Desire, Obligation, and Familial Love : Mothers, Daughters, and Communication Technology in the Tongan Diaspora / Makiko Nishitani.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Nishitani, Makiko, author.

Contributor:

De Gruyter.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Mothers and daughters--Australia.

Mothers and daughters.

Tongans--Australia--Melbourne (Vic.)--Communication--Case studies.

Tongans.

Tongans--Australia--Melbourne (Vic.)--Social life and customs.

Women foreign workers--Family relationships--Australia--Melbourne (Vic.).

Women foreign workers.

Families.

Manners and customs.

Communication.

Australia.

Genre:

Case studies.

Dictionaries.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (224 pages) : 1 black and white illustration

Contained In:

De Gruyter University Press Library.

Place of Publication:

Honolulu : University of Hawaii Press, [2020]

Language Note:

In English.

System Details:

Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.

text file PDF

Summary:

Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork among Tongan migrant mothers and adult daughters in Australia, anthropologist Makiko Nishitani provides a unique account of how gifts, money, and information flow along the connections of kin and kin-like relationships. Desire, Obligation, and Familial Love challenges the conventional discourse on migration, which typically characterizes intergenerational changes from tradition to modernity, from relational to individual, and from obligation to autonomy and freedom. Rather, through an intimate examination of Tongan women's everyday engagement with kinship relationships, Nishitani highlights how migrant women and their daughters born outside Tonga together create a field of relationships with kin and kin-like people, and navigate between individualistic, personal desires and familial duties and obligations. Their negotiations are not limited to a local frame of reference, but encompass vast distances, including relationships with relatives in places like Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and the "home" island nation. Tongan women manage these relationships across diverse modes of communication: face-to-face interactions in homes and at church, lengthy telephone conversations on fixed phone lines in kitchens, and interactions on social media accessed on living room computers shared between neighboring households.Relationships between migrant mothers and second-generation daughters are suffused with warmth and empathy, as well as tensions and misunderstandings. Nishitani's work demonstrates the critical contemporary relevance of classical anthropological kinship studies and gift theories as tools that can help us to understand transnationalism in the "digital" age. Through reflections on feminist geography, social theory of technology, Bourdieu's field theory, and media studies, Nishitani makes a convincing call for anthropologists to use relationships rather than geographical places as a site of anthropological fieldwork in order to understand the sociality of diasporic people.Filled with rich, intimate portrayals of diasporic women's everyday lives and the everyday politics of familial relationships, Desire, Obligation, and Familial Love will appeal to students and scholars of the anthropology of migration, of communication technologies and social media, and of gender and familial relationships, as well as to those interested in fieldwork methodology, transnational and migration studies, and Pacific studies.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1 "So Far Apart, Yet Too Connected": The Tongan Social Field

Chapter 2 Reterritorializing the Tongan Social Field: Melbourne

Chapter 3 Boys Go, Girls Stay

Chapter 4 Diasporic Gifts

Chapter 5 Social Media in the Everyday Lives of Mothers and Daughters

Chapter 6 Making Things Happen: Communication Flows and Diasporic Drama

Chapter 7 Conclusion: Desire, Obligation, and Familial Love

Notes

References

Index

About the Author

Notes:

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 02. Mrz 2022)

ISBN:

9780824883607

OCLC:

1183962772

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.