Care and Connectivity in Labour Migration

Abstract

Until quite recently notions of kinship have been treated as localized modes of social organization and classification systems. Moreover, as forms of organization and as ideational relational structures, kinship systems have been considered to exist outside colonial administrations and economies, nation states and the market. An early non-typical example going against this trend is Esther Goody’s study of fosterage practices among West-Africans in London. Her study is a prolongation of studies she carried out in Ghana on different types of institutionalized child-care arrangements which implied child circulation (Goody 1982). The study of fosterage, wardship and apprenticeship practices in West Africa has contributed to a newer research current which thematically links West Africa, the Pacific region, the Caribbean and parts of Latin America. Situations of multi-local families and kinship groups, relational and changeable socialities and the circulation of children have been shown by ethnographic accounts and social history studies to exist parallel and prior to the period when conditions of economic globalization turned transnational migration into a relevant research topic. Ethnographic insight from these studies can contribute to the study of kinship and the structuring of kinship relations in transnational contexts.