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MARIAL CENTER COLLOQUIUM Karen Fog Olwig (Anthropology professor, University of Copenhagen) An American Nuclear Family?: Narratives of "Betterment" and Personhood in an African-Caribbean Immigrant Context Wednesday, April 9, 4:00 p.m.-6:00 p.m Since the 1960's a large number of African-Caribbean families have migrated to the United States in order to "better" their lives. Much migration research has focused on ascertaining the extent to which these immigrants succeed at experiencing upward social and economic mobility in American society, as measured by “objective” indicators such as occupation, income, housing and education. The expectation is that the immigrants are eager to pursue American goals of social mobility and establish mainstream middle-class nuclear families. In this paper I analyze three life stories related by members of an immigrant nuclear family from the Caribbean. I show that while this family fulfils several of the criteria of social mobility as defined by "objective" American standards, individual family members' interpretations of these achievements differ markedly from dominant American assumptions of middle class family life. The life stories therefore point to the importance of questioning the social norms underlying research on family relations in an immigrant context and to explore the migrants' own notions of "betterment" and personhood as they stake out a life for themselves in American society. Karen Fog Olwig is a professor at the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen. She has done extensive research on the African-Caribbean family, studying the development of family relations within the context of European colonial societies African-Caribbean local communities as well as immigrant communities in Europe and North America. She has recently completed a study of three Caribbean family networks dispersed through migration to Britain, Canada and the United States. Her most recent publication is Caribbean Journeys: An Ethnography of Migration and Home in Three Family Networks. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. DIRECTIONS TO THE MARIAL CENTER The MARIAL Center is located on the 4th floor of the main building of Emory's Briarcliff Campus, |