Transnational Families

1
Transnational Families

• Anth 130
• Kin, Kith and Community

2
Old Issues, Changed Contexts

• Monogamy, polygyny
• Approximately 50-100K in US
• Guinean immigrant married to Ghanian protests
  his acquisition of another wife. Allowed in
  Islamic practice, but problematic to State laws

3
What then?

• Inheritance
• Obligations
• Cartoon of Baby Bear and his wife in marriage
  counseling. The wife says, Nothing I do is ever
  good enough for him. Of course, everything his
  mother did was always just right.

4
Power

• Hypergamy
• What constitutes marrying up?
• Race
• Whose racial constructions?
• Tacit assumptions about sexuality, docility,
  plasticity

5
The State

• State definitions of citizenship
• Always Chinese
• Cultural definitions of identity
• Nuanced categories
• Residence
• Shaped by immigration policy and cultural
  assumptions
• Shaped by adoption practices through 1st order
  regulations and 2nd order consequences (i.e. one
  child policy in China)

6
Context

• Connections to globalizing political economy
• Nicole Constable
• Hong Kong maids from the Philippines, changing
  family on a household level
• Mail-order brides from Asia

7
Moral Panic

• "the intensity of feeling expressed by a large
  number of people about a specific group of people
  who appear to threaten the social order at a
  given time.
• (Stanley Cohen)
• What assumptions does this reveal about the
  social order?

8
Unpacking Roles

• What difference does it make if the international
  person is
• 16?
• 15?
• 14?
• 9? 10?
• Ego?
• Kindred chart with ego in the center, 15 is the
  mother, 16 the father, 9 the paternal grandmother
  and 10 the paternal grandfather, 14 the maternal
  aunt)

9
Assumptions

• Adopting children
• Bringing grandparents from the old country
• Bringing parents
• Marrying a foreign husband (British? Saudi
  Arabian?)
• Marrying a foreign wife (British? Ukrainian? A
  Filipina?)

10
Contexts revisited

• Using matchmaking services?
• Sojourning?
• Immigration?