Translocal Householding

The urban experience remains inextricably entangled with the rural for millions of poor migrants to cities in the global South who labor in informal economies. Long after they first arrive in a city, even many of those who have established something of a footing in it may remain oriented to their villages, materially, emotionally, and intimately. Translocal households, households that share the labor and costs of social reproduction spatially across the city and the country, are an important site of entanglement.

The dynamics of transformation in the contemporary world requires conceptualizing the mutual imprint of the city and the country. Social scientists are beginning to realize the inadequacy of current modes of engagement that focus primarily on either the rural or the urban. In India, for instance, the village and the rural were a strong focus of sociological and development studies from the 1950s to the late 1980s. Then, with liberalization of the economy, urbanization, and globalization in the early nineties came the urban turn, which led to a relative neglect of the rural by social scientists over the last two-plus decades. A slew of disquieting trends that link the city and the country are now coming to light. The rapacious inroads of urban capital into the countryside to convert agricultural land into elite residential housing complexes;¹ the consolidation of gender, caste, and class inequalities in enclave capitalist Special Economic Zones;² and the violent mediation of landed high castes in land, labor, and produce markets in urban peripheries and small towns³ are recent instances of such encroachments. The links between the country and the city, with an emphasis on the former, have been encapsulated by Left scholars and journalists as the agrarian crisis and its concomitant rural-to-urban distress migration, which show signs of deepening.⁴ Whether looking toward the rural from the urban or toward the urban from the rural, as articulated in these characterizations, there is ample reason to theorize the urban and rural as entangled in heterogeneous ways, empirically and imaginatively.⁵

In this article, I contribute to this effort by suggesting how the concept of translocal householding provides an architecture for understanding contemporary rural-urban entanglements. Intrinsically spatiotemporal and deeply gendered institutions, households are geared for social reproduction—that is, for producing laborers with the capacity to labor today and reproducing laborers who will labor in the next generation. To create capacities to labor, daily and intergenerationally, foremost is the “work of tending” to the bodies of laborers in need of repair and rejuvenation at the end of each day and when they are spent, sick, disabled, old, and, ultimately, dead.⁶ In recognition of its unruly expansiveness, feminists have termed social reproduction—much of which takes place in households, with female labor—“life’s work” to acknowledge the “fleshy, messy, and indeterminate stuff of everyday life.”⁷ The broadening of the definition of reproductive work to life’s work draws attention to the multiplicity of labors required for reproduction, not only biological and reproductive labor, but emotional, affective, and intimate labors as well.⁸ Those who perform these different kinds of labors within households and when they enter the informal urban market as commodified labor—whether domestic service or sex work, the beauty industries or cleaning toilets—intersect with constructions of social difference in specific locations. In the wake of spatiotemporal transformations of capitalism wrought by globalization, feminist scholars have uncovered such phenomena as global care chains, transnational surrogacy, and the transnational intimate labors of call-center workers. Surprisingly, not enough feminist scholarship has considered the repercussions of intensifying mobility between the rural and the urban within national territories. Moreover, there has been “strikingly little attention to social reproduction in the literature on rural political economies and agrarian change.”⁹

Translocal householding, also called translocal family reproduction or split labor reproduction, refers to the ways multiple generations in geographically dispersed locations provision care and livelihoods.¹⁰ Translocal householding is critical to conceptualizing the urban experience in both China and Vietnam, where the state’s strict regulation of migration to the cities, according to Nguyen and Locke, produces translocal households as an...