This dissertation asks how deepening global inequalities reshape the ways families negotiate “economic moralities,” normative expectations of material obligation and entitlement. It focuses on the families of middle class migrants: French-educated Senegalese urbanites whose diplomas no longer protect them from discrimination in Paris but who, among Africans, are still construed as high-status, potential patrons. Heightened tensions surrounding Islam and immigration have reconfigured the stakes of belonging in the French Republic. Faced with economic decline and escalating French xenophobia, educated Dakarois provide a striking example of the ways migrants reinforce transnational hierarchies as they cling to (post)colonial privilege. I examine the ways transnational families manage diverse moral priorities in their struggle to maintain status in multiple communities, each of which places demands on their limited resources. Drawing on 18 months (2014-2015) of linguistic and ethnographic data from Senegalese households in Paris and Dakar, I analyze how talk about exchange serves to categorize and rank people and their rights to resources in kinship networks and state systems alike. This dissertation approaches the values that shape material exchange in a novel way: through examination of everyday acts of storytelling and food sharing. It foregrounds the role of children in negotiating economic moralities, attending to the moral stances family members voice in household talk. I theorize how people respond to multiple, sometimes contradictory economic moralities in their daily lives, examining values as located in explicit pronouncements of virtue and tacitly communicated through talk evaluating and explaining acts of giving, taking, and sharing. I argue that economic moralities are inherently political, demonstrating how family discussions reproduce social distinction and selective solidarity, creating nested hierarchies of belonging in France and transnational kinship networks alike.

Last modified

• 04/09/2018

Creator

• Chelsie Jeannette Yount-Andre

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/N2TX1N

Subject

• Anthropology

Keyword

• transnational families
• France
• food sharing
• Senegal
• children
• migration

Date created

• 2017-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright