New Study on Armenian Women's Labor Migration in the Post-Soviet Period

An article in the latest issue of Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, which has just appeared, gives a rare glimpse into the private thoughts and motivations of women from Armenia who are driven abroad in order to find work and provide for their families back home.

Author Armine Ishkanian's article, titled "Mobile Motherhood: Armenian Women's Labor Migration in the Post-Soviet Period," examines the Post-Soviet transnational labor migration of women from Armenia to the United States, narrates episodes of their experience, and analyzes the way they view themselves. She explores their continued reliance on traditional cultural ideologies for representing oneself and making sense of one's experience in a transnational and constantly shifting context.

Ishkanian argues that the migrant women employ "sacred motherhood" to explain their choices and behaviors; through it they justify all actions as serving the well-being of the family. The mother's role is to maintain the family by perpetuating and transmitting family and cultural traditions, values, and beliefs. In Armenia, women are considered the hearth (odjakh), the pillar (syun), and the light-giving lamp (jrak) of the family. Yet, Ishkanian explains, women who emigrate from Armenia cite "family duty" as the main motivation for the non-traditional behavior of leaving their families and working at demeaning jobs. She bases her ethnography of migrant Armenian women on an examination of the historical context and socioeconomic processes of post-Soviet Armenia that led them to recognize labor migration as a viable survival strategy and life option.

Armine Ishkanian is a lecturer at the Centre for Civil Society of the Department of Social Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She received her PhD in anthropology from the University of California, San Diego, in 2000, with a dissertation titled Hearths and Modernity: The Role of Women in NGOs in Post-Soviet Armenia. She is the author of several articles and book chapters.

Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies was founded by the Zoryan Institute in 1991 and is co-published by the University of Toronto Press and the Zoryan Institute, appearing three times a year. It is dedicated to the multidisciplinary study of the history, culture, social structure, politics and economics of both the traditional diasporas - Armenian, Greek, and Jewish - and other groups ranging from the African-American to the Ukrainian-Canadian, from the Caribbean-British to the new East and South Asian diasporas.

There have been several articles about Armenian Diaspora issues published in this journal over the years. For more information, to obtain copies, or for subscriptions, please contact the Zoryan Institute, 255 Duncan Mill Rd., Suite 310, Toronto, Canada M3B 3H9, zoryan@zoryaninstitute.org.