Mobile Technology and “Doing Family” in a Global World: Indian Migrants in Cambodia

Abstract

This chapter compares and contrasts the use of mobile and internet technologies among two sets of Indian migrants in Cambodia. One set consists of rural and less educated single male migrants from eastern India, while the other comprises highly educated professionals generally migrating with family from across the country. Education, income levels and the cost of technologies at the destination country shape migrants’ access to technologies, with the professionals using more sophisticated technologies and the rural migrants depending more on simpler and commercially available public facilities. We use the trope of “doing family” to explore the transformations in the nature of communication between migrants and various left-behind family members. More frequent and timely communication allows migrants to produce intense affective bonds that regenerate the “family feeling” required to reproduce the family as a transnational corporation of kin. Especially for the rural migrants, ICTs enable faster and more frequent financial remittances, underlining their character as a “currency of care”; additionally, they help strengthen homeland culture and occasionally subvert gender and age hierarchies. Among the professionals, globalised, multilocal families are able to keep in constant touch, mitigating in part the pain of separation.