Anthropologist Caitrin Lynch writes a provocative ethnography about women workers in Sri Lanka's 200 Garment Factories Program (200 GFP), a state initiative that brought international industry to rural villages. Working at the intersection of globalization, gender studies, and labor relations, Lynch discusses the localization of production, examining how transnational capitalist dynamics settle into local contexts. This engaging book is based on eighteen months of qualitative research performed in two garment factories. The pages brim with lively characters and trenchant analysis.
Lynch suggests that “[p]eople in nations that experienced colonization often fear that globalization, in practice, means neocolonialism” (p. 237). Anxieties about cultural preservation played out in Sinhala Buddhist discourse during the colonial period and have resurfaced since economic liberalization in 1977. Could Sri Lanka modernize without Westernization? In particular, could the government employ women to work in global industries without threatening the core of national authenticity? In 1992, President Ranasinghe...
