Translations in Kinscripts: Child Circulation Among Ghanaians Abroad
Creators: name: Coe, Cati
Publisher: name: University of Chicago Press";"University of Chicago Press
Year: 2016
Subjects: Fosterage
Kinship
Belonging
Adoption
Migration
Ghana
Europe

description: The regulation of African migration by states has important implications for the family life of migrants and their children. Poor working conditions and restrictive immigration regimes in Fortress Europe promote migrants’ reliance on fosterage and the circulation of their children into other households. In Ghana, fosterage has been significant historically in enabling women’s urban migration and in broadly distributing the benefits, tasks, and costs of parenting among kin and non-kin (namely educated, urban residents). Some transnational migrants were fostered in their childhoods by older siblings, their parents’ siblings, teachers, or grandparents for the purposes of their education or to assist in household work, or because a parent had died. Transnational migrants draw on these practices and understandings of fosterage to balance family responsibilities and their labor migration when they go abroad. Western governments have a different understanding of parenting as a singular (not distributed) relationship and as primarily biological, although legal substitutions of biological parents are possible in cases of abuse, neglect, orphanhood, or parental desire to give up the child. These understandings of parent-child relationships are encoded in legal mechanisms governing immigration, welfare, and social protection. Ghanaian practices of fosterage are not recognized by European states, nor are relationships with adult siblings or the children of siblings seen as significant. Western states thus short-circuit some of affective circuits that fosterage enables. These different understandings of family result in transformations in how migrants participate in their familial affective circuits. Furthermore, they generate tensions in the emotional and political belonging of migrants’ children. This chapter explores three examples of the ways that Western familial models and legal arrangements impinge on Ghanaian practices of fosterage, the attempts by Ghanaian migrants to translate fosterage to Western parenting institutions in response, and the emotional outcomes of these translations. The first case concerns Mario Balotelli, Italian soccer star and child of Ghanaian immigrants. His parents’ poor living conditions resulted in his fosterage and ultimate adoption by an Italian family. I examine the conflicting understandings of parenting and fosterage presented in newspaper accounts in light of my ethnographic research in Ghana. Secondly, I examine the case of a girl left behind by migrant parents to Italy who stayed with her grandmother and was emotionally connected to her. When she joined her parents in Italy, in her own words, she forced herself to love them because they were her parents, undergoing a more wrenching experience than those fostered with grandmothers in Ghana who later join their parents. Finally, I examine the case of a Ghanaian immigrant who tried to adopt (through international adoption procedures) her nephews, first in the U.S. and then in the U.K., after her mother’s death. These cases reveal how the state regulation of African migration deeply affects Ghanaian migrants’ relationships with their children and with the children of their siblings. As a result, their children’s sense of political belonging, familial obligation, and emotional connection is also affected. In the conclusion, I will explore the larger implications—-for citizenship and rights--of these blockages in affective circuits.