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Orchestrating Care in Time: Ghanaian Migrant Women, Family, and Reciprocity
Author(s) -
Coe Cati
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
american anthropologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.51
H-Index - 85
eISSN - 1548-1433
pISSN - 0002-7294
DOI - 10.1111/aman.12446
Subject(s) - reciprocity (cultural anthropology) , synchronizing , gender studies , child care , sociology , socioeconomics , geography , gerontology , demographic economics , economic growth , medicine , nursing , social science , economics , topology (electrical circuits) , mathematics , combinatorics
ABSTRACT People in southern Ghana provide care by attending to and synchronizing their and others’ life courses. Women, in particular, synchronize their life courses with the developmental and aging pathways of others. Since the 1970s, younger women in southern Ghana have migrated to urban or rural areas to earn money, leaving their children in the care of their mothers, whom they support with their remittances. As migrant women grow older, they return to their hometowns to provide elder and child care. Although female transmigrants also use these temporal strategies of care, the synchronization of life courses proves more difficult to coordinate in transnational contexts. For these reasons, time and timing is as important as space and location to transnational migrants, and migration is transtemporal as well as translocal.