Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork among Tongan migrant mothers and adult daughters in Australia, anthropologist Makiko Nishitani provides a unique account of how gifts, money, and information flow along the connections of kin and kin-like relationships. Desire, Obligation, and Familial Love challenges the conventional discourse on migration, which typically characterizes intergenerational changes from tradition to modernity, from relational to individual, and from obligation to autonomy and freedom. Rather, through an intimate examination of Tongan women’s everyday engagement with kinship relationships, Nishitani highlights how migrant women and their daughters born outside Tonga together create a field of relationships with kin and kin-like people, and navigate between individualistic, personal desires and familial duties and obligations. Their negotiations are not limited to a local frame of reference, but encompass vast distances, including relationships with relatives in places like Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and the “home” island nation. Tongan women manage these relationships across diverse modes of communication: face-to-face interactions in homes and at church, lengthy telephone conversations on fixed phone lines in kitchens, and interactions on social media accessed on living room computers shared between neighboring households. Relationships between migrant mothers and second-generation daughters are suffused with warmth and empathy, as well as tensions and misunderstandings. Nishitani’s work demonstrates the critical contemporary relevance of classical anthropological kinship studies and gift theories as tools that can help us to understand transnationalism in the “digital” age. Through reflections on feminist geography, social theory of technology, Bourdieu’s field theory, and media studies, Nishitani makes a convincing call for anthropologists to use relationships rather than geographical places as a site of anthropological fieldwork in order to understand the sociality of diasporic people. Filled with rich, intimate portrayals of diasporic women’s everyday lives and the everyday politics of familial relationships, Desire, Obligation, and Familial Love will appeal to students and scholars of the anthropology of migration, of communication technologies and social media, and of gender and familial relationships, as well as to those interested in fieldwork methodology, transnational and migration studies, and Pacific studies.

Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork among Tongan migrant mothers and adult daughters in Australia, anthropologist Makiko Nishitani provides a unique account of how gifts, money, and information flow along the connections of kin and kin-like relationships. Desire, Obligation, and Familial Love challenges the conventional discourse on migration, which typically characterizes intergenerational changes from tradition to modernity, from relational to individual, and from obligation to autonomy and freedom. Rather, through an intimate examination of Tongan women’s everyday engagement with kinship relationships, Nishitani highlights how migrant women and their daughters born outside Tonga together create a field of relationships with kin and kin-like people, and navigate between individualistic, personal desires and familial duties and obligations. Their negotiations are not limited to a local frame of reference, but encompass vast distances, including relationships with relatives in places like Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and the “home” island nation. Tongan women manage these relationships across diverse modes of communication: face-to-face interactions in homes and at church, lengthy telephone conversations on fixed phone lines in kitchens, and interactions on social media accessed on living room computers shared between neighboring households. Relationships between migrant mothers and second-generation daughters are suffused with warmth and empathy, as well as tensions and misunderstandings. Nishitani’s work demonstrates the critical contemporary relevance of classical anthropological kinship studies and gift theories as tools that can help us to understand transnationalism in the “digital” age. Through reflections on feminist geography, social theory of technology, Bourdieu’s field theory, and media studies, Nishitani makes a convincing call for anthropologists to use relationships rather than geographical places as a site of anthropological fieldwork in order to understand the sociality of diasporic people. Filled with rich, intimate portrayals of diasporic women’s everyday lives and the everyday politics of familial relationships, Desire, Obligation, and Familial Love will appeal to students and scholars of the anthropology of migration, of communication technologies and social media, and of gender and familial relationships, as well as to those interested in fieldwork methodology, transnational and migration studies, and Pacific studies.

""You have to come to my wedding," Kavita told me, turning to face me where I sat next to her on the couch. "You can come with the other people from the street. You will get everything you need for your *research* there." "I will come, I will come!" I replied enthusiastically. I had only met Kavita and her two younger sisters, Arthi and Deepti (see Figure 2.1), mere minutes before this invitation was extended. I had initially come to Pulan that day in October 2012 to meet another woman, Heena, whose family rents a room on the third story of Kavita's family's home. Heena and I had been sitting in the furniture refurbishing store she operates with her husband on the main street of Pulan when Deepti, Kavita's youngest sister, passed by. Heena introduced us and told me to go with Deepti to meet her family. When we reached the family's three-story house-the largest in the gali-Deepti led me past the empty rooms on the ground floor, which I would eventually begin renting, to the second-story living room. There, we found Kavita and Arthi organizing clothing and jewelry they had purchased earlier in the day for the upcoming wedding festivities. Kavita made room for me to sit next to her on the couch and began asking me about myself. I immediately warmed to her because of her open, friendly smile and sharp, staccato Hindi, which I delighted in being able to understand. I explained that I had come to India to study how women's lives are different in rural and urban areas, and Kavita assured me that she and her family could help. She noted that her parents had come to Udaipur from Ram Nagar, a large village thirty-five kilometers north of the city, and that the family would be returning for her and her older brother Krishna's weddings the following month. Their weddings would be held five days apart to help reduce the difficulties of family members traveling from outside Udaipur. Prompted by the description of my research, Kavita commented on differences that she recognized between the village and the city. The biggest difference, she suggested, was the experience of caste, namely that in the village, people from different jatis live separately, whereas in the city, people are "mixed." As I would come to learn when visiting Ram Nagar for various functions, there is a fair amount of caste and religious diversity in the village. Although spatial and ritual segregation was rather strictly maintained during religious observances, it is likely more flexible in everyday life. The segregation during ritual functions-the occasions for which Kavita also traveled to the village-likely informed her sense of a lack of "mixing" in the village as. The majority of residents in the area of Ram Nagar where the family maintains a home were also from the Mali (lit: gardener) jati, although Mali was not a majority jati in Pulan"--

This book explores the children of Chinese single-child families who go to study abroad and in particular the increase in Chinese familial investment in daughters' education within the wider socio-moral transformation of China.

'Bollywood' is the dominant global term to refer to the prolific Hindi language film industry in Bombay (renamed Mumbai in 1995). Characterised by music, dance routines, melodrama, lavish production values and an emphasis on stars and spectacle, Bollywood films have met with box-office success and enthusiastic audiences from India to West Africa to Russia, and throughout the English-speaking world. In Bollywood, anthropologist and film scholar Tejaswini Ganti provides a guide to the cultural, social and political significance of Hindi cinema, outlining the history and structure of the Bombay film industry, and the development of popular Hindi filmmaking since the 1930s. Providing information and commentary on the key players in Bollywood, including directors and stars, as well as material from current filmmakers themselves, the areas covered in Bollywood include: history of Indian cinema narrative style, main themes, and key genres of Hindi cinema significant films, directors and stars production and distribution of Bollywood films interviews with actors, directors and screenwriters.

Originally published in 1989, this cross-national study investigates the role and pattern of family life in fourteen countries in contemporary Europe. Providing a wealth of information on European families, it is a key source for anyone wishing to understand the changes in the family at that time. The contributors argue that, far from withering away, the family remained a very important social unit which continued to have considerable influence on other social institutions such as the state and the labour market. The central theme is the interrelation between changes in production and working life on one hand, and changes in family life and reproduction on the other. The contributors focus on the pressures and contradictions produced by the division of functions between family and work, and on problems which have arisen as a consequence of the sometimes incompatible and even conflicting demands of the two institutions. They show that the evolution of the nuclear family model in Europe had led to a great diversity of family patterns, and conclude that the family in modern European societies still had a contribution to make which no other institution could provide.

What happens over time to Indians who spend their working hours answering phone calls from Americans—and acting like Americans themselves? To find out, the authors of Answer the Call conducted long-term interviews with forty-five agents, trainers, managers, and CEOs at call centers in Bangalore and Mumbai from 2003 to 2012. For nine or ten hours every day, workers in call centers are not quite in India or America but rather in a state of “virtual migration.” Encouraged to steep themselves in American culture from afar, over time the agents come to internalize and indeed perform Americanness for Americans—and for each other. Call center agents “migrate” through time and through the virtual spaces generated by voice and information sharing. Drawing from their rich interviews, the authors show that the virtual migration agents undergo has no geographically distant point of arrival, yet their perception of moving is not merely abstract. Over the duration of the job, agents’ sense of place and time changes: agents migrate but still remain, leaving them somewhere in between—between India and America, experience and imagination, class mobility and consumption, tradition and modernity, here and there, then and now, past and future. However tangible and elastic their virtual mobility might seem in these relatively lucrative jobs, it is also suspended within the confines of the very boundaries they migrate across. Having engaged with these vivid and often poignant interviews, readers will never again be indifferent to an Indian agent’s greeting at the other end of a toll-free call: “Hello, my name is Roxanne. How may I help you?”