PSHEV 60, NO. 2 (2012) 1–33 © Ateneo de Manila University
Seamen’s wives know absence very well. Their lives are striated by it.
Based on interviews with seamen’s wives conducted in Ilocos Norte, this
article investigates the communicative practices obtaining amid absence
and separation, and the wives’ activities that bring their husbands home
and bring “home” to their husbands. It examines how new communication
technologies, particularly the cellphone, have engendered new ways of
becoming present and intimate. For seamen’s families, cellphone-mediated
intimacy creates a space of imagined communion, which becomes the locus
of the reproduction of family and affective ties and is itself the result of
these emotional and material activities.
Keywords: seafaring • mobile telephony • transnational communication •
family • intimacy • imagined communion
communi cation
and filipino
seamen’ s wives
imag ined communion
and the int imacy
of absence
RODERICK G. GALAM