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

Drawing from extensive fieldwork in Kenya and the United Kingdom, Leslie Fesenmyer considers the kinship dilemmas – moral, material, and affective – facing transnational families. By asking who is responsible for whom, she reveals that questions of intergenerational care are at the heart of relations between individuals, societies, and states.

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.