Children In-Between: Constructing Identities in the Bicultural Family

While transnational movement and migrancy are not new fields of inquiry for anthropology, the experiences of children from inter-cultural marriage, as a part of these processes, have rarely been discussed. In this context, competing cultural ideas of childhood and child-raising are tackled in the intimacy of the domestic home and family life. Ethnographic evidence from families where there is a parent of each nationality (British and Greek) resident in Greece, demonstrates that although 'flux' and 'flow' are compelling theoretical metaphors for transnational movements, they gloss over the intra-familial 'edges' in which parents and grandparents experience and express their particular Greekness and Britishness with regard to children. It is argued that the children of these families generate their own conceptual spaces and identities 'in-between' culturally differentiated adult thoughts and actions through certain identificatory media and thereby effect not merely a role of cultural brokering but hybridized identities in their own right.