The Scattered Family: Parenting, African Migrants, and Global Inequality by Cati Coe (review)

In this book the American anthropologist Cati Coe offers an original perspective on organizing long-distance parenting after international migration. The subject is not new in the literature on transnational families and the parent-child separation involved, but Coe develops arguments that run counter to most analyses. Drawing on a multi-site ethnographic study of Ghanaian immigrants in the United States and their families in Ghana, a comparison of these situations with those engendered by migrations within Ghana, and a long-term historical overview from the mid-nineteenth to the early twenty-first century, the author lays out the workings of contemporary intergenerational relationships. The work thus achieves its goal of offering a fresh, richly documented perspective on the subject.

As in many African countries, IMF budget cuts in the 1970s and 1980s considerably reduced job opportunities for the middle class in Ghana, whose members had been the primary beneficiaries of state civil service jobs. Coe explains how transnational migrants cope with the contradictions generated by various state policies (immigration, family, education and others) and the forces of global capitalism; specifically, how they adapt and “reshuffle” their parenting, kinship and gender “repertoires.” A “repertoire” as she explains it (pp. 14-29) is a concept close to the notion of habitus, covering a combination of beliefs, practices and resources that people acquire throughout their lives and use to interpret, evaluate, and adapt to situations (p. 5). It is widely understood that the families who leave Ghana are not those with the least economic, educational or social capital. Indeed, the Ghanaian urban middle class emigrated to maintain their relatively high standard of living (p. 90). This book details the history of family repertoires as they concern parent-child separation, a situation that, whatever other effects it may have, still conflicts with the Ghanaian middle-class ideal of “living together” as a family.

Coe, whose research included study of legal files on family conflicts and interviews with grandparents caring for their emigrant children’s children in Ghana, retraces a long history of intergenerational relationships (Chapter 1). She then explains how internal migration, women’s entry into the workforce, and the fact that in Ghanaian tradition several adults may take care of children, including ones who are not their own, may make parent-child separation seem an ordinary not to say normal event. The historical perspective allows for closely analysing what is new and what traditional in the ways these families organize their lives in response to international migration. Coe argues that “exchanges between young people and their kin that centered on debt changed, over time, to become reciprocities of care as they are understood in transnational families today” (pp. 40-41). Repertoires that are being challenged today by international migration have in fact been adapted or “reformulated” several times “in response to changing economic conditions at a particular historical moment” (for example, during the early twentieth-century boom in cocoa production for exportation). Parent-child separation is therefore not a new situation engendered by international migration or a practice that necessarily causes pain and suffering; rather it figures in the possibilities encompassed by Ghanaian family repertoires. Regarding what is called child “fostering,” Coe explains: “Because the sharing of care for children is so normal in Akuapem, there is no equivalent Twi word for the practice” (p. 63).

Nonetheless, the reasons for separation have changed, and decreased in number over time. The urban middle class ideology holding that good parents raise their children themselves worked to stigmatize fostering, which was practiced primarily at crisis moments or in situations of poverty. During the 1990s country girls began coming to the city to find work as maids. Children have “tended to circulate to live with wealthier relatives.” But international migration did bring about a major change: middle-class parents in the United States are now entrusting their children to poorer family members back in Ghana (Chapter 6): “transnational migrants have trouble bringing...