Argonauts of West Africa Migration, citizenship and kinship dynamics in a changing Europe

This book is about the novel and often experimental ways West African migrants in the Netherlands use kinship in their quest for international mobility, employment and legal residence. In the social sciences, there has been a general tendency to assume that the emergence and growing influence of the state will restrict the societal role of kinship and its entanglement with politics and other domains of social life. This study shows that it is precisely the evermore intensive interventions by the state – notably new measures to control mobility across borders, access to the labor market and citizenship – that trigger new efforts by migrants to mobilize and develop kinship in order to use it for creating footholds in new surroundings. A focus on kinship, a classical anthropological topic, turned out to be surprisingly relevant for understanding migrant struggles to retain agency in the face of mounting external pressures. Yet, this new context can also inspire a critical appraisal of the basic tenets of older approaches to kinship. Close attention to kinship’s dynamics and flexibility is imperative. But even more important is the attention to inequality as a complement to the usual tendency to pair kinship with reciprocity. Instead of seeking a normative answer to what kinship is, this book examines what kinship enables and how it does so. The emphasis on the practices of kinship relativizes its glossy cover of reciprocity and solidarity, shedding light on its dark side, which is often neglected in formal statements by both migrants and kinship scholars.