Migration and Family Discord
The relationship between social change and transformations in family violence has become increasingly problematized in recent years. While conventional wisdom has held that Westernization and other types of social change lead to increased family violence, due to a variety of factors related to the disruption of the social fabric (Gelles and Cornell 1983), recent studies have suggested a more complex picture.
Morley (1994), for instance, has found that the relationship between “modernization and wife-beating” is complex—while tensions arising from the political context of kinship relations may diminish, other factors such as alcohol consumption frequently exacerbate pre-existing problems. Although social change has been found to increase family violence in some contexts (Savishinsky 1976), in others the opposite effect is the case (Erlich 1966). In his broad cross-cultural survey Levinson (1989) finds that there is not a unidirectional relationship between social change and increases in family violence, calling instead for specifying the types of relationships that may serve to mitigate or vitiate family violence within the particular context of social change.In this paper I will analyze transformations in domestic violence and conflict resolution through a focus on the changing nature of gender, kinship, and marriage among Nuer refugees from Africa's Sudan who have recently settled around a community I will refer to as Wacohtia—an outer-ring suburb of a large U.S. Midwestern city. Drawing on research undertaken in Wacohtia since December 1995, I compare processes of domestic violence and conflict resolution among Nuer couples living in the United States with the nature of these processes in Sudan, drawn from both informants' accounts and published ethnography (Evans-Pritchard 1940, 1951; Hutchinson 1996).
Since mid-1994 when Nuer refugees began arriving in Wacohtia in significant numbers, domestic violence has emerged as an important issue, both within the refugee community and for the agencies involved in the resettlement process.
Within the context of war, flight, and resettlement, a variety of new tensions have entered the Nuer conjugal relationship, already significantly transformed through displacement. Expectations of male employment, changes in male sociability and drinking, transformations in spatial dimensions of gender relations, gendered differences in second-language competence and in the ability to negotiate a new cultural environment, and the need for new forms of cooperation between spouses have all conspired to create a variety of marital tensions not present in Sudan. These new tensions are arising within the context of Nuer marriages which are now extricated from the wider kinship network in which they are traditionally embedded—this network constituting the normal context for conflict resolution afforded to Nuer couples. Factors largely internal to Nuer social relations will be discussed in relationship to cultural, ideological, and legal dimensions related to life in the United States in framing domestic violence and conflict resolution within the Nuer refugee community.
More on the topic Migration and Family Discord:
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- CHARACTERIZATION OF ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES