Abstract

World-wide migration has an unsettling effect on social structures, especially on aging populations and eldercare. This volume investigates how taken-for-granted roles are challenged, intergenerational relationships transformed, economic ties recalibrated, technological innovations utilized, and spiritual relations pursued and desired, and asks what it means to care at a distance and to age abroad. What it does show is that trans-nationalization of care produces unprecedented convergences of people, objects and spaces that challenge our assumptions about the who, how, and where of care.

“The chapters are ethnographically rich, geographically diverse, and engaging. Collectively they offer a cutting-edge discussion of theory and method for analyzing how people care for their kin when migration has separated families.” • Michele Gamburd, Portland State University

“This book convincingly demonstrates that care can be provided across distance, even as it may be transformed, and care relations re-negotiated… [it] is an important contribution to the growing literature on transnational aging, in providing detailed studies of its complex and multiple effects on individuals and families.” • Cati Coe, Rutgers University

Azra Hromadžić is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Syracuse University. She is the author of Citizens of an Empty Nation: Youth and State-making in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), which was recently translated into Serbian.

Monika Palmberger is a research fellow and lecturer in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna, research fellow at the Interculturalism, Migration and Minorities Research Centre, University of Leuven, and author/editor of How Generations Remember: Conflicting Histories and Shared Memories in Post-War Bosnia and Herzegovina (2016) and Memories on the Move: Experiencing Mobility, Rethinking the Past (2016, with Jelena Tosic).