When the Mother-To-Be Is the Daughter-In-Law: Transnational ‘Matrescence’ and Women’s Family Care Between Australia and Nepal.

Nepal is a patrilineal society. Typically, women move into their in-laws' household after marriage and are expected to ‘care for’ their in-laws. Conversely, the mother-in-law becomes the daughter-in-law’s primary carer when she gets pregnant, and traditionally, her main child-rearing companion and guide through this major life event. These care giving and receiving practices establish that the wife and the children 'belong' to the husband's family. When having a baby overseas, the in-laws will often be called into the host country to perform their postpartum caring duties, as culturally prescribed. They will bring their ancestral health-care knowledges and relevant therapeutic items with them. However, they will also be 'guests' in their daughter-in-law’s home. This drastically changes intergenerational family roles and its associated care circulation practices and hierarchies. This paper analyses how these women’s family care roles are re-signified and contested by the condition of the ‘transnational household’. It draws on multi-sited ethnographic research on transnational experiences of antenatal and postnatal care for Nepalese women living in Sydney, Australia, and for their extended families in Nepal. In defining this life stage in anthropological terms rather than biomedical ones, I follow anthropologist Dana Raphael's (1975) use of the term ‘matrescence’. I argue that matrescence, in the South Asian context, ought to be conceived as a collective biopolitical, discursive, spiritual, relational and bodily process that accompanies the prospects of the birth of a new family member. The collective aspect of this estate of ‘becoming’ in the family is emphasised, placing careful attention to how the web of relationships around the mother-to-be and future child shifts after conception, and how these relationships are negotiated in new terms in the transnational context. Data from more than 30 in-depth interviews and from extensive participant observation with mothers and their families in both countries illuminate these dynamics.