South Asian transnational marriages in comparative perspective

Abstract This issue on South Asian transnational marriages brings diverse practices and networks into detailed ethnographic focus. Gender and agency are key themes explored in the collection, as well as the potential and actual transformation of gendered status resulting from marrying a migrant or joining a spouse overseas. The introduction identifies some common threads. Several articles challenge the assumption of wives' passivity in arranged marriages or in their joining husbands overseas, while one highlights the less‐documented experiences of men who migrate to join wives working abroad. The collection also offers insights into the cultural and emotional reasons for such marriages, complementing analyses that stress strategic motivations, and noting the emotional consequences of separation and new household formations for the experiences of marriage and parenthood. Marriage emerges as an important means of producing and transforming transnational networks, while marriage practices and dynamics are themselves transformed in the process.     

Rishtas: adding emotion to strategy in understanding British Pakistani transnational marriages

Abstract The popularity of transnational marriages that in most cases involve first cousins or other kin distinguishes Pakistanis from other British South Asian groups. In this article we explain the popularity of such marriages. We seek to complement accounts that stress kinship obligations and socio‐economic strategy by showing that transnational marriages are also motivated by the emotional ties of kinship. Central to this analysis is a focus on the Urdu/Panjabi concept of rishta, which conveys ideas about a ‘good’ match and about emotional connections between people. Our attention to emotional discourse between siblings, between parents and children and between prospective spouses in the context of marriage arrangements augments the understanding of what is at stake for those involved in transnational marriages. Our analysis also complements accounts that emphasize parental exegesis by offering a multigenerational perspective.     

Place,gender and power in transnational Sikh marriages

In this article I explore the importance of place during transnational marriages and in particular during wedding rituals. The rituals described are two Sikh weddings taking place in East Africa and the Punjab respectively. Highlighting the importance of status and hierarchy during wedding events, the ethnography focuses on how transnationalism is experienced as a generator of status as well as a potential risk to status. Through an account in the article of ritual practices in transnational marriages and households, I underline place as a significant factor in gender relations during wedding events.     

Technologies of the spouse: intimate surveillance in Senegalese transnational marriages

Rapid advances in communication technology in the last 20 years have enabled migrants to sustain social and economic investment in multiple geographic locations, or, to be transnational. In this article, by analysing non‐migrant Senegalese women's experiences in marriages with migrant Senegalese men, I critically engage in discussions about the role of technology in transnational family dynamics. In the intimate negotiations of transnational married life, these women feel profoundly ambivalent about the role of communication technologies in their lives. Instead of enabling ‘emotional closeness’, the virtual presence of their absent husbands frequently represents a spectre of suspicion, control and surveillance.     

Diasporic kinship hegemonies and transnational continuities in the Hmong diaspora

ABSTRACT

Although hegemony has been understood as the property of nation-states and the ruling classes, this paper explores cultural hegemonies among diasporic peoples by examining the pervasive compliance of Hmong living in Laos and the United States with the principles of their kinship system. Since these kinship rules are inculcated through parental education from an early age and are seen as essential for maintaining the cohesion of their dispersed diasporic community in the absence of a territorial ancestral homeland, they have become culturally engrained and taken-for-granted by Hmong through their voluntary consent and no longer have to be enforced by overt power and coercive means. However, like all hegemonies, the Hmong kinship system may also confront increasing challenges and contestation as it is enacted in the different nation-states where Hmong reside, and may eventually become an ideology that needs to be actively enforced and imposed by the direct use of power.     

Globalization and the increase in transnational care work: The flip side

Abstract

I argue that to understand the reality of who is (or is not) accessing care globally, we must examine the flip side of the flows of women migrating transnationally to perform caring labor. The flip side includes the levels of care the migrants experience and that attained by their families in their absence. Most migrants endure a care deficit, working in physically and emotionally stressful situations where they encounter many forms of discrimination. Their families may be better off economically, but not emotionally. I examine the role of the state, pointing out that many governments face a double bind—needing women to migrate for economic reasons but not wanting citizens abused abroad or the accompanying adverse publicity. I critique several government responses to this dilemma and conclude by assessing recent international initiatives to address migration problems, suggesting they lack perspective on how globalization influences women's migration.     

Transnational lives,transnational marriages: a review of the evidence from migrant communities in Europe

Abstract Whom do migrants marry? This question has become a popular topic of research, and existing studies identify a common trend: most of the non‐European, non‐Christian migrants in Europe marry someone from their country of origin. The motivations for such practices are to be found in the characteristics of transnational spaces and in the social structures that emerge in such spaces. Based on a review of research from several European countries, three such constellations are discussed: first, the obligations to kin, especially when migration regulations become more restrictive, and marriage becomes the last route by which to migrate to Europe. Second, new forms of global inequality, between the metropolitan centre and countries of the global periphery, give migrants in Europe improved status and standing in their society of origin and therefore excellent opportunities on the marriage market there. Third, gender relations have started to shift in both host society and migrant families. Men and women alike are trying to rebalance power relations within marriage and to shift them in their favour. In this process marriage to a partner from the country of family origin may promise strategic benefits. The article ends with suggestions for future research.     

The transnational lives and third space subjectivities of British Nigerian girls

Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in 2012 on British Nigerian young women who have gone to boarding school in Nigeria and returned to attend university in the UK, I use the concept of third space as a heuristic device for understanding their transnational subjectivities and practices. I argue that, for some, this third space is a transgressive one in which they can craft alternative subjectivities and narratives about African culture and political economy. Applying insights from decolonial theory, I seek to build on the transgressive nature of this third space. In positioning themselves variously as Londoners, Nigerians, dual and post‐nationals, they express key features of contemporary transnational European subjectivities. Yet, parental expectations that they marry Nigerians and members of the Nigerian diaspora serve to reproduce the racial distinctions and nationalist rhetoric of colonial modernity that their third space subjectivities contest.     

Women and the work of caring

In the U.S., care for chronically dependent people is done mostly by family and friends, with only sporadic community support. Though such unpaid caregiving work--the bulk of it performed by women--constitutes an enormous subsidy to the national welfare, the contribution is undervalued, and the negative practical consequences for caregivers seldom recognized.     

The Indonesian transmigration program in historical perspective

"The purpose of this paper is to look at what has been achieved by the transmigration program [in Indonesia], to examine the major problems that have arisen and to consider the present constraints which now cast some doubt upon the future of the program." A historical overview of government policies from 1905 to 1988 is provided, and problems of land supply, land use, and lack of funds are discussed. Data are from the 1961 and 1980 Indonesian censuses. (SUMMARY IN FRE AND SPA)     

Inverting the boomerang: examining the legitimacy of North–South–North campaigns in transnational advocacy

The boomerang model is typically used to describe campaigns in which international NGOs respond to requests from local activists, often from marginalized populations, for assistance in addressing local needs. Such campaigns are perceived to represent local interests and have some accountability to local actors. However, while the local–international–local pattern is often accurate, it does not capture the full spectrum of campaign development. This article theorizes an international–local–international or ‘inverse’ boomerang, in which international NGOs facing an international policy blockage initiate a transnational campaign, recruiting local activists to assist in the international advocacy effort. The article demonstrates the theory's plausibility using several cases of Northern‐initiated advocacy. It then examines the implications of the model for campaign legitimacy. It finds that inverse boomerang campaigns benefit from the same presumptions of legitimacy as traditional boomerang campaigns, but that representivity and accountability are substantially weaker, potentially disempowering the campaigns' claimed stakeholders.     

The twenty-first century revolutions and internationalism: a world historical perspective

ABSTRACT

In his essay, ‘It is imperative to reconstruct the Internationale of workers and peoples’, Samir Amin (2018) suggested that in order to ‘deconstruct the extreme centralization of wealth and the power that is associated with the system’, we should seriously study ‘the experience of the worker Internationales […], even if they belong to the past. This should be done, not in order to “choose” a model among them, but to invent the most suitable form for contemporary conditions’. In this paper, I will follow Amin's suggestion and provide a brief examination of the past experiences of first Internationales in the nineteenth century, and conditions that produced them, with an eye to the present moment. By comparing the political climate of the early twenty-first century to analogous comparable periods in world history, I will argue that today we need two distinct forms of global political organizations. First one should serve as a horizontal ‘movement of movements’ that reflects the spontaneous and creative energy of mass movements from below; the second one should serve as a hierarchically organized international party which points out, brings to front and represents the global and long-term interests of the movements against their local/short-term interests.     

Shifts in Grenadian migration: an historical perspective

Migration from Grenada has been varied and large over the past century, reaching levels which even resulted in negative population growth. This article focuses on changes in Grenadian migration over the past 80 years, with emphasis on the Grenada Revolution, 1979-1983. After the 1979 revolution there were some changes in the attitudes of Grenadians to migration, although many of the expected socioeconomic and demographic features of migration were still present. Migration may be seen as a means of circumventing low wages and limited opportunities, as a culturally specific pattern of behavior, or as a combination of economic, political and cultural factors. After reviewing the pattern of Grenadian migration over the past 80 years, some of the causes of and attitudes to migration are examined, and the meaning of migration for Grenadians is discussed.     

Severe self-neglect: an epidemiological and historical perspective

Older adults with severe self-neglect have multiple deficits in various social, functional and physical domains, and often live insqualor. These individuals often present with poor personal hygiene, domestic squalor and hoarding which results in a threat to their own health as well as personal and public safety. Severe self-neglect occurs along a continuum with older adults often having cognitive and affective disorders compared with younger individuals presenting with psychiatric illnesses. In cases of severe self-neglect with hoarding, evidence has shown this behavior occurs in diverse social strata and not among the wealthy and professionals alone as believed earlier. Due to the multiple conditions associated with severe self-neglect, this population will require an interdisciplinary, multidimensional approach to reduce morbidity and mortality rates including nursing home placement. Research on this group has been limited and is rarely described in the medical and nursing literature. Future research is needed to provide practitioners with effective screening instruments and interventions on cases of severe self-neglect.     

Grandparents,kinship ties,and belonging after migration: the perspective of second‐generation grandchildren

In this article, I investigate the roles of grandparents for second‐generation immigrants who live with their parents in a different country from their grandparents. I draw on in‐depth interviews with second‐generation Vietnamese immigrants living in the Czech Republic, where they are very often raised by Czech caregivers. The carers and the children are joined through the process of caregiving and become grandmothers and grandchildren to each other. The analysis focuses on how the interviewees make sense of, interpret, and understand their roles as grandchildren vis‐à‐vis their Czech and Vietnamese grandmothers. It shows how, after migration, the kinship ties are performed, negotiated, and reproduced on a micro level of everyday life, with tasks of caring, homeland visits, and a transnational/face‐to‐face maintenance of intimacy. The article concludes that grandparents play an important role in the grandchildren's sense of belonging both to their family kin and to the homeland.     

Accountability and nonprofit organizations: A historical perspective

American nonprofit organizations first developed in the nineteenth century as the organizational instruments through which Americans put their First Amendment freedoms of religion and political belief into practice. For one hundred years American nonprofits were held accountable by relatively small, compact communities of people who shared religious or other highly defined beliefs and values. In the twentieth century, many nonprofit organizations have grown very large and have adopted a scientific, general-service-to-the-community ethos. The legal, institutional, and cultural ideas and practices through which traditional nonprofits were, and are still, held accountable no longer seem to work equally well for the larger, more universal nonprofits of the late twentieth century.     

Death of a migrant: transnational death rituals and gender among British Sylhetis

In this article I discuss transnational burial rituals carried out in London and Sylhet. While collective identity and reaffirming social ties are important issues in discussing the burial of migrants in Sylhet, the main focus of the article is on gender. The analysis of what happens when Londonis die reveals a great deal about the differential effects of living between two places on men and women. While transnationalism may in some contexts be understood as potentially subversive, for the majority of Sylhetis in Britain movement between places is highly constrained by poverty and British immigration controls, as well as by particular gender and household relations. These in turn impact on men and women’s experiences of bereavement, as well as on their access to and relationship with the British state.