1 12. Transnational Families and the Obligation to Care: Debating Culture Across Distance (1) in Ralph Grillo (2008) (Ed) Immigrant Families in Multicultural Europe: Debating Cultural Difference University of Amsterdam Press Loretta Baldassar (University of Western Australia) Introduction This chapter explores some of the transnational dimensions of debates within and about families, in particular the way kin who are separated by distance and national borders construct and negotiate cultural notions of obligation about aged care (2) . I argue that debates about migration and caregiving concerning transnational families, both internal (at the micro level of everyday practice) and external (at the generally more meso and macro levels of policy and service provision), must be understood not as an attribute of individuals or families alone, but as a function of relationships between agents and social institutions within and across both home and host settings. In other words, a focus on transnational caregiving shifts attention from the behaviour of individual agents to the pattern of relations between agents, social units and institutions. In this way, internal debates concerning migration and care within the transnational domestic sphere (Gardner & Grillo 2002) provide a link between micro, meso and macro levels of analysis locating the practices of individuals and families in the context of local and transnational communities and states. The ‘transnational family’ in this context is best understood, following Grillo (supra ), ‘as an iconic cultural, social and ideological “site”’. Under examination here are the interrelations between the family as ‘moral order’, albeit one that is socially constructed and contested through internal debates, and the external debat es and constraints that impact upon the institution of ‘the family’ and its members, in particular those relating to the provision of aged care and the (1) An early version of aspects of this paper was presented at the symposium, ‘Sociability and its Discontents: Civil Society, Social Capital, and their Alternatives in European and Australian Society’, in August 2005, convened by Dr Nicholas Eckstein, Cassamarca Senior Lecturer in History, Sydney University. Many thanks to Professor Ralph Grillo for his valuable input into this paper. (2) The ideas presented here are drawn from a larger collaborative study by Baldassar, Baldock and Wilding, funded by an Australia Research Council Grant A00000731, ‘Transnational Care-giving: cross-cultural aged-care practices between Australian immigrants and their parents living abroad’. Data collection comprised approximately 200 life- history interviews and participant observation with migrants and refugees in Perth, Western Australia, and their parents abroad in Italy, The Netherlands, Ireland, Singapore, New Zealand and in the transit country of Iran. Details of the research, and of a framework for analysing transnational caregiving between adult migrant children and their homeland based parents, have been described at length elsewhere (Baldassar, Baldock & Wilding 2007).