Practical Kinship in migration : revisiting transnational family. An ethnographic study among highly skilled italian migrants in Paris
Thomas PFIRSCH, Université polytechnique hauts de France , France
In migration studies Transnational Family refers to families that are not disrupted by long distance and manage to maintain intense crossborder ties (Gouldbourne et aliter, 2009). But most transnational families studies focus on migrations from the Global South to the Global North and are based on a normative, western-centered definition of the Family as a nuclear domestic group (composed of two parents and their children).
In this presentation, I focus on migrations within the Global North, and I use the broader concept of Practical Kinship (Carsten, 2000, Weber, 2005), rather than Family to describe the extended and highly changing set of relatives who are actually mobilized by migrants in everyday life, and whose composition can be different from genealogical kinship. Indeed, for « privileged migrants » (Kunz, 2016) from the Global North, migration rarely separates nuclear families (parents and their young left-behind children, husbands and wives etc…), it rather affects the extended family and broader kinship groups (siblings, adult children and ageing parents...). Despite nuclearization, Kinship still plays a key role in the European welfare systems, but its impact on contemporary european migrations - especially the recent wave of italian and southern european emigration (Dubucs et al. 2017) - remains unexplored.
The presentation is based on three multisited family case studies. Using ethnographic observation, whatsapp family groups analysis and in-depth interviews conducted in Paris, Naples, Rome and other european cities, the practical kinship of three Italian middle class couples recently arrived in Paris was reconstructed. I show that to take care of their young children in Paris, Italian migrants rely on matrifocal « transnational maisonnées » (Weber, 2005) - based on the fluid circulation of flying grandparents, aunts, siblings, and domestic workers between France and Italy, and facilitated by the political context of free movement within the EU.
Mots clés : transnational family|privileged migrations|Free movement|European Union|Italian migration
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