“Just bring me a little letter”: the flow of things in Cape Verde transnational family relations
Year: 2014
Type: article
Abstract: This article discusses the ways people strengthen and maintain their sense of belonging to concrete or imagined places or groups via communication networks. It focuses on the flow of things through transnational networks between Cape Verdean migrants and their relatives at home. It is an intense and diversified network involving kinship ties in a context of prolonged physical distance in both space and time. The flows in question consolidate social, cultural, and family networks between migrants and their home communities in a complex system of exchange and circulation of gifts, requests, money, and information that mobilize those who leave and those who stay. The argument is based on the dialogue between ethnographic data and works that have explored transnational flows of people, capital, and goods within the globalization framework.
Source: Etnografica
Author: Andréa de Souza Lobo
Institutions: Universidade de Brasília, Centre for Research in Anthropology
Language: English
Subfield: Demography
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W1504173115