ABOUT THIS BOOK
The massive scale and complexity of international migration today tends to obscure the nuanced ways migrant families seek a sense of belonging. In this book, Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg takes readers back and forth between Cameroon and Germany to explore how migrant mothers—through the careful and at times difficult management of relationships—juggle belonging in multiple places at once: their new country, their old country, and the diasporic community that bridges them.
Feldman-Savelsberg introduces readers to several Cameroonian mothers, each with her own unique history, concerns, and voice. Through scenes of their lives—at a hometown association’s year-end party, a celebration for a new baby, a visit to the Foreigners’ Office, and many others—as well as the stories they tell one another, Feldman-Savelsberg enlivens our thinking about migrants’ lives and the networks and repertoires that they draw on to find stability and, ultimately, belonging. Placing women’s individual voices within international social contexts, this book unveils new, intimate links between the geographical and the generational as they intersect in the dreams, frustrations, uncertainties, and resolve of strong women holding families together across continents.
REVIEWS
“A sensitive, well-grounded, and beautifully written study of the dilemmas immigrant mothers face when they migrate and the social strategies and community resources they mobilize in handling those conflicts.”
— Cati Coe, author of The Scattered Family
“In a wonderful book full of rich and compelling ethnographic cases, Feldman-Savelsberg tells the story of Cameroonian migrants in Germany through the lives of women who navigate belonging—in Europe and in Africa—through birthing and caring for children. Without sugarcoating the challenges that these woman face, Mothers on the Move presents a refreshingly uplifting account of African migration, offering a welcome corrective to the predominant focus on abjection. International migrants commonly frame their motivations to move in terms of providing better lives for their children. This book develops a much-needed and highly insightful perspective on migrants as mothers.”
— Daniel Jordan Smith, author of AIDS Doesn’t Show Its Face
"Mothers on the Move is a detailed study of Cameroonian migrant mothers in Berlin and their sense of belonging and notbelonging through birthing and childcare practices. The most innovative...aspect of the book is its link between historical reproductive insecurity in Cameroon and women’s current experiences in Berlin."
— International Migration Review
"Overall, this is a beautiful contribution to scholarship on migration and belonging"
— African Studies Quarterly
"Mothers on the Move manages to bring together migration and reproduction in fresh ways through a rich ethnographic case, situated in a broad temporal and spatial frame."
— Medical Anthropology Quarterly
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter One: Introduction - Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226389912.003.0001
[affective circuits;belonging;Cameroon;Germany;legal consciousness;migrant associations;migration;mothers;narrative;reproductive insecurity]
This chapter introduces core concepts, methods, and themes regarding mobility, belonging, and motherhood. Reproductive insecurity is both a motivation for and a result of migration. Mothers manage this insecurity by forging and maintaining affective circuits of exchange among overlapping social networks. Kin back home, migrant associations, as well as enforcers of German laws and bureaucratic procedures expose Cameroonian migrant mothers to new expectations about belonging-through children. Mothers balance these expectations by sharing and weighing advice through personal stories. They develop a migrant legal consciousness by circulating narratives of encounters with the law along the same affective circuits that anchor their belonging. Belonging—a complex mix of recognition by, and attachment to, a particular place or group—is constituted by social and emotional connections (citizenship, ethnicity, family) that can be felt, performed, or imposed. This chapter imagines the social networks that create belonging for migrant mothers through the metaphor of electrical circuitry; mothers switch connections on and off to control the information, goods, money, and emotions flow between them and social outlets located both nationally and transnationally. Mothers capitalize on the attention their children elicit from various actors, enabling them to navigate the many challenges of belonging in the diaspora. (pages 1 - 27)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Chapter Two: Cameroonian Predicaments - Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226389912.003.0002
[colonialism;Grassfields;history;hometown associations;infertility;labor migration;mobility;placed based identity;reproduction;transnationalism;Cameroon]
This chapter discusses Cameroonian predicaments of belonging, reproduction, connection and mobility. Colonial and post-colonial mobilities in the Cameroonian Grassfields region presage later international migration and building of transnational connections. They affect reproduction, kinship, belonging, attachment to the land, political rights, and the emergence of formal and informal forms of place-based association. The complex colonial history of Cameroon has left a legacy of official bilingualism, dual legal and educational systems, and religious heterogeneity, resulting in multilayered distinctions of Cameroonian belonging and identity. Embedded in this complex field of belonging is a sense of reproductive insecurity, tied to a colonial legacy of loss, infertility and disease. In the post-colonial flux of Cameroonian rural-to-urban labor and educational migration, women navigate and leverage lineage and reproduction to establish belonging, ensure fertility, and to reproduce important Cameroonian lifeways. Urban hometown associations afford women the opportunity to formalize their connections to their places of origin, thereby reinforcing place-based identities that anchor women and their children in a mobile world. Mothers on the Move thus places women’s reproductive strategies in Berlin within the context of the history of migration within Cameroon, demonstrating that international migration is less novel than is often portrayed. (pages 28 - 56)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Chapter Three: Starting Cameroonian Families in Berlin - Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226389912.003.0003
[childbearing;cultural innovation;family foundation;fertility goals;Fortress Europe;infant care;kinship and marriage;medical anthropology;pregnancy;proxy weddings]
This chapter explores family foundation—finding partners, childbearing, and infant care—in relation to Cameroonian migrant women’s striving to belong in Berlin. Weddings and childbirth promote intense exchanges along affective circuits. Four women’s love stories reveal the complexities of love, marriage, and belonging. Proxy weddings and their accompanying videos emerge as adaptations to situations of mobility and immobility between the African continent and Fortress Europe. Pregnancy and childbearing strengthen the obligations between husband, wife, and wider circuits of family belonging. Cameroonian mothers naturalize their child wish as part of being a woman, being an African, or being Bamiléké, but adapt their fertility goals to the challenges of immigrant life in Germany. Because extended family members are not physically present to pressure them, husbands and wives make their family-planning decisions as couples. But the absence of extended family members’ local knowledge and availability to provide escort and immediate support leaves mothers feeling “all alone” when finding prenatal and obstetric care. Building upon the medical anthropology of childbirth and infant care, the chapter demonstrates that women’s laments about absent post-partum caregivers express concerns about creating and maintaining kinship. The social reproduction involved in family making entails adaptation, compromise, and cultural innovation. (pages 57 - 90)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Chapter Four: Raising Cameroonian Families in Berlin
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226389912.003.0004
[childrearing;cultural transmission;emotion;family ties;global mobility;immigrant integration;language learning;secular ritual;social reproduction]
This chapter investigates mothers’ socially reproductive work forging belonging for their children through transmitting family ties and attitudes. It reveals the inherently unfinished nature of culture and belonging. Through their child-rearing practices and their cultivation of social networks, migrant mothers attempt to provide their children with guidance and stability in a world of global mobility. They seek to instill in their children a proud sense of having roots, traditions, and extended family ties. Simultaneously, mothers work hard to develop children’s emotional dispositions and life skills that facilitate global mobility. This chapter shows the multiple strategies mothers use to meet the dilemmas of childrearing—foremost of which is the management of flows along affective circuits. Language learning becomes simultaneously an indicator of cultural retention and integration in a new place. Mothers strive to keep children Cameroonian by correcting their distorted perceptions of Africa, teaching respect for elders, adapting old secular rituals (for newborns) and creating new ones (the school-starting party). The phrases “I have a German child” and “Where do you come from?” express mothers’ ambivalent feelings about their children’s socialization in Germany as well as the limits to their acceptance by broader (non-immigrant) German society.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Chapter Five: Civic Engagement - Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226389912.003.0005
[Berlin;civic engagement;community;conviviality;diaspora;extrafamilial networks;hometown associations;mothers;performative belonging;transnationalism;civil society]
This chapter examines Cameroonian participation in migrant place-based associations, where mothers develop extra-familial ties within the Berlin diasporic community. Hometown associations help mothers publically perform the connections that undergird belonging. The saying “it takes a village to raise a child” is more relevant for migrants than for those who stay in their familiar “village” or home. Parents try to recreate the social integration of home by participating in associational life. Momentary encounters facilitated by the association help community members build enduring multiplex relationships and reciprocal exchange. But parallel formal and informal interaction streams at association meetings reveal an ironic underbelly of transnational place-based identification; fear of transnational gossip circuits and their simultaneous effect on connections to kin back home as well as on ties among other migrants in Berlin makes association events venues of cautious conviviality, and even mistrust. In four scenes (a routine meeting, a year-end celebration, the children’s corner, and a wake), this chapter reveals the positive and negative, stop-and-start nature of affective circuits in associational life. Through their hometown associations, mothers receive formal benefits and strengthen informal networks at important reproductive moments, and give their children a sense of belonging through participation in community life. (pages 128 - 163)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Chapter Six: In the Shadow of the State - Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226389912.003.0006
[birth;bureaucracy;documentality;domestic violence;family;law;legal consciousness;marriage;migrants;state]
This chapter explores threatening and protective shadows cast by the German state upon Cameroonian migrant mothers’ pursuit of belonging. When Cameroonian migrants meet German state and humanitarian NGO authorities, they choose among cultural and legal toolkits and restructure their repertoires of family life, mobility, and separation. Through a legal consciousness framework, this chapter traces migrant mothers’ development of collective understandings of the symbols, norms, and organizational forms of German laws and regulations. It explores a series of encounters with the state: at the foreigner’s office; with an asylum seeker at the welfare office; the bureaucratic labyrinth surrounding birth; re-casting what counts as family, marriage, and childhood well-being; and recourse in case of domestic violence. Papers, documentality, and the discretionary judgment of low-level bureaucrats play a big role in migrant mothers’ lives. Social relationships are crucial in managing life under the shadow of the state. To access public benefits, migrants depend on the information that circulates among their fellow migrants. In this way individual experiences crystalize into collectively held orientations toward the law, the state, and life in a new land. The shadow of state regulation recasts affective circuits among kin, and constrains mothers’ autonomy in caring for their children. (pages 164 - 208)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
