Questions of Friendship and Degrees of Transnationality among Second-Generation Return Migrants to Barbados

Abstract

While the academic literature has demonstrated the importance of social networks in relation to the process of migration, investigations have rarely examined in detail the personal–social adjustment issues that migrants and return migrants face. This study examines the context and types of friendship pattern that young return migrants from Britain cultivate in Barbados. The research centres on a wholly under-researched demographic group—young return migrants or second-generation Barbadians who have decided to return to the birthplace of their parents. The investigation is based on 51 in-depth interviews carried out with these young returnees to Barbados. Presenting a taxonomy of friendship types, it is argued that, for the ‘Bajan-Brits’ under study, the cultivation of new friendships is highly problematic. The research identifies what we refer to as the ‘insular transnational’, the ‘we are different’ and the ‘all-inclusive transnational’ friendship types among the young returnees. Our analysis also shows that problems of friendship are highly gendered, with females reporting the most problems due to what is perceived as sexual and workplace competition. It is stressed that these circumstances exemplify the essentially ‘hybrid’, ‘liminal’ and ‘in-between’ positionality of these second-generation migrants within contemporary Barbadian society.

Keywords:

• Transnational Migrants
• Friendship Patterns
• Second-Generation Return Migration
• Barbados

Acknowledgements

The generosity of The Leverhulme Trust in funding this research from 2002 to 2006 is gratefully acknowledged by the authors. We also wish to thank the second-generation Bajan-Brit migrants who gave freely of their time in talking with us about their experiences

Notes

1. These organisations incuded the government's Facilitation Unit for Returning Nationals (FURN), and local return-migrants’ organisations.

2. Names have been changed to afford anonymity.

3. Wilson's (1969, 1973) ethnography of the moral gendered identities of men and women on the small island of Provendencia has been used extensively as a frame of reference to explain and deconstruct Caribbean gendered identities. He maintains that (West Indian) society is based on a dialectic of respectability and reputation. Respectability is rooted in a Eurocentric culture that is the normative concern of elite classes and women, and speaks of proper or respectable behaviour. On the other hand, reputation is used to describe male behaviour. Reputation is viewed as a post-colonial response to the inability of West Indian men to attain the prosaic symbols of respectable behaviour. Reputation is the ‘poor man's riches’—his virility, bragging about sexual conquest, the fathering of many children and general boasting.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joan Phillips

Joan Phillips is Research Fellow at the Policy Studies Institute, London

Robert B. Potter

Robert Potter is Head of the School of Human and Environmental Sciences and Professor of Human Geography at the University of Reading