ABSTRACT
This book intends to ask how people in the Global South are dealing with the everyday insecurity and precarity, which emerge in close interconnection with the condition of the Global North. While ethnographies of this volume are all from the Philippines, precarity dealt with in each chapter have strong implications for the other parts of the Global South: gentrification and slum clearance of urban space; moral insecurity and uncertainty of identity among the youth in diaspora; global climate change and the “lost paradise” of the world-tourism destination; emergence of populism, putting emphasis on the citizenry discipline and moral; unpredictable overseas employment for care work; widening gap between haves and have-nots among the rural population; insecurity in post-conflict society. While these cases of precarity are situated in the concrete settings of the localities in the Philippines, their relevance would extend beyond the Philippines owing to their close connection with the Global South and also with the post-Fordist transition of the Global North. Further, this volume will propose to examine the concept of “emergent sociality”, an alternative connectedness emerging from the interactions, and negotiations, between the formal institutions of social protection and the informal networks of interpersonal relationships. It is argued that such emergent sociality works as a resource to deal with, and sometimes successfully tame, the precarity of the Global South.
