Description
Book SynopsisDrawing from extensive fieldwork in Kenya and the United Kingdom, Leslie Fesenmyer considers the kinship dilemmas moral, material, and affective facing transnational families. By asking who is responsible for whom, she reveals that questions of intergenerational care are at the heart of relations between individuals, societies, and states.
Trade Review'This book draws the reader into the lives of family members who, over decades, share an existence across geographical distance. Against the backdrop of wider social transformations, an extremely rich ethnography is explored with the support of a complex framework based on thorough insights into the essence of anthropology and migration studies. This is the anthropology of migration at its best.' Lisa Åkesson, University of Gothenburg
'In all the scholarship on transnational kinship, Relative Distance is unique in focusing on the moral obligations and moral economies generated by migration. It reveals how the affective and the material are inextricably entangled, highlighting the tensions as well as intimacies generated by moral claims.' Cati Coe, Carleton University
'The ties binding migrants to their homelands are often narrowly measured by economic remittances. In this powerful ethnographic study of Kenyans in the UK, Leslie Fesenmyer focuses instead on the dynamics of transnational families. She vividly and compellingly shows how reciprocity, mutuality and honour are embedded in obligations based on kinship and religion.' Robin Cohen, University of Oxford
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments; Introduction; 1. Securing the future: family, livelihoods, and mobility; 2. Aspirations, obligations, and imagination in family migration; 3. The making of 'migrants'; 4. Kinship dilemmas: negotiating relatedness across space; 5. Weddings as transnational household rituals: marriage and other intimate relations; 6. Change and continuity: the social reproduction of families between Kenya and the United Kingdom; 7. Conclusion; References.
