Relative Distance
Kinship, Migration, and Christianity between Kenya and the United Kingdom

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

Leslie Fesenmyer (Author)

9781009335072, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 6 July 2023

232 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.4 cm, 0.51 kg

'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

The socio-economic and political uncertainties of Kenya in the 1990s jeopardised what many saw as the promises of modernity. An increasing number of Kenyans migrated, many to Britain, a country that felt familiar from Kenyan history. Based on extensive ?eldwork in Kenya and the United Kingdom, Leslie Fesenmyer's work provides a rich, historically nuanced study of the kinship dilemmas that underlie transnational migration and explores the dynamic relationship between those who migrate and those who stay behind. Challenging a focus on changing modes of economic production, 'push-pull' factors, and globalisation as drivers of familial change, she analyses everyday trans-national family life. Relative Distance shows how quotidian interactions, exchanges, and practices transform kinship on a local and global scale. Through the prism of intergenerational care, Fesenmyer reveals that the question of who is responsible for whom is not only a familial matter but is at the heart of relations between individuals, societies, and states.

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.

Subject Areas: African history [HBJH]