Pakistani migrant families in Denmark find themselves in a specific ethno-national, post-9/11 environment where Muslim immigrants are subjected to processes of non-recognition, exclusion and securitization. This ethnographic study explores how, why, and at what costs notions of relatedness, identity, and belonging are being renegotiated within local families and transnational kinship networks. Each entry point concerns the destructiveproductive constitution of family life, where neglected responsibilities, obligations, and trust lead not only to broken relationships, but also, and inevitably, to the innovative creation of new ones. By connecting the micro-politics of the migrant family with the macro-politics of the nation state and global conjunctures in general, the book argues that securitization and suspicionlaunched in the name of integrationescalate internal community dynamics and processes of family upheaval in unpredicted ways.

Mikkel Rytteris Assistant Professor in the Department of Culture and Society at Aarhus University where he is affiliated with the research program on contemporary ethnography and part of a cross-disciplinary project on Sufism and Transnational spirituality.

Preface

Chapter 1. Introduction

PART I: HISTORIES

Chapter 2. Macro-perspectives: the usual suspects
Chapter 3. Micro-perspectives: contested notions of improvements

PART II: MARRIAGES

Chapter 4. Between preferences: love marriages as symbolic mobility
Chapter 5. Welfare-state nomads in the borderlands of Sweden and Denmark
Chapter 6. The Danish family and the aliens

PART III: HOMELANDS

Chapter 7. Pakistan-Denmark: back and forth
Chapter 8. An imagined return: negotiations of identity and belonging
Chapter 9. The Kashmir earthquake: dynamics of intensive transnationalism

PART IV: AFFLICTIONS

Chapter 10. In-laws and outlaws: suspicions of local and transnational sorcery
Chapter 11. Demonic migrations: the re-enchantment of middle-class life
Chapter 12. Conclusion: family upheaval

References
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