Table of Contents

Acknowledgments; Introduction; 1. Securing the future: family, livelihoods, and mobility; 2. Aspirations, obligations, and imagination in family migration; 3. The making of 'migrants'; 4. Kinship dilemmas: negotiating relatedness across space; 5. Weddings as transnational household rituals: marriage and other intimate relations; 6. Change and continuity: the social reproduction of families between Kenya and the United Kingdom; 7. Conclusion; References.

Promotional Information

Examines kinship dilemmas – moral, material, and affective – facing transnational families living between Kenya and the United Kingdom.

About the Author

Leslie Fesenmyer is Assistant Professor in Social Anthropology and African Studies at the University of Birmingham. She is currently leading a project on multi-religious encounters in urban Kenya funded by the European Research Council. Her research has been published in leading journals, including City & Society, Journal of Religion in Africa, and Social Anthropology.

Reviews

'This book draws the reader into the lives of family members who, over decades, share an existence across geographical distance. Against the backdrop of wider social transformations, an extremely rich ethnography is explored with the support of a complex framework based on thorough insights into the essence of anthropology and migration studies. This is the anthropology of migration at its best.' Lisa Åkesson, University of Gothenburg

'In all the scholarship on transnational kinship, Relative Distance is unique in focusing on the moral obligations and moral economies generated by migration. It reveals how the affective and the material are inextricably entangled, highlighting the tensions as well as intimacies generated by moral claims.' Cati Coe, Carleton University

'The ties binding migrants to their homelands are often narrowly measured by economic remittances. In this powerful ethnographic study of Kenyans in the UK, Leslie Fesenmyer focuses instead on the dynamics of transnational families. She vividly and compellingly shows how reciprocity, mutuality and honour are embedded in obligations based on kinship and religion.' Robin Cohen, University of Oxford