Kinwork in Transnational Colombian Families: an anti-dichotomic approach to care

• In Event: Care in transnational families: blurring dichotomies

Abstract

This theoretical and methodological proposal for understanding and analyzing transnational families adopts an anti-dichotomic approach to care that emphasizes the category “kinwork”, showing that transnational families build their lives around certain social practices that are crucial for the survival of all persons. In its affective, moral and material dimensions, care is crosscut by gendered kin ties which are inseparable from power relations, also in migratory contexts. By means of a multi-sited ethnography of transnational families between Elche (Spain) and Bello (Colombia), I analyze the kinwork that men and women conduct in order to reorganize their family and kinship ties as well as to manage local and global processes of tension that society imposes on them. Through kinship, the transnational family responds to its surroundings yet not in a linear, persistent or unique way. Its responses shape the organization of space and time, gender representations, the maintenance of family ties, the terms of address used for kin and the definitions of reciprocity among them. This paper will illustrate how kinwork has become a key analytical category for understanding the social reproduction of transnational families.

Author

• Herminia Gonzálvez