ABSTRACT
While kinship has and continues to feature in studies of the African-Caribbean family, the peculiar role of siblings has, curiously, often been neglected except in a few studies of migration that focus on families and networks as an integral process of migration. This chapter focuses on the role of siblings—brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts—and on migration, the roles of family members located elsewhere, the importance and nature of families dispersed transnationally, and the use, once again, of family as a metaphor for social behavior. Beyond the conjugal, ties, it is assumed that particular functions, rights, and responsibilities relate to these roles and relationships, and failure to perform or conform is, in both social and legal terms, measurable. But who is a sibling raises all manner of definitional problems. The sibling relationship itself has, therefore, few of the formal social and legal constraints that characterized the parental relationship, although there are powerful informal social pressures that control expected behavior.
