Ways of Being a Child in a Dispersed Family: Multiparenthood and Migratory Debt between France and Mali (Soninke Homeland)

Abstract

Although literature on child migration has developed considerably over the last decade, it has tended to focus on intra-African migration and one-way south to north migration (Razy and Rodet 2012). The themes of north to south and circular childhood migration remain understudied, and its educational, social and cultural objectives are mostly ignored. Although children are at the heart of family practices (Basch et al. 1994; Rouse 2002), the nature and function of the children’s mobility within migrant families to the family, and the community more broadly, in the process of transmission and reproduction as well as social and cultural change has been overlooked. A transnational perspective has developed (Baldassar and Merla 2014; Bryceson and Vuorela 2002; Levitt and Waters 2006; Mazzucato and Schans 2011; Olwig 2007; Parreñas 2005), but family and kinship dynamics have not been an important feature of the research, particularly in Africa (Grillo and Mazzucato 2008). Similarly, the ethnographical data and efforts at conceptual clarification have long been absent even though the notion of the ‘transnational family’ dominates¹. Indeed, the criteria of membership and the morphology of the ‘transnational family’ are rarely specified (Le Gall 2005), and local family structures are often ignored. The family is defined as nuclear or extended, and is synonymous with ‘blood ties’ in a Euro-American-centered sense even though ‘nonblood ties’ can be included, as Bryceson and Vuorela (2002) state.