Marriage Without Borders. Dinah Hannaford
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families a tradition of patrilocality means that most married women “seeyi” or move into the homes of their husbands’ kin and, as in India, this living arrangement effectively curtails most opportunities for a wife’s increased autonomy.
Indeed, instead of accessing amplified mobility and domestic control, many Senegalese migrants’ wives instead find their power and mobility quite reduced. The present study suggests that due in part to their own legal and financial precarity, migrant husbands in transnational marriages tend to be increasingly concerned about questions of dominance in the relationship. This manifests in several ways, many of which contribute to the persistent knowledge gap between migrants and non-migrants.
Many of the migrants’ wives I interviewed were uninformed or confused about fundamental aspects of their husbands’ lives. Roughly a third had no idea what their husband did for work and many could not name the city in which their husbands resided. These women had limited means to access the details of their husbands’ life abroad and found their husbands unwilling to be explicit. Husbands might seek to hide the details of their overseas activities, including the particulars of their employment, legal status, and living arrangements for several key reasons. By keeping the details of life overseas vague they can embody the prestige associated with being abroad despite realities that are far more humble and occasionally are shameful. Many migrant husbands feel concern that their wives will have less respect for them and be less likely to obey them if they have a clear picture of their humble circumstances.
This concern over conjugal dominance also prevents many Senegalese migrants from bringing their wives overseas to join them. If wives witness their lowly conditions abroad or—worse—find employment and begin to earn for themselves, then they might flout patriarchal norms.13 Many migrants expressed this anxiety as fundamental to their decision to live apart from their wives.
Migrant husbands also might obscure the details of their work activities overseas in an effort to control how they remit to wives and other loved ones at home. Whitehouse (2013) uses Keith Hart’s idea of the “entrepreneur’s social dilemma”—the conflict of managing entrepreneurial interests to accumulate privately alongside incentives to give generously in a communal society—to explain West African motivations to emigrate. By putting physical distance between themselves and their loved ones, migrants are escaping one of the most compelling kinds of claims on their resources—the face-to-face request—and are able to more discreetly manage their earnings and spending away from the prying eyes of claimants. This evasion is most effective when not only are the migrants at a distance, but their kin also fail to understand exactly when, what, and how the men earn and spend.14
Questions of fidelity also strain relations between husbands and wives who are living apart, although in uneven ways. Senegal’s culture of polygyny15 removes most expectation that husbands will remain celibate in the absence of their wives—and indeed, some Senegalese migrants have wives in the host country as well as at home—while wives face tremendous social sanctions for infidelity. As many migrants’ wives move in with their in-laws and face social control from their households and virtually from husbands overseas, opportunities for female infidelity are limited. Still, migrant husbands and Senegalese society at large agonize over the potential threat of female infidelity—perhaps as reflection of displaced fears about social reproduction in the face of the societal upheaval brought about by the force and intensity of emigration.
Perhaps most critically, when marriages become transnational, conjugal intimacy suffers. Husbands and wives who are not physically co-present cannot benefit from the quotidian subtleties of traditional Senegalese married life. Senegalese women discuss at length their soft power within a marriage: using incense, food preparation, sex, and various forms of adornment as key tools of negotiation and influence within their marital unions. Women in transnational marriages cannot take advantage of these resources and thus wield considerably less power within their marriages than their counterparts in non-transnational marriages. In the vacuum, in-laws and co-wives can usurp much of that power and control, and misunderstandings and animosity between couples can flourish.
Transnationalism and Neoliberalism
The pervasiveness and stubbornness of the information gap between those who migrate and those who do not could serve a broader purpose outside of individual relationships. For the neoliberal state, an image of limitless possibility associated with overseas migration both encourages the labor migration and the remittances that are so crucial to the contemporary Senegalese economy, and provides citizens hope that there are pathways to success in an increasingly restrictive economic climate. Perhaps most importantly, the myth of limitless resources for the taking overseas displaces the responsibility for the advancement and social welfare of citizens onto individuals rather than the state.
With a nod to the current fatigue of anthropological studies that casually label everything “neoliberal” and fail to unpack the term (see Ferguson 2009: 171–72), let me explain explicitly what I mean by neoliberalism in this context and why I find the term a helpful one in understanding transnational marriage. Both specific neoliberal policy changes (structural adjustment in Africa and Thatcherite economic policy in Europe and North America) and also the so-called “technologies” or “techniques” of neoliberalism (see Rose 1999, Ong 2006) are directly connected to transnational marriage and its rise.
Structural adjustment and its consequences are centrally implicated in the exodus of Senegalese into the global workforce, as well as in the general perception in Senegal that access to Western economies—through migration or marriage—is critical to social and economic advancement. Currency devaluation and inflation lowered the standard of living across Senegal, and doubled the value of remittances. Increasing unemployment—particularly the loss of much civil-sector employment—foreclosed a pathway to professional success and economic stability. Across rural and urban Senegal the most promising opportunities for financial and social success were overseas.
Privatization and the cutback in government spending and social services that took place through structural adjustment are in part responsible for keeping migrants transnational. Non-migrants in Senegal depend on remittances from overseas for help with the expenses of healthcare, education, and supporting elderly family members in retirement. This need effectively keeps migrants tethered to home and sending their earnings through remittances, making them more likely to marry transnationally.
At the same time, the effects of privatization and the attacks on the welfare state in Europe directly contribute to new labor policies that pull migrants into unstable working conditions in the West, making them invest in transnational strategies like marriage as insurance against possible expulsion. As the Italian economy moves to more flexible labor practices in which migrants have temporary, part-time, and special contracts that must be renewed, migrants are vulnerable not only to unemployment but also to expulsion, because their legal status depends on their employment. The temporary-permanence that characterizes their work and migration status effectively prevents most Senegalese migrants from imagining their futures in Italy even after long periods of stay. Because of this status, most Senegalese abroad find themselves suspended between home and abroad—propelled out of Senegal through migration, but tethered to home through familial duty and precarity abroad. They are compelled to live their lives oriented towards Senegal and not towards their host country’s definitions of success and honor. They thus are more apt to marry transnationally.
The government of Senegal relies heavily on the “economics of exodus” (Chalfin 2010: 201), and its “techniques” for making “responsibilized” subjects of its citizens directly contribute to transnational marriages. The World Bank estimates, for example, that remittances by overseas migrants from 2010 to 2012 equaled 13 percent of Senegal’s GDP (World Bank 2013). At a time when neoliberal policies and the fallout of structural adjustment have led to the slashing of social services, the shrinking of civil-sector employment, and extreme inflation, the prospect of a mobile workforce that invests at home is both appealing and indispensable to the Senegalese government. Thus, the Senegalese government—like other governments that act as labor brokers (see Rodriguez 2010)—actively promotes a narrative of its overseas citizens as heroes, dutiful sons of their family and of the country, again putting the onus on migrants to provide social welfare services