Reconfigurations familiales à travers l’espace

Abstract

Sustained by data of a long-term ethnography, the article scrutinizes family configurations across transnational space. It asks how the configurations are related to respective (im-)mobility regimes, and what analytical language allows access to the phenomena. The empirical focus is on two women and their relatives, whose everyday lives and practices of doing family take place transnationally: What does it mean to be a mother of a “Swiss kindergarten child” in Ghana; or how do blatant differences in income play into family configurations between relatives living in Kosovo and Switzerland? The simultaneous incorporation in social and local respects is thereby not understood as incorporation into antagonistic others, but as mutually generating and constituting reference points. A conceptual lens of multi-referentiality is developed and how such an approach to transnational families can fruitfully enrich the understanding of diversified family configurations is shown.

Keywords

• ethnography
• transnational families
• multireferentiality
• status paradoxes
• childhood studies