Abstract
In Marriage without Borders, Dinah Hannaford takes us into the intimate, complex domain of transnational Senegalese marriages: the expectations, accomplishments, caring, complicity, compromises, disappointments, waiting, suspicions, and conflicts that result from spouses’ separation across continents. The book tells of men’s efforts to provide for their wives and family and meet expectations of success, as well as wives’ complicity in forging their husbands’ reputation back in Senegal and their often-complicated cohabitation with their husbands’ families. With evocative examples, Hannaford draws a vivid picture of the intricacies of the social, economic, moral, religious, caring, and sexual aspects of transnational marriage.
Hannaford shows how transnational marriage represents a strategy by which migrant men and non-migrant women seek to achieve their goals of social status. As she describes, having a wife back home symbolizes for men success, status, and masculinity. A woman can moreover assist her husband in reputation building and maintenance — wives’ lavish clothing at ceremonies, for instance, signals their migrant husbands’ success and status. If the latter struggle abroad, women exercise sutura (discretion) to preserve both their husbands’ and their own reputations. For non-migrant women, marrying a migrant represents a transnational strategy for accessing the financial means through which to display the elegance and generosity (in daily life and during celebrations) that bestow good reputation and social status in Senegal.
Hannaford’s analysis contributes to our understanding of transnational kinwork, both highlighting transnational marriage’s potential as a strategy of care and illustrating its challenges for couples. Migrants’ wives, when they stay in Senegal, generally move in with their in-laws and assist with caring for migrants’ aging parents. Cohabitation with their absent husbands’ families is, however, often a source of frustration and tension within transnational couples and with the wider family, as Hannaford skillfully depicts. Conflicts erupt over wives’ behavior, the distribution and use of migrants’ remittances within the family, and suspicions over women’s fidelity. Hannaford shows how, in a context of separation, communication technologies can be used to surveil women’s bodies. Husbands may use such technology to control their wives virtually from abroad, and wives may themselves alter their behavior in expectation of this control (and out of feeling surveilled by their in-laws and neighbors) to protect their reputations and avoid conflict.
Much of the book’s success at richly relating the complexity of a topic so private, yet so publicly discussed, throughout Senegalese society stems from Hannaford’s prolonged, multi-sited ethnographic engagement with transnational marriage and her in-depth knowledge and experience of Senegalese society, culture, and language. Hannaford’s ability to weave together the perspectives of both migrant men and non-migrant women provides a rare contribution to the literature on migrant transnationalism. With her focus largely cast on women’s perspectives, hers is a welcome contribution to the growing body of research that centers the experiences of the many who have not (yet) migrated abroad but whose lives are intimately affected by their connections to others who have. The downside of this focus is that the reader is at times left wondering what migrants would have to say on some issues. Why, for instance, do men from rural backgrounds with limited formal education persist in pursuing marriages with more educated urban women from a higher social class, unions which, as Hannaford describes, are often more conflict-ridden? Hannaford also at times emphasizes the knowledge gap between non-migrants’ perceptions of migrants’ lives abroad and the latter’s reality to the point of losing some nuance: in those occasions, she falls short of acknowledging that many non-migrants have quite sophisticated understandings of migration, despite not having migrated themselves. She could perhaps also have reflected more on whether some of the women who reported knowing very little about their husbands’ occupations abroad might in fact be exercising sutura by covering for their husbands’ unglamorous or even nonexistent work.
Hannaford does well to place transnational marriage as a family strategy in the context of neoliberal politics at home and abroad. Her suggestion, however, that neoliberal policies all but force migrants to be transnational (suggesting, for instance, that migrants might prefer to settle abroad) obscures the interplay between macro forces and individual strategies, and the ways in which individuals strive to make the best of structural constraints. It also contradicts her own observations that most Senegalese migrants wish to eventually return to Senegal and that establishing and maintaining a family there (rather than in Europe) contributes to this long-term goal. In emphasizing the impact of neoliberal policies, Hannaford sometimes risks overshadowing migrants’ and non-migrants’ agency as they pursue transnational strategies to forge financially secure and socially meaningful lives — which her book otherwise so vividly portrays.
Hannaford’s is an engaging, illustrative, and instructive book that will be useful reading to scholars, students, and practitioners in the fields of Senegalese migration, transnational marriage, and transnational migration and kinwork more generally.