Paper long abstract:

Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork with migrants and their families in rural Tajikistan and Russia, this paper sheds light on the inherent tensions and contradictions of care in the context where migration to Russia has become the exclusive means of sustaining livelihoods. Drawing on the ethnography of one migrant’s family’s attempts to arrange care for his elderly parents at a critical time of their increasing frailty and serious illness, my paper critically engages with the recent literature on care in transnational families. Bringing this literature into conversation with my ethnography and the debates about the regional culturally informed notions and practices of respect and authority, hospitality and help, mutual presencing and involvement in neighbourhood space, I show how migration is entwined with the relations of indebtedness and care that are constitutive of moral personhood. By looking at migrants’ struggles to meet the disjunctive demands of care as an affective performance of respect and as material provision, I expose the key paradox of care in migration contexts – the necessity of being both present and absent at the same time. Against this backdrop, migrants’ attempts to bridge the disjuncture between the moral obligation to care and the capacity to do so can keep men ‘stuck’ in a loop of constant movement between Russia and Tajikistan: a form of mobility which is associated with constrained agency and lack of choice.