Paper short abstract:

Drawing on a long term fieldwork on Portuguese Bangladeshis, the objective of this paper is to show the articulations between households, extended families, transnational migration and temporalities.

Paper long abstract:

The main objective of this paper is to highlight the way extended families, as moral persons, are transnationalized. Furthermore, it will reveal how time, namely one's position in the life course and in the cycle of the domestic unit, create tensions and ambiguities in these transnational households.

This argument is based on a long term ethnography of Bangladeshi extended families living between Portugal and Bangladesh. In the past 20 years, Bangladeshis in Portugal have reunited their families, invested in businesses and in their children's education, while maintaining a close relation with their non-migrant relatives in Bangladesh, through economic and social remittances, rituals, the circulation of food, among other examples (tangible and intangible goods circulate in both ways, though). These forms of intergenerational participation and mutuality take place mainly at the level of the household and within extended families, and they reveal how the house, as a moral category and person, is transnationalized. Simultaneously, though, a longitudinal ethnographic exercise, reveals how the position in the life course and in cycle of the domestic unit create tensions, ambiguities and uncertainties in these forms of translocal participation.