Material Care and Kinship on Trips to Dakar:
Year: 2022
Type: article
Abstract: This article examines how relatives in Dakar take up diverse parental roles (Goody 1971, 1982) vis-à-vis migrants’ children, in efforts to cultivate transnational affective and economic relationships with children growing up in France. It examines the social work of kinship-making during families’ trips to Dakar, questioning whether and how transnational kin might establish roles of pluriparentalité with children growing up abroad. Not everyone who cares for a child assumes a parental role, however. Analysis of an example of transnational “cross-cousins” sheds light on the ways caregivers distinguish between types of care that create parenthood and those that underpin other kinship relations. Applying insights from linguistic anthropology into the ways speaking roles may be distributed among many social actors, it considers, first, how transnational relatives share parental roles and second, how Senegalese caregivers signal extra-parental relations of care. Examining how adults in Dakar care for migrants’ children who live abroad, I show how Senegalese caregivers trace the contours of parenthood within a universe of kinship relations.
Source: Journal des africanistes
Author: Chelsie Yount-André
Institution: Leiden University
Language: English
Subfield: Demography
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4376473999