The Golden Wave: Discourses on the Equitable Distribution of Tsunami Aid on Sri Lanka's Southwest Coast Michele R. Gamb…
Unforgotten: Love and the Culture of Dementia Care in India , by Bianca Brijnath
People like me who have served as caregivers for beloved family members suffering from dementia will quickly realise that Bianca Brijnath ‘gets it’. More than once this extraordinary book moved me
Linked Lives: Elder Care, Migration, and Kinship in Sri Lanka
When youth shake off their rural roots and middle-aged people migrate for economic opportunities, what happens to the grandparents left at home? Linked Lives provides readers with intimate glimpses into homes in a Sri Lankan Buddhist village, where elders wisely use their moral authority and their control over valuable property to assure that they receive both physical and spiritual care when they need it. The care work that grandparents do for g…
Transitions and Transformations: Cultural Perspectives on Aging and the Life Course
Rapid population aging, once associated with only a select group of modern industrialized nations, has now become a topic of increasing global concern. This volume reframes aging on a global scale by illustrating the multiple ways it is embedded within individual, social, and cultural life courses. It presents a broad range of ethnographic work, introducing a variety of conceptual and methodological approaches to studying life-course transitions …
Sama in the Forest: Directed by Carlos G. Gómez, 2023, 75 minutes, color. Distributed by Documentary Educational Resources
Sama in the Forest rivetingly shows that folklore provides a catalyst for social change.This creative, colorful film reveals how women use storytelling to contest gender roles in South Asia.For this project, anthropologist and producer Coralynn Davis draws
"Migration craziness!" Financial Turbulence and Transnational Families in Sri Lanka
This article analyzes Sri Lanka's post-2022 "migration craziness" through ethnographic case studies of transnational families. Combining household histories with national crisis dynamics-currency collapse, austerity, inflation, and political unrest-it explains why middle-class professionals and skilled youth are emigrating to Australia, New Zealand, and Europe. The analysis foregrounds shifting intergenerational obligations ("kinsurance"), the re…
Sociology (9 works) · Sri lanka (8 works) · Political science (7 works) · Socioeconomics (6 works) · Law (5 works) · Ancient history (4 works) · Geography (4 works) · History (4 works) · Law (4 works) · Migration and Labor Dynamics (4 works)