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6 - Change and Continuity: The Social Reproduction of Families between Kenya and the United Kingdom

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 June 2023

Leslie Fesenmyer
Affiliation:
University of Birmingham
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Summary

Devoted to issues of change and continuity, Chapter 6 considers the social reproduction of families, particularly the ways in which ‘change’ and ‘continuity’ (understood as tradition) are drawn upon as tropes in moral economies of transnational kinship. In examining each generation of migrants in turn, I suggest that younger migrants assert ‘continuity through change’, a moral claim with important historical resonances, while older women generate ‘change through continuity’ in familial practices. ‘Change’ emerges as a form of social betrayal, complicating ideas of change as understood in narratives of modernity and in Christianity, particularly its presumed desirability. What is at stake in ‘having changed’, an accusation non-migrants level at migrant kin, are existential questions of personhood and belonging, along with potential access to symbolic and material resources.

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Kinship, Migration, and Christianity between Kenya and the United Kingdom
, pp. 160 - 185
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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