Wright, Andrea

Dr., Lecturer in Anthropology,
Harvard University (USA)

This paper examines the processes that drive ethnic minority women from the Northeast Region of India to migrate to Bangalore and the transformations they undergo as migrants, beauty-therapy trainees, and laborers in local spas and salons. Based on twenty-four months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork between Bangalore and the states of Manipur and Nagaland, this paper employs ‘pressure’ as a central analytic connecting chapters and arguments. This concept was born from observing beauty workers in local salons, particularly their ability to use the pressure of fingers and palms on clients’ bodies as a mode for communicating care. I use this concept as a foundation for theorizing these female migrants’ movements, both inside the salon and across vast geographies of difference. Threaded through this paper is the argument that the ability of female migrant laborers to know how and when to give physical pressure as a form of communicative care is born of and impacted by the daily external pressures placed on them. I assert that these structural forces such as the growing beauty industry, family and state pressure to migrate, and community pressure to behave a certain way are embodied in their interactions and physical ‘touch and feel’ labor in service of beautifying their clients and that it is only through laboring on the bodies of others that these ethnic minority migrant women become legible as citizens.