ABSTRACT
Drawing on a case-study of an Afghan family whose members have spread over four continents during the last 25 years, this chapter argues that remittances serve as a socio-material basis for sustaining and recreating transnational families across time and space. It shows how remittance flows and transnational mobilities are mutually constitutive. Extending anthropological analyses of remittances that have tended to focus on transfers between parents and children or husbands and wives, it explores how, for the family in question, remittances have flowed ‘down’, ‘up’ and ‘within’ generations – that is, from parents to children, from children to parents and between male siblings. It demonstrates how remittances have materialised concerns about care and caused disputes over who should provide them, towards whom they should flow and in what quantities. In a context of protracted conflict in Afghanistan, the chapter also reveals how the mobilities and resources of this transnational family have increasingly been directed away from the ‘homeland’ and towards new homes much further afield, critiquing notions of circularity in studies of Afghan migration.
