Legami in movimento: Un’introduzione ai viaggi migratori delle parentele
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-4216
Il concetto di famiglia è una costruzione sociale e quello comunemente usato nei paesi occidentali non permette di comprendere i complessi sistemi di interazione tra pratiche della cura dei figli, relazioni tra sposi e siblings, relazioni verticali e orizzontali tra parenti, legami coniugali, contratti matrimoniali, ménage domestici in altri paesi e ancor meno se queste relazioni vengono condotte a distanza. Nonostante ciò il termine “famiglia” è ampiamente usato negli studi sulla migrazione e la mobilità spesso in maniera acritica. Questa introduzione intende problematizzare questa prospettiva acritica e mira a evidenziare alcuni tranelli nei quali possono incorrere gli studi delle migrazioni e della mobilità adottando un’idea etnocentrica di famiglia. Lungi dal riproporre inflessibilmente sempre gli stessi identici schemi qualsiasi siano le circostanze, i legami di parentela si adattano e aiutano altri ad adattarsi alle situazioni incontrate in nuovi paesi, così fornendo una risorsa e un elemento essenziale di cultura della mobilità.
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Francesca Declich
Anuac
Kinship ties on the move: An introduction to the migratory journeys of kindred
Text.Serial.Journal
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Thematic section: Kinship ties on the move
2020-07-29
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2020-07-29
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Francesca Declich
2020/07/29
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-4216
87
University of Urbino, Italy
2239-625X
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en
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Kinship ties on the move: An introduction to the migratory journeys of kindred
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Kinship ties on the move
An introduction to the migratory journeys of kindred
Francesca DECLICH
Università di Urbino




ABSTRACT: The concept of family is a social construct, and the one used in Western
countries fails to accommodate the complex systems of interaction between parenthood
practices, relationships between spouses and siblings, vertical and horizontal relationships
among relatives, conjugal ties, marriage contracts, domestic arrangements in other
countries – the more so as these relations are frequently conducted at a distance.
Nonetheless, the term “family”is widely used in studies of migration and mobility,
though often uncritically. This introduction intends to expose the pitfalls incidental to
this uncritical perspective and aims to clear up some of the misunderstandings that can
occur when migration and mobility studies adopt an ethnocentric idea of family. Far
from being inflexible and forging the self-same links whatever the migration
circumstances, kinship ties adapt and help others adapt to the novel situations
encountered in new countries, thereby proving a resource and an essential part of the
culture of mobility.

KEYWORDS: CULTURE OF MOBILITY; TRANSLOCALITY; TRANSNATIONAL FAMILY; KINSHIP; ARRANGED MARRIAGE.




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Francesca Declich
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Migration, mobility and kinship
   The discussion about the crucial role that relatives, neighbours or
communities play as prompting factors in the individual’s choice to migrate
has been ongoing since the emergence of the first critiques of migration
theories based solely on economic paradigms (Castles, Miller 2005:47)1. One
of the main human factors recognized in the New Classical economy of
labour market explanations is that families, extended families or even
groups of neighbours might be involved in designing the migration path of
one or more members of the group, so that the migrant, once settled in the
host country, could help the others in their country of origin (Taylor 1987;
Stark 1991; Castles, Miller 2005). Insights into the bearing on mobility of
kinship ties and relational networks have come mostly from social sciences,
and especially anthropology and sociology that have used ethnographic
methods, albeit at different depths, in the study of migrations.
   That mobile people go through life cycles, entering into conjugal ties,
reproducing, delivering and raising children is obvious, yet the fact that such
a reality gets categorized as “family making” is reductive: it risks conflating
in a single, universal category all social interactions – the decision to enter
into conjugal ties, ways of parenting, plus the values people ascribe to these
stages in the life cycle either in their places of origin or when moving across
countries – and in so doing it obscures rather than illuminates cultural
dynamics and related values. In fact if there is no consensus about the
concept of family (Moore 1988; Goulborne 2010) it is even more complicated
to try and apply such a concept to the multifarious domestic arrangements
adopted by the diverse cultures of the world in the course of their
movements and migrations. The word family, from a western point of view,
calls to mind a nuclear family composed of mother, father and their children;
this is a very idealistic concept, as it is not reflected in the domestic

1. Some papers of this thematic section were part of the conference Gender, Generations,
and Family in Transnational Migration (held in Lisbon on 6-7 December 2016) in the
framework of the project “Migration, family and social network relationships between Africa
and Southern Europe” (Italy- Portugal 2015-2017), resulting from the collaboration of: the
Institute of Social Sciences (ICS-ULisboa), the Istituto di Studi sulle Società del
Mediterraneo (CNR-It), and the University of Urbino Carlo Bo (Uniurb-I), Paola Avallone,
Immacolata Caruso, Marzia Grassi, Bruno Venditto and Tatiana Ferreira. I am grateful to
two anonymous reviewers for good suggestions on how to reorganize this introduction.


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KINSHIP TIES ON THE MOVE                                                          89


arrangements of many peoples and countries, but it is certainly an idea
continually appealed to by the mass media which, in these times of
consumerism, tend to socially construct the needs of such domestic units
and thus target each member of a nuclear family with specific consumer
advertisements.
   Concerning the legal provisions that regulate conjugal ties, those, too, are
different not only in different countries of the world but even in each of the
countries of the European Union. By way of example, it is enough to cite that
living under the same conjugal roof is legally part of what is considered
being married in Italy, but it is not so in other countries, or the different laws
in different countries regulating the end of the marriage contract, the
divorce. Thus, taking the western concept of family as a frame may impose
ways of looking at the life cycle which are not necessarily shared universally.
The use of this concept and the legal regulations underlying it in a
completely different legal system leads to misunderstandings and, indeed, to
abuses – a good example are the sort of “conjugal ties” established by the
Italians with the Eritrean women in the colony.
   During colonial times in Eritrea, the Italian scholar Conti Rossini was
impressed on encountering a society in which the institution of temporary
marriage was considered perfectly legal (the demoz or quzar). Only women
devoid of better prospects would engage in such relationships, not least
because the woman concerned would not be entitled to inherit part of the
husband’s estate (Barrera 2011: 100-101), but the Italians, for whom marriage
was indissoluble, tended to confuse demoz with concubinage. The Eritrean
women involved in such relationships were swindled. While the Italian men
considered it a sort of “temporary marriage” or “marriage by reward”, as
accepted by the customary law, they did not take permanent responsibility
for the offspring of the couple, as the local tradition in Eritrea envisaged
even after the relationship had terminated. Thus the children born of such
relationships were often abandoned in the colony with their mothers. The
colonial officers knew of the cultural misunderstanding that could occur.
Discussing the different legal statuses of different forms of marriage,
Ferdinando Martini, Governor of the Eritrean colony at the turn of the
twentieth century, stated that “the White could cheat and the indigenous
woman could be cheated” (Martini 1946 in Sorgoni 1998: 129). The demoz
was used so as to enable the institution of madamato to provide permanent
sexual partners for the soldiers and colonial officers in service. Yet, in Eritrea
the women would consider their conjugal agreement a legal marriage while
for the Italians it was a wholly different thing: a form of concubinage in


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which they would refrain from interfering with customary law but blithely
disregard the local rule which obliged them to support the offspring of the
couple for life.
   Talking about the life cycle of mobile people in contexts of translocality,
misunderstanding of terms is usual, as in many intercultural relations. Yet,
one problem with many studies on migration is that they are written from
the perspective of people who consider migration and mobility to be
occasional characteristics of lives that are assumed normally to be resident
in one place.

The paradigm of sedentarism
   Allow me an apparent digression to clarify my argument. Some
suggestions are provided by Africanist studies which have developed a
radically new approach to research into movements of people, also from the
point of view of “those who move” rather than of “those who stay” (Declich,
Rodet 2018).
   As a premise to her studies on refugees in Africa, Liisa Malkki has clearly
highlighted that anthropologists have always encountered migrants during
their ethnographic studies; yet, for a long time, they were not able to include
them as objects of their study because the anthropologists’ paradigm of
knowledge would see the migrants as incompatible with what was
considered the minimal unit of study, a culture, a tribe, an ethnic group.
Malkki dubs the process of normalizing the existence of nations in which
inhabitants must have fixed residency the “national order of things”, a
specific way of looking at the world that, besides numerous other
assumptions, considers sedentarism and permanent human settlement as
the norm (Malkki 1995). Yet, in the African continent, nations were imposed
through a top-down process and very recently – since the Berlin Conference
(1884-1885) with the European scramble for Africa – upon populations that
were organized according to different political forms (see also Declich and
Rodet 2018), not to mention those who practised nomadic lifestyles. Thus,
the imposition of national borders entailed sidelining all those who did not
fit the kind of sedentarism required in a colonial nation state. Turton
addresses the wording we use to classify social groups and argues that “the
very word ‘displacement’ implies an assumption that all human populations
‘belong’ in a certain place and that, in an ideal world, they would all be
where they belong” (Turton 1996: 97). This would entail the belief that one’s
identity is based ‘naturally’ on association with a place, and thus the absence



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KINSHIP TIES ON THE MOVE                                                        91


of that connection is seen as losing “part of one’s very humanity” (Turton
1996: 97). No wonder the African experience can still tell us something
about living without borders.
   Certain social constructions of kinship were part of specific cultures of
mobility (Declich 2018a). The capacity of the Somalis to travel all over the
world, for instance, and their success in adapting everywhere quickly and
easily has long been due to their kinship system, based on a unique
patrilineal allegiance in which even far distant cousins are considered like
brothers (sing. walaal) and, therefore, deserve almost unlimitedly long
hospitality. The proverbial hospitality (Declich 2007) and welcome afforded
even very remote members of the same patrilineage was solidly grounded in
the nomadic pastoral livelihood culture but proved successful even in
Western countries, especially with first generation migrants, as part of a
culture of mobility. Although this hospitable attitude is becoming less
widespread in Western countries due to the different dwelling conditions in
European or American cities and the lifestyles imposed in Western
countries, it has served as the basis for the extensive network of Somalis
living in many parts of the world. This kind of network eludes state control:
many people can live in the same dwelling and easily move elsewhere
undetected, following the paths of their invisible network. In the pastoralist
contexts of the semi-arid Somali environment, the members of a household
stay apart for many months of the year, depending on the availability of
water in the wells and on the possible rains. The camel herds must be
pastured in areas where there are specific plants to eat, while other animals
like goats and cows cannot survive transhumance. Thus young and older
men may follow the camel herds while women and younger children may
stay longer in semi-permanent settlements, taking care of other animals.
Thus the social distance they maintain from one another varies according to
the season, the productive activities and other factors.
   The fact that uncontrolled movements of human groups come to be
defined as problematic goes hand-in-hand with the wording used to name
those who move as “displaced”, in which the prefix “dis” equals “lack of”,
meaning therefore lack of place (Turton 1996: 97), thus denoting mobility,
rather than settlement, as an inadequate form of livelihood.
   But what can a state make of a lifestyle that involves mobility and where
domestic arrangements and conjugal ties are by default often maintained at
a distance? Even nation states in the Horn of Africa have devised policies to
foster sedentarism; in the Horn of Africa to settle nomads is also meant to be
a way of combating forms of translocal trade that have come to be


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considered smuggling, although trade is part of the normal activities of
nomads that travel in semi-arid environments (Manger, Ahmed 2000).
Nomads are not easily traceable when it comes to paying taxes. The
undesirability of uncontrolled migration and the fact that it is portrayed as a
problematic phenomenon thus stems from the need for social control over
people whose livelihoods the states consider desirable only if sedentary
rather than mobile.
   With this in mind, studying from an emic point of view the way mobile
people manage their conjugal ties, as well as the care of their children, may
prove a perspective from which we can gain a better understanding of
mobility which always involves some sort of domestic arrangements which
may not entail a fixed place of residence over the year. Such an insight is
only likely to result if we avoid imposing our own category of “family”,
framed from the point of view of those who are settled, which would lead us
to find much of what we are looking for, i.e. a unit similar to a nuclear family
everywhere.

National, transnational, translocal and state control
   In 2002 in a cornerstone text on the discussion of kinship in migration
contexts Ulla Vuorela and Deborah Bryceson (2002) elaborate on the concept
of the transnational family. Assuming with Henry James Maine (Maine 1861;
Bryceson, Vuorela 2002: 9-10) that family is not a “biological unit per se” but
a social construction, they see the concept of the transnational family as one
that may unhinge the “nation state’s definition of legitimate immigrant
families” (Bryceson, Vuorela 2002: 10). There is a tendency from a Western
viewpoint – they assert – “to make the family synonymous with the house-
hold; the management and sharing of everyday life in a common dwelling”
(Bryceson, Vuorela 2002: 28); as this unit becomes the target of social
policies, the authors see this idea of a household as something that cannot
accommodate the different composition and structure that families assume
when they get dispersed in different countries. Therefore, they propose to
correct the term “family” with the adjective “transnational”, suggesting a
larger space than one nation. In the European context, Deborah Bryceson
asserts “transnationalism, the espousal of different locational loyalties and
cultures, was potentially subversive” (Bryceson 2002: 31).
   Their book, as the title spells out, refers however to “new European
frontiers and global networks”; it thus appears a text addressed to a
European audience and is meant to provides tools to expand the ideal-type
concept of family by adding the transnational aspect to it. The concept of


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KINSHIP TIES ON THE MOVE                                                        93


transnationalism itself, though it does open the idea to relationships that
can cross nations, seems at the same time to imply that transnational
families are a new phenomenon by neglecting the fact that many translocal
relationships and translocal domestic arrangements were creating bridges
among peoples long before nations existed (Declich 2018b: 8-16).
   Despite the intention, the term “transnational families” has come to be
used in a vague way, yet reproducing the paradigm of sedentarism as a
normal feature of anybody’s identity and the existence of nations as a
prerequisites for the existence of domestic arrangements based on
translocality.
   Many studies on migrations have arisen in national contexts in which
states need to exert social control on kin groupings through their legal and
welfare systems. Family units are a basis for the state’s social control
(McIntosh 1979; Moore 1988). Thus, if conjugal ties or parental care take
place at a distance, and especially across nations, this appears an anomaly.
In Europe social services identify individuals as family members and target
families as the “ideal” units to which services are addressed. This approach
also entails that families “must” provide certain services for free, including
care of children and elderly people and, in general, all the work necessary to
generate and take care of the labour force during the life-long cycle
(McIntosh 1979; Moore 1988).
   Yet, using the western concept of “family” for the networks of relatives
through which humans navigate mobility may also obscure a number of
complex social interactions that lie behind the conjugal relations of mobile
people. Moreover, it also obliges the mobile people to represent themselves
according to that model, (also Decimo, Gribaldo 2017: 204) for legal systems
only allow strictly defined family units and states offer welfare only to
western-looking families (Lee 2013), as well described in the newly
published book by Frédérique Fogel (2019). The impact of this sort of welfare
has been well presented by Ida Idjayawanis through the example of the
conjugal relations of three Swahili women who migrated to the United
Kingdom. Single women with children who live on British national welfare
are sought as second wives by Swahili men who cannot support them and
now count on the UK social services for it; they may marry them according to
the Muslim rite but would not do that under British Common Law as
polygamous marriages are not allowed in the UK and the womens’ welfare
benefit would be forfeited (Hadjawayanis 2018). In describing how the
different standards of welfare in the European countries influence the life
cycle of individuals and their positioning in the social hierarchies of kin


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dispersed in different countries, also Aurora Massa (this issue) talks of the
welfare system in the UK and highlights how it boosts the position of refugee
women alone with children to the detriment of male self-esteem. This might
create problems for fathers who are stuck in countries like Italy that block
any form of integration and see their wives developing skills and
opportunities.
   Notwithstanding the fact that there is no consensus about the term
“family”, social science discussion of transnational migrations towards
Europe has been pervaded by the concept of family used in a broad sense,
often vaguely defined. While the large majority of scholars have kept using
the term “family” (Goulbourne, Reynolds, Solomons, Zontini, 2010), some
have developed the discussion about transnational families (Bryceson,
Vuorela 2002; Evergeti, Zontini 2006; Razy 2011; Grassi, Vivet, Marinho
2016), others have made clear that the idea of transnational families is
highly contested (König, de Regt 2010: 5) and some others, especially
anthropologists, have preferred the term “kinship” (for instance, Gardner
2002 and Decimo, Gribaldo 2017).
   Interestingly, the latter have re-analysed the importance of kinship in
migrations as a “space deeply crisscrossed by borders” (Decimo, Gribaldo
2017: 208; Massa 2017), but also as a set of relationships that the states try
to control by choosing “how they fit into ‘natural’ relationships deserving of
state recognition” (Decimo, Gribaldo 2017: 207). I would add, in Henrietta’s
Moore words, that states “tend to promote a particular form of
‘family’/household structure: the male wage earner, with dependent wives
and children (Wilson 1977; McIntosh 1978; 1979)” (Moore 1988: 128), which
also allows the reproduction of the labour force by exploiting women’s
unpaid and invisible contribution as domestic care workers. Thus, those
kinship networks that are not consistent with the nuclear family model are
not considered “normality” as they tend to elude this kind of state control.
Kinship as a culture of mobility experienced by people with a pastoralist
background, like the Somalis, seems therefore to be a resilient pattern of
behaviour which is also more susceptible of innovation and negotiation.
   In this thematic issue we suggest looking at human movements by trying
to reverse our standpoint and, as far as possible, using local concepts of
kinship and kinship networks so that the western concept of family is not
superimposed on social relations that are framed elsewhere through
different ways of looking at them. This reasoning may open new possibilities
in thinking about the links between kinship networks and mobility. The
three articles presented here tackle different kinds of dynamics of



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KINSHIP TIES ON THE MOVE                                                        95


relatedness that become crucial in mobility: conjugal ties at a distance,
parental care at a distance, forms of friendship that are used to get away
with kinship constraints, connections between mother and daughter in order
to chart a course through the rules governing migration. Some individuals
resort to migration anxious to escape parental wishes. Describing these ties
and dynamics in their interconnectedness and diversity, I argue, is far more
productive than bundling them all together under the single heading of
family, which would also make women’s care work invisible.

Negotiating gender roles, kinship and translocal mobility
   In Egypt Mulki Al-Sharmani (Al-Sharmani 2006) noticed that for several
Somali women the chance to be on their own as refugees in the country had
allowed re-negotiation of their gender roles within their couple and some of
them had also become the main economic support and decision maker for a
number of their relatives. Similarly, Getachew (1996) in a refugee camp on
the northern Kenyan borders found that women, when they become refugees
and live away from their husbands due to forced migration, may acquire new
skills and tend to renegotiate their authority within the groups of relatives.
   In this issue Aurora Massa describes how many Eritreans are obliged for
years to conduct conjugal ties and relations with siblings at a considerable
distance. She also notices that gender relations change during this process.
Many Eritrean refugees cannot return to their country because they dodged
military service, but they are condemned to live apart from siblings and
partners as the border regimes may not even allow them to travel freely
within Europe. It is not uncommon that parents travel occasionally to the
country where they have become refugees or asylum seekers but still their
relational lives with siblings, partners and other relatives, when pursuable,
extends over a broad area that can cover several countries. Personal
encounters depend entirely on the possibilities offered by border regulations
and travel opportunities. This distance, and especially the border regulations
between African and European countries, allows for negotiation not only in
gender roles but also in a variety of other aspects of the life cycle such as
relationships among spouses and siblings, practices of parenthood as well as
marriage forms. The very border regulations sometimes shape and determine
the ways people decide to initiate conjugal ties.
   Also the Somali refugees that travel within Africa maintain their vertical
and horizontal relationships among spouses, children, parents and siblings
at long distance and vast geographical space (Declich, this issue). The
chances of entertaining such relationships in person are still determined by

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socio-economic conditions, even in contexts in which border regulations
may be less strict. For instance, in ten years the Somali Bantu refugee,
Arbay, could only go twice from the refugee camp of Kakuma to Chogo, in
Tanzania, to meet her relatives in person. Although distances from northern
Kenya to central east Tanzania may be shorter, and borders more easily
crossed than the European ones, poverty and working conditions may
prevent such meetings from occurring frequently.
   The socio-economic conditions may also have an impact on how long
people stay apart. Praneet, a Pakistani woman who has permanent residency
in Italy and an Italian passport, – as described by Sara Bonfanti (this issue) –
given her status as a middle-class person, is able not only to go and visit
Pakistan as she wishes, but she was entitled to go, marry and come back fifty
days after her wedding. She actually decided to live apart from her new
husband, only visiting him regularly until getting pregnant. Pregnancy
strengthened the chances of obtaining family reunification and his
husband’s transferral to Italy. Thus Praneet, holding a residence permit, can
navigate the Italian legal system concerning marriage, unlike the Eritreans
described by Aurora Massa (this issue).What is particularly striking in the
Pakistani case is that Praneet chose an institution of her Pakistani cultural
inheritance, the arranged marriage, which would otherwise seem to restrict
her freedom, to pursue her aim of having her Pakistani husband come to
reside in Italy,
   How binding are the constraints of kinship ideologies in translocality and
how much space is there for individual agency? In all three articles, the
actors try to find in mobility an opportunity to negotiate a personal space
within the constraints that kinship ideologies impose. Praneet, contrary to
the customary practices of her mother’s homeland, is able to have her newly
married husband displaced from Pakistan to Italy, thus setting up a
matrilocal and matrifocal couple. Arbay manages to go to live in Kenya and
study there, avoids an undesired marriage in Tanzania and, thereafter,
marries a partner of her choice in the refugee camp of Kakuma. Mohamed
does not achieve what he wishes, but his motivation for escaping to Kenya is
one of social mobility: he wants to find a good job and start a new life. Thus
the articles describe the agency of several actors that try to “bend” the
kinship ideologies of their relatives to their own purposes, whether
successfully or not. Certainly the distance from the original group offers a
certain freedom from constraints, a space for action which would not have
been available had they stayed in their own country (Declich 2018b).



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KINSHIP TIES ON THE MOVE                                                        97




The variable value of conjugal ties and children
   The ethnographic material presented here shows the extent to which
conjugal ties are seen differently in different contexts of migration. Setting
up conjugal ties does not lead universally to the experience of an ideal
settled family as one might envisage a white, middle class, Western nuclear
family, a couple with two children in a comfortable home. This is not only
because border regulations introduce obstacles but also because the sheer
diversity of human experience shapes human relations in many different
ways and permanent residence in the same place for life cannot be taken for
granted; family is a socio-cultural construction and many people do not
necessarily aim at a nuclear family model. Social mobility is one reason why
the Eritreans whom Aurora Massa met start conjugal ties: they represent a
real opportunity for major life changes. The kinship ideology which
facilitates their removal to Western countries clashes with the border
regulations which, in extreme cases, prevent their even meeting as couples.
   The “ideal family” stereotype also obscures fact that some kinds of
migration occur in order to escape from ties with relatives that are
oppressive, negative and even dangerous for the girls who experience them.
Paola Tabet (2004) has already shown that many African women migrate to
urban areas to flee from restrictive and oppressive traditional customs. The
work recently published by Katarzyna Grabska, Marina de Regt, and
Nicoletta del Franco shows the extent to which girls’ internal migrations in
Ethiopia, Bangladesh and Sudan are often prompted by these kinds of
dramatic relations within families (Grabska, De Regt, del Franco 2018). For
instance, children whose parents have died are often considered cursed in
Ethiopia and thus are mistreated by relatives so as to provoke their flight.
Maltreatment by relatives also pushes Bangladeshi girls to flee from their
homes. Mohamed’s escape to Kenya, presented in this issue (Declich), is not
as dramatic: the parents were set on organizing a wedding that Mohamed did
not want. His flight, however, in search of a good job in Mombasa, is
embedded in the framework of the kinship ideology which sees children
trying to achieve successful life standards that will, later, bring secondary
benefits for their parents.
   Arranged marriages are practices which are acceptable in Eritrea, Somalia
and many other countries. Thus, the three cases reported in this volume
should not come as a surprise: Eritrean arranged marriages with refugees
living in Europe are regarded as a very good opportunity to ensure oneself


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and one’s relatives back home a good standard of living (Massa, this issue);
the Somali Bantu refugee woman who, having studied and resided in the
refugee settlement of Mkuiu and in Chogo in Tanzania, agreed to an
arranged marriage in the refugee camp of Dadaab, hopes she might be
offered, at some point, a resettlement in the US (Declich, this issue).
Praneet, on the other hand, finds that an arranged marriage organized in a
traditional way conflates two of her wishes: giving fresh impetus to her life
in Italy where she is unlikely to get naturalized, and then embracing her
mother’s Pakistani traditions while still retaining her life in Italy as a
married woman. She, too, navigates the legal system to achieve her
objectives by entering on conjugal ties (Bonfanti, this issue). The main aims
of these marriages go far beyond the desire to start a life as an “ideal couple”
living in a fixed place of residence. Kinship becomes a resource for mobility.
   It clearly emerges from the accounts of the Somali refugees in Tanzania
(Declich in this issue) and the Eritreans in several countries (Massa in this
issue) that kinship ideologies are often the support of a system of social
security that is the only one available, especially in conditions of poverty.
Some of the practices which look as though they curtail the individual
human rights of young people are sometimes part of this social security
system (Declich 2016a, 2011). In such contexts parents count on their
children as if they were their retirement scheme and, indeed, in many parts
of the world there are no such schemes offered institutionally. The moral
and economic obligations that Eritrean migrants feel towards their parents
and relatives back home is part of the “moral model of the ‘successful
migrant’” (Massa this issue), but is also a strong driver for people living in
Africa, even for non-mobile people; it is a moral model based on the lack of
any other institutional social security or welfare.
   The work of kinship in contexts of mobility is thus much deeper than one
might imagine. It does not simply reproduce its typically resilient character
(Decimo, Gribaldo 2018: 206) wherever it operates; in translocal contexts
aspects of kinship are reinterpreted and reorganized in response to the
individual’s negotiation of the new environment (Declich 2018b). That has
been the experience of the Shariif along the coast of the Western Indian
Ocean, of the Hadrami and the Banyans in many countries overlooking the
Indian Ocean, of the Umar Ba Umar in Somalia as shown elsewhere (Declich
2016b). Ironically, while border regulations produce a scattering of relatives
dispersed in several countries, setting up painful obstacles in the way of
spouses and their children meeting, however irregularly, it is not true that
all the individuals involved only long for permanent reunification under the


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KINSHIP TIES ON THE MOVE                                                         99


same roof, as the Family Law in Italy, for example, envisages for spouses.
The idea of family, among the Somalis for instance, as a large network
extending through many branches bears only a pale resemblance to what a
middle class white European means by using the same word. Yet, even those
diverse ideas get readapted to different conditions when people travel, as
Praneet shows by setting up a matrilocal marriage in an otherwise
patrilineally organized Pakistani culture.

Three ethnographic contributions
   The article by Sara Bonfanti describes the way in which the Pakistani girl
Praneet, raised in Italy, reconciles the pressure she is under to comply with a
marriage arranged by her parents in Pakistan with her desire to continue
living in Italy and enjoying her livelihood in Europe. She, in fact, goes to
Pakistan and marries the designated husband, agreeing thus to a return
marriage (that is, with a Pakistani living in Pakistan) and fulfilling her
parent’s expectations; quite soon, however, after the wedding, she goes back
to Italy and succeeds in arranging to bring her husband there through a
family reunification. She is thus pro-active in a context in which a marriage
to a countryman served to reinforce her cultural identity in a place, Italy,
where she could not hope for naturalization. Contrary to the usual idea that
men go first as migrants and later bring their womenfolk along (Cvanjer
2018), it was her mother, Kanval, who arrived first in Italy to open the road
for her husband. Thus the daughter, Praneet, seizes her opportunities in
dialogic relations with the norms of her original group in India but follows
her mother’s course in securing her lifestyle by first migrating and then, as
an economically successful migrant, bringing a husband to join her, rather
than the other way round. In some ways, she bent the patriarchal gender
rules that constrained her life and navigated the opportunities of the
neoliberal governance of migrant human capital in Italy. She does certainly
exert agency in navigating structural constraints. The impossibility of
obtaining naturalization in Italy hampered her chances of full integration
and fostered her desire to follow at least some Indian traditions. Mobility
facilitated a combination of mother and daughter agencies in which a
negotiation of gender roles occurred.
   The article on conjugal ties and parental care at a distance by Aurora
Massa reflects on the experience of three Eritrean refugees in dealing with
their private lives across continents and European nations. Marrying a
refugee in Europe has become the easiest way to gain access to European


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100                                                           FRANCESCA DECLICH


countries through family reunification and this can be done by both men and
women. Therefore the most widespread way of guaranteeing a wedding, the
arranged marriage, is also practised across Eritrea and Europe and represents
an important investment which parents and relatives can make for a child.
The people Aurora Massa presents have to struggle between an ideology of
romantic love and a livelihood strategy that, even though it may seem an
economic contract rather than a love story, can ensure a much higher
standard of living to an individual and to his/her relatives at home. One of
the cases describes the story of Efrem and his spouse Huda. They were able
to arrive in Europe separately, one in England and one in Italy, and they
could only meet in France, due to the fact that they were unable to join each
other in either England or Italy because of visa restrictions. The spouses
could not spend much time together even on a temporary basis and the
children were taken care of at a distance. In time, both managed to lead a
relatively successful life in their respective host countries, but Efrem could
never, because of visa requirements, visit the children and the spouse in
England. The article shows how different approaches to marriage can be, but
also the extent to which the Dublin Treaty and the enforcement of national
borders in Europe (and the Dublin Treaty) can put people who marry in the
impossible situation of not being able to live together or travel within
European countries. At odds with the ideal which envisaged a transnational
space in which supposed families are at liberty to develop their interactions,
we have a class of people who are free to decide whether to interact with
their loved one across states or to a lifestyle that entails travelling (for
instance, UN and World Bank staff, international students), while others,
though married, cannot meet even if they would like to. This class dynamic,
determined also by the socio-economic status of the people in mobility, has
been effectively highlighted by Marzia Grassi in research work on Portuguese
engineers working for the petrol industry in Angola who conduct a good part
of their time with wives and children resident in Portugal through the
internet (Grassi 2016; Tamburlini 2016). Thus, observing that kinship ties
are moulded by boundaries and border regulations has important political
implications but does not point to a brand new phenomenon since such ties
have always been very elastic and people have used them in creative ways
across countries to suit their interests or the requirements of their domestic
arrangements in settling areas, as suggested by the study of several groups
along the coast of the Western Indian Ocean (Declich, 2016b). In Massa’s
article, as well as in Bonfanti’s, conjugal ties are seen as allowing great


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KINSHIP TIES ON THE MOVE                                                       101


opportunities for mobility and for imagining different ways of life. People
realise that and they take their chance. Such ties, though, do not seem
particularly connected with ideologies of romantic life or a marked desire to
spend time together as a couple. The conventional way of talking about
conjugal ties as pertaining to the “private” sphere proves again to be an
euphemism; calling the domestic sphere “private” eclipses the work
performed in it as well as the cost of such work; the state, as feminist
literature highlighted long ago, exerts social control over conjugal ties and
the ways married people ought to behave (Moore 1988). The border
regulations are one of those forms of social control. To govern migrations,
states attempt to delineate those kinship ties to be regarded as legitimate
relationships (Bryceson, Vuorela 2002: 10). On the other hand, border
regimes separate relatives of specific undesired groups of migrants putting
their lives in paradoxical situations.
   My own article shows that migration paths do not always follow the
parents’ or kinship groups’ desires. Rather than following the parents’ advice
or complying with what they feel as obligations towards the parents, girls
and boys often escape from kinship ties that they perceive as too
constrictive. Thus kinship ties may be a push factor in opting to pursue the
migration path, not because the migrants follow the parents’, communities’
or ethnic group’s project but because they wish to escape, at least
temporarily, from such a project. Arbay, for instance, after completing her
fourth year of study in Tanzania, did not have funds enough to continue
studying. Her decision, therefore, was to go and live in a refugee camp in
Kenya, a two-day journey from where her relatives lived in Tanzania, to seek
more options for studying and to avoid early marriage. Her brother
Mohamed, who also did not manage to go on to secondary school in
Tanzania, escaped from the village together with a male friend to try their
luck as workers in Kenya. In the end they had to come back to the village as
they fell ill. The migratory paths of the children were not decided within the
kin group, but rather in negotiation or opposition to their parents’ will. In
both cases, the boy and the girl had clearly exerted agency in pursuing a path
designed to lead to a different life from the one that the structural
constraints of their kinship group had traced for them. On the other hand,
should they be successful and attain a good standard of living, their
achievements would lead back into a path which their parents had
envisaged, i.e. to ensure social security for their relatives.



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102                                                            FRANCESCA DECLICH


   The articles describing conjugal relations refrain from mentioning how
spouses kept apart by borders reacted to the lack of affection and sexual life.
In preparing her married life, the young woman described by Bonfanti does
not hesitate to stay away from her newly wedded husband for months until
she obtains family reunification. The conjugal ties seem more of an
achievement in one’s life – useful in attaining a desired livelihood – than the
realization of a romantic love. The very widespread practice of the arranged
marriage is resorted to as an option that may increase the chance of a better
standard of living in Europe. It is not surprising that people are ready to
entertain and preserve such ties, even across countries, especially if they
promise better living conditions.

Life stories and diachronic anthropology
   It turns out that the three articles in this thematic section present life
histories describing the trajectories of migrants over several years. These life
histories have not been elicited through straightforward interviews with the
actors, designed for that purpose; they have been gathered over the course
of time through longterm friendships that the authors have maintained with
the protagonists of these stories. This shows the importance of this specific
tool in anthropology in understanding mobility from a diachronic perspective,
a tool that implies a long-term commitment from the anthropologists
involved. It has come to be recognized as an anthropological method of
almost crucial importance that can be used in multi-sited fieldworks
conducted over an extended period, and one that provides a formidable
density of information. Long-term fieldwork shows the extent to which the
anthropological approach involves a thorough knowledge of the socio-
cultural background of the “interviewees”. Such knowledge has usually been
acquired at many levels beyond the range of the mere interview by reflecting
on one’s own experience in the field (Piasere 2002: 42-43), spending a long
time within the group one studies while waiting for the people to give you
their point of view (Piasere 2002: 183-184), resonating with the people, as
suggested by the Balinese to Norwegian anthropologist Wikan (1992 in
Piasere 2002: 148), “trying to interpret with all available emotional and
cognitive means”… “fragments of cognitions, fragments of emotions,
fragments of practices” (Piasere 2002: 185) and counting on the embodied
knowledge (Okley 1992: 18). The long anthropological fieldwork also allows
one change one’s mind through the process of tuning the researcher to the
emic wavelength of the interviewees and the subjects involved in the


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KINSHIP TIES ON THE MOVE                                                        103


research. Such a process of knowing differs from what can be achieved
through the in-depth interviews used by sociologists as the main tool of a
sociological qualitative ethnographic method (Cipolla, De Lillo 2004). The
latter interviews, albeit defined as in -depth and used either to explore
hypotheses that are pre-constructed before starting the research work
(Statera 2014) or to enquire into values (Marradi 2005), are not a flexible
enough tool to pursue local explanations that could arise while the field
experience is ongoing. Nor can they alone provide a “thick”, thorough
knowledge of a context (Geertz 1975), as happens with anthropological
ethnographic work in which the lives, aspirations and socio-cultural
background of the people becomes known to the researcher at many levels.

Conclusion
   Domestic arrangements, conjugal relations, forms of parenthood, ways of
experiencing siblinghood lived at distance, networks of lineages that
constitute hospitality for their far distant relatives, all practices which do
not resemble the ideal-type of a western resident nuclear family elude the
control of the state. Although the border regimes exasperate all possible
relationships experienced at distance, as can be seen in this issue from the
case of the Eritreans, these networks still evade national control because
they are not considered within the range of possibilities. In the cases shown
here, kinship is a resource for mobility and an idiom that can help in
devising paths and choosing behaviours to adapt to mobility.
   All the articles show the extreme fluidity of the concept of family and the
different ways conjugal ties, or avoidance of conjugal ties, are used to pursue
individual aspirations. A poorer or richer socio-economic background can be
the driving force behind either migration or mobility, but the conditions of
mobility differ accordingly. Socio-economic status makes a difference in a
context where border regimes are becoming ever stricter and less porous.
   Choices that had been made on the assumption that crossing European
and American borders was easier have a strong impact on the way people
rethink their lives and the decisions they take at key stages in their
lifecycles. People may marry and remain in refugee camps for twenty years,
waiting and dreaming of resettlement in Western countries, or they may
start a conjugal relation that can rarely be enjoyed together. Barren refugee
camps become ideal destinations for a Somali Bantu newly wedded couple in
the wait for a possible resettlement in Western countries, as shown in my
own article (Declich, this issue). Arranged marriages that young “modern”


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104                                                           FRANCESCA DECLICH


Eritreans were trying to avert become desirable in the perspective of possibly
spending their married lives in the West through a family reunification
procedure. Conjugal ties in certain conditions are seen as offering the
possibility of social mobility for middle-class Eritreans and for the Italian
Pakistani woman, Praneet, (Massa and Bonfanti, this issue); in other
circumstances they are viewed as an obstacle to the achievement of young
people’s aspirations, as in the case of Arbay and Mohamed in Tanzania,
coming from a poor peasant family. And yet the debt incurred through the
upbringing received from parents is still often the driving force which
propels mobility.




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KINSHIP TIES ON THE MOVE                                                             105



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 Francesca DECLICH is Associate Professor at the University of Urbino Carlo Bo. She
 has been Research Fellow of the Refugee Studies Centre in Oxford as well as
 Fulbright research scholar at Northwestern University and Stanford University.
 She has carried out long term ethnographic fieldwork and archival research in
 Somalia, Tanzania and Mozambique and worked with Somali Refugees in East
 Africa and the US. Her latest edited book published for Brill is Translocal
 Connections across the Indian Ocean: Swahili-speaking networks on the move. She
 recently co-edited with historian Marie Rodet a thematic issue on memories and
 migration for the journal Africa (2018) and a special issue on research films on
 slavery for the Journal of Global Slavery (2020).
 francesca.declich@uniurb.it




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Francesca Declich
