Aspirational Infrastructure: Everyday Brokerage and the Foreign-Employment Recruitment Agencies in Nepal

This article contributes to the current scholarship on migration brokerage and infrastructure by revealing the contingent, experimental, and dynamic nature of recruiting work for foreign-employment recruitment agencies (FERAs) in Nepal. By situating Nepal’s migration infrastructure, or foreign employment (baidesik rojgar), within the nation’s social history and long-standing discourse on development (bikas), this paper argues for the importance of tracing the experimental character of an emergent migration infrastructure. In particular, I develop the concept of “aspirational infrastructure,” by which I mean the oft-overlooked experimental practices and practicalities that shape and direct the aspirations of those involved in foreign-employment recruitment work. The ethnography traces the intense encounter, intermediation, and interaction among the actors engaged in brokerage activities at FERA social spaces, where recruiters shape not only the social imaginaries and aspirations of potential migrants, but also their own. The recruitment work and migration brokerage rely on balancing the renewed vision and familiar discourse surrounding the “promise of livelihood,” and the reconfiguration of existing institutional norms, ultimately serving the state’s reprioritization of maintaining its “developing” status.

志存高远的基础设施：尼泊尔的日常中介和国外就业招聘局

关键词： 基础设施；理想抱负； 中介； 外国就业招聘； 尼泊尔。

本文通过揭示尼泊尔国外就业招聘局的招聘人员的工作中劳工中介和基础设施的偶发性、试验性和动态性，对当前的劳工移民中介和基础设施研究做出贡献。通过将尼泊尔的劳工流动基础设施——国外就业——置于该国家的社会历史以及关于发展的长期话语体系之中，本文提出追踪一个新兴劳工流动基础设施的试验性特征的重要性。我特别提出了“志存高远的基础设施”的概念，指的是会塑造和指引国外就业招聘工作所涉及到的人员的抱负的那些通常被忽视的试验性的做法和实际考量。 本文使用民族志研究追踪了在国外就业招聘局的社交空间进行中介活动的人员之间密集的接触、调节以及互动，其中招聘人员不仅会塑造不仅包括潜在流动者也包括他们自身的社会想象力和抱负。 招聘工作和外籍劳工中介依靠的是在围绕着“生计的承诺”的更新的愿景和熟悉的话语之间保持平衡，以及对现有的制度性规范进行重新配置，最终服务于国家对维护其“发展中“身份这一目标给与的再优先化。

Translated from English by Li Guo