Michele Ruth Gamburd (Ph.D., University of Michigan 1995) is Professor of Anthropology. A cultural anthropologist, she focuses on issues of power, politics, and identity in a Sinhala-speaking village in southwestern Sri Lanka. She writes about gender, family relations, and power struggles in The Kitchen Spoon’s Handle: Transnationalism and Sri Lanka’s Migrant Housemaids (2000) and Breaking the Ashes: The Culture of Illicit Liquor in Sri Lanka (2008). She explores humanitarian aid, class hierarchies, and disaster diplomacy in The Golden Wave: Culture and Politics after Sri Lanka’s Tsunami Disaster (2013) and in a volume (co-edited with Dennis B. McGilvray) entitled Tsunami Recovery in Sri Lanka: Ethnic and Regional Dimensions (2010). Her most recent book, Linked Lives: Elder Care, Migration, and Kinship in Sri Lanka (2021), addresses issues of aging, demographic transformation, and changing intergenerational obligations in rural families.
Selected Works:
- Gamburd, Michele Ruth. 2021. Linked Lives: Elder Care, Migration, and Kinship in Sri Lanka. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
- Gamburd, Michele Ruth. 2020. “Migrant emplacement: Gendered subjects, state regulations, and the discursive erasure of elders in Sri Lanka.” In Caring for Old Age, edited by Christiane Brosius and Roberta Mandoki. 185-211. Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Press.
- Gamburd, Michele Ruth. 2020. “Proper Conjunctions of Bodies: Chastity, Age, and Kin-work in Sri Lankan Migrants’ Families.” In The Asian Migrant’s Body: Emotion, Gender and Sexuality, edited by Michiel Baas. 135-160. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
- Gamburd, Michele Ruth. 2016. “Sri Lankan Migration from Sri Lanka to the Gulf: Female Breadwinners and Domestic Workers.” In South Asian Migration to Gulf Countries: Histories, Policies, Development, Prakash C. Jain and Ginu Zacharia Oommen, eds. Pp. 226-246. New Delhi: Routledge.
- Gamburd, Michele Ruth. 2015. “Migrant Remittances, Population Ageing and Intergenerational Family Obligations in Sri Lanka.” In Transnational Labour Migration, Remittances and the Changing Family in Asia, Lan Anh Hoang and Brenda Yeoh, eds. Pp. 139-164. New York: Palgrave.
- Gamburd, Michele Ruth. 2013. The Golden Wave: Culture and Politics after Sri Lanka’s Tsunami Disaster. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Courses Taught:
- Anth 103 Introduction to Social/Cultural Anthropology
- Anth 300U The Modern World in Anthropological Perspective
- Anth 304 Social Theory
- Anth 312U Southeast Asian Societies and Cultures
- Anth 333U Anthropology of Food
- Anth 412/512 Ethnographic Methods
- Anth 426/526 Transnationalism and Migration
- Anth 428/528 Political Anthropology
- Anth 432/532 Gender, Sex, and Sexuality in Anthropological Perspective
- Anth 490/590 The Anthropology of Violence
- Anth 491/591 Culture, Vulnerability and Disaster Resilience
- Anth 511 Core Seminar in Social and Cultural Anthropology