Migrants’ fluid kinship structure weakens household authority and family labor

Evidence

Many of the catering and retail entrepreneurs were single women; and few of the men had conjugal relations which allowed them to enter into partnership with their wives, since the traditional role pattern is typically both patriarchal and segregated. Few had children old enough to be much help, and most of those were busy acquiring the qualifications for a career of literate employment. The fact that descent organization did not travel to the south meant that kinship ties were much more fluid and the authority of household heads was frequently weak. Here the contrast is with Asian minority communities whose tight cohesion provides patriarchs with external support to domestic hierarchy. Frafra migrants were mostly an undifferentiated brotherhood of mobile single men, linked to a few prominent married men by ties of patronage and pseudo-kinship or descent. Such a community did not lend support to domestic hierarchy. Consequently, family labour was problematic. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2377

Categorization

• XREF: Contrast between Frafra fluid kinship and Asian tight cohesion parallels Coleman’s social capital argument that closed social structures enforce norms.
• DEFINE: Shows how ‘descent organization’ failing to migrate undercuts the kinship-based governance that Coleman theorizes.