Routines of morality: Nurturing familiar values in unfamiliar lands

Abstract

Although many long-term Sri Lankan migrants to Italy have words of praise for Italian culture and find few reasons to permanently return to their hometowns, they often take the decision to bring children back to Sri Lanka for their education. The reason most cited to opt for Sri Lankan schooling is that ‘Italians don’t have good values’. Certain Sri Lankan normative practices that adults can circumvent while in Italy play a fundamental heuristic role in the education of children and are allegedly only present in Sri Lanka. However, values are also a fundamental aspect of arguments put forward by migrants to stay in Italy as workers. This article discusses the ambiguities that concepts such as values and culture have in the daily usage of migrant workers. To clarify how they are used in arguments for and against migration, I suggest that scholarship in the anthropology of ethics can be illuminating in the ethnographic context of the Sri Lankan transnational experience. I discuss how migrant parents critically approach their understanding of Sri Lankan and Italian cultures, and how they ponder over alternative courses of action that tread between the material objectives of migration and the ethical values of Sri Lankan Catholicism.