For the Family, By the Family: Migration and “Betterment” in Rural Pakistan

This dissertation explores how migrant families in rural Khyber Pakhtunkhwa mobilize the institution and ideology of the patriarchal family to achieve “betterment” in a migrant-dependent economy. Joint families send some sons as migrants to Malaysia and the Gulf and make others stay behind to uphold the family’s honour by taking care of the women, land and kinship obligations. In Malaysia, men marry local women to get spousal visas and business licenses to open small businesses like convenience stores. They leave their Pukhtun wives and children to live in a joint family with their parents, brothers and their wives and children. Through this transnational division of labour, responsibilities and care alongside joint consumption and saving, migrant joint families invest in small businesses and a lucrative real estate market in Pakistan. As new possibilities for upward mobility and class inequalities emerge, families idealize and pursue fraternal solidarity with the aim of family betterment. In pursuing these ideals, some families also reckon with the reality of leaving some family members and obligations behind to sustain their upward mobility. The dissertation makes two major contributions. First, it shows how the family’s pursuits of betterment create new solidarities and conflicts between brothers and agnates, husbands and wives, and parents, sons and daughters-in-law. In turn, these relations of solidarity and conflict constitute the patriarchal family as a central node through which class is formed and understood. The dissertation contributes to the insight that capitalist development produces multiple and uneven processes of accumulation alongside localized ensembles of contradictory and unequal relations and meanings. The second contribution concerns the role of temporality, specifically reference to the past in the constitution of something new. The dissertation shows that the tenacity of the institution and ideology of the patriarchal family can, on the one hand, be attributed to how migrant families mobilize and re-construct patriarchal dynamics and norms like fraternal solidarity, agnatic rivalry, filial piety and the subordination of women to adapt to and thrive in a new economy. On the other, its tenacity can be ascribed to how families invoke historical narratives about the timelessness of the patriarchal family to re-inscribe masculinity, wifehood and filial relations onto reconstructed family relations and meanings. The concurrent futurity of the family as a vehicle for betterment and the nostalgic temporality aimed at preserving and protecting it from modernity characterize how migrant families experience economic and social change. Migrant families adapt the patriarchal family to these changes by making it malleable while ferociously preserving and re-constructing patriarchal norms imagined as rigid and timeless. The simultaneous malleability and aspiration to rigidity makes the patriarchal family persevere in new ways.

Department dc:contributor.department

Anthropology

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• Akhtar Khan, Hadia

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Li, Tania M

• Caste
• Class
• Economy
• Family
• Gender
• Migration

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1807/152092

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:utoronto.scholaris.ca:1807/152092