Current Sociology

Please welcome our Sociologist of the Month for December 2021, Veronica L. Gregorio (Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore, Singapore). Her article for Current Sociology, Isolation and Immunity within the Family: Commuter Marriages in Southeast Asia is Free Access this month.

Veronica L. Gregorio

Could you please tell us about yourself? How did you come to your field of study?

V. L. Gregorio: Hi, I am Veronica L. Gregorio from Manila, Philippines. I received my PhD (Sociology) from the National University of Singapore where I am currently a teaching assistant. I have been a teaching assistantfor undergraduate modules such as introduction to sociology, social research methods, sociology of family, and Southeast Asia in a globalizing world.

Before coming to NUS, I did my bachelors and masters in the University of Philippines (Manila and Diliman). In these earlier years, I developed my interest on rural studies, gender and sexuality, youth studies, and visual methodologies. My MA thesis is about teenage pregnancy and youth perceptions on motherhood and sexuality. I wrote the thesis in Tagalog but a journal article in English is also publicly available here.

My interest on family – the generational hierarchies, household arrangements, family ideologies, among others – evolved as I took my PhD course work and taught sociology of family for about two years. At present, my field of study includes gender studies, rural sociology, and sociology of family.

What prompted you to research the area of your article, “Isolation and Immunity within the Family: Commuter Marriages in Southeast Asia”?

V. L. Gregorio: For the PhD, I challenged myself to extend my work outside Philippines. Initially, I wanted to study rural families in Malaysia and Indonesia, but after some discussion with my mentors in Singapore and Philippines, I decided to continue with Philippines while exploring a new site in Malaysia. Perhaps in the near future, for postdoc or other research positions, I can include another Southeast Asian country.

My ethnographic fieldwork in Malay and Philippine villages gave me the opportunity to learn about rural households and the relationship details between families of three to four generations. Together with my research assistants, we joined family gatherings (birthdays and weddings), farm work (planting and harvesting), and different community events. Some of the topics I observed and analyzed for the thesis include grandparenting, siblingship, transition to adulthood, and parenting strategies.

The article on commuter marriages is one of my thesis chapters which I wrote while on a visiting fellowship in the Sydney Southeast Asia Center (SSEAC). It was also submitted for the International Sociological Association (ISA)’s 2019 PhD Laboratory for Junior Sociologists.

What do you see as the key findings of your article?

V. L. Gregorio: I propose two concepts in the article: family isolation and family immunity.

Both concepts are the products of transient gendered subjectivities and particular family ideologies that farming families practice. Family isolation is experienced by commuter wives as they feel that their feminine subjectivities are not being heard or recognized in their home and community. As weekend warriors, the presence of commuter wives at home is sometimes forgotten. In contrast, family immunity is found among commuter husbands. Due to the relatively long time spent away from home, commuter husbands are being exempted from work-family life balance expectations whenever they are back in their villages. Both commuter wives and husbands (with the help of their extended kin) create ways to remind their families and neighbors of their identity. You can read the details in the article!

What are the wider social implications of your research in the current social climate? How do you think things will change in the future?

V. L. Gregorio: My research is a reminder for sociologists (and other social scientists for that matter) to continue examining gender and family relations in a serious and rigorous manner. More specifically to Southeast Asia, we have to consider how agricultural development, migration patterns, and age-based hierarchies influence gender subjectivities and family ideologies.

In the future, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, there will be challenges in conducting ethnographic field work, but I am certain that innovative ways of data gathering will help us continue studying household dynamics. As we recognize the importance of “village restudies” (Rigg and Vandergeest 2012), I hope we can complement it with what I call in my thesis as “family restudies” using qualitative approaches.

Do you have any links to images, documents or other pieces of research which build on or add to the article? Or a suggested reading list?

V. L. Gregorio: I would like to recommend this list for those who are also interested to study rural families in Southeast Asia:

Andaya, B. W. (2007). Studying Women and Gender in Southeast Asia. International Journal of Asian Studies, 4(1), 113–136. https://doi.org/10.1017/S147959140700054X
Hayami, Y., Koizumi, J., Songsamphan, C., & Tosakul, R. (Eds.). (2012). The Family in Flux in Southeast Asia: Institution, Ideology, Practice. Kyoto University Press; Silkworm Books.
E. C. Thompson, J. Rigg, & J. Gillen (Eds.). (2019). Asian Smallholders in Comparative Perspective. Amsterdam University Press.
Netting, R. M., Wilk, R. R., & Arnould, E. J. (Eds.). (1984). Households: Comparative and historical studies of the domestic group. University of California Press.

Finally, I would like to link here my PhD thesis: Farm and Familialism in Southeast Asia.