Mercenaries, domestics and prostitutes, three figures of the wage system in Nepalese international migrations: Beyond the institutional fictions of the State: the reality of employee trafficking

Abstract

As a result of preliminary research into the growth of social, domestic and gender inequalities in certain non-Hindi minority populations of Nepal, who began to emigrate massively from the rural areas in the 1980s, I was led to study the conditions of their integration in Arab or Christian countries where these Buddhist populations migrated, through multi-site and transnational surveys in their destination countries (especially in Europe - France, Portugal, Belgium, and in the United States). Having lived since fourty years now, in close continuity with a Tamang community of Nepal, how could we sociologically account for the shared representation of the profits or losses in the new statuses they claimed and sometimes acquired in working abroad? How could the new provisions of these aspiring migrants who had managed to create new conditions of life outside their country, in turn influence and change new forms of exploitation or "self-exploitation" of workers, believing they were accessing a new form of subjectivity and freedom by leaving behind the rural world and domestic constraints? This paper attempts thus to drawing a historic redefinition of the 'restrained work', i.e. not working on the desire of people to emigrate, nor whatever the pressures exercised on candidates for emigration, but rather on the redefinition of what we commonly mean by 'work' and 'employment' in the recent history of Nepal and through the studies of economic history and history of rural migration abroad.