12 - Debating Culture across Distance: Transnational Families and the Obligation to Care

Summary

Introduction

This chapter explores some of the transnational dimensions of debates within and about families, in particular the way kin who are separated by distance and national borders construct and negotiate cultural notions of obligation about aged care. I argue that debates about migration and caregiving concerning transnational families, both internal (at the micro level of everyday practice) and external (at the generally more meso and macro levels of policy and service provision), must be understood not as an attribute of individuals or families alone, but as a function of relationships between agents and social institutions within and across both home and host settings. In other words, a focus on transnational caregiving shifts attention from the behaviour of individuals to the pattern of relations between people, social units and institutions. In this way, internal debates concerning migration and care within the transnational domestic sphere (Gardner & Grillo 2002) provide a link between micro, meso and macro levels of analysis locating the practices of individuals and families in the context of local and transnational communities and states.

This examination of migration, family, culture and caregiving is explored ethnographically using case studies of transnational families comprising ageing parents from Italy, New Zealand and Afghanistan (the latter living in transit in Iran) and their adult migrant children living in Perth, Western Australia, the most (geographically) isolated capital city in the world. While these countries, aside from Italy, might appear to have only limited relevance to a volume exploring immigrant families in Europe, the practices and processes of transnational caregiving that are documented are pertinent to the global care chains (Yeates 2004, 2005) which are increasing in scope and complexity and which affect all areas of the world, not least Europe with its increasing immigration. Furthermore, the examples not only represent the traditional focus on migratory relationships between developed and developing nations but also the much less common focus on migration between developed nations (Brijnath forthcoming 2008). Hence, the discussion involves an analysis of both formal and informal care provision, including the development of social capital, in local, national and transnational contexts. The emergent patterns are pertinent to Europe with its diversity of socio-cultural groups, forms of migrant interaction and the multifarious discourses of power that help define them, including state legislation, transnational agreements, access to resources and historical context.