Document Type
Photo Essay
Abstract
This photo essay explores the affective infrastructures that sustain and shape return migration between the Philippines and the Arab Gulf states. By affective infrastructures, I refer to the material, moral, economic, and relational arrangements that make migration possible, and that continue to structure life after return. Rather than addressing migration as a linear trajectory (departureemployment-return), the essay presents it as processual, and encrypted in houses, debts, bodies, aspirations, and memories. The fieldwork is grounded in Tampakan, a rural municipality in South Mindanao, a region that contains one of the largest Filipino emigration basins to the Gulf. Illustrating how return reshapes the local, the imprint of Gulf migration is embedded in a broader logic of dependence in Tampakan. It further reflects the Philippines’ position as the fourth most represented country in the region, particularly in the domestic service sector.
Citation Information
Breteau, Marion. "PHOTO ESSAY: Affective Infrastructures of Migration in Mindanao, Philippines." Asia Pacific Perspectives 19, No. 2 (2026)