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Guilty feelings and the guilt trip: Emotions and motivation in
migration and transnational caregiving
Loretta Baldassar
Professor and Discipline Chair, Anthropology and Sociology, University of Western Australia, Australia
article info
Article history:
Received 3 September 2013
Received in revised form
24 August 2014
Accepted 26 September 2014
Available online xxx
Keywords:
Guilt
Obligation
Emotions
Migration
Transnational families
Transnational caregiving
abstract
This paper explores experience of 'guilt' as a motivating emotion in the migrant process. Data are drawn
from two major research projects with a focus on Italian transnational families comprising adult migrant
children living in Australia and their ageing parents in Italy. Findings confirm Baumeister et al.'s (1994)
three broad functions of guilt as relationship-enhancing; a tool for exerting influence over others; and a
mechanism for alleviating inequities in relationships. The analysis extends this social relational under-
standing of guilt by locating it within the broader context of cultural processes to argue that a moral
obligation to return is implicit in the migration process.
Crown Copyright ©2014 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
As a scholar of migration working in the disciplines of anthro-
pology and sociology, the issue of emotions has always been rele-
vant and evident, but has rarely been the focus of my research. This
tendency to overlook emotions is common in migration studies
generally (Mai and King, 2009: 297), although there is a growing
body of research (including this Special Issue) that responds to this
gap (e.g. Svasek, 2012). In this paper I draw on two substantial
migration research projects, neither of which was designed spe-
cifically to analyse emotions, but both of which elicited data that
lends itself to an examination of emotions and motivation. The
focus of both projects was the ongoing connections between mi-
grants and their homelands and, in particular, the transnational
family relationships maintained across time and distance between
adult migrant children and their ageing parents in Italy. Findings
from both projects indicate that an emotion central to key moti-
vations in the migration process is guilt. In the words of one
migrant daughter; “Guilt, guilt, guilt is what all migrants face!”
Despite receiving a certain amount of attention from psychol-
ogists, guilt has featured only occasionally in the anthropological
and sociological literature on emotions. This said, the emotion or
notion of ‘shame’, which is thought to be closely connected to guilt,
has received much attention in the anthropological literature
(especially of the Mediterranean), particularly in relation to the
cultural construction of honour and morality (Peristiani, 1966;
Herzfeld, 1980; see also; Fassin, 2012). The long-standing anthro-
pological notion that shame is a more public emotion and guilt a
more private affair (Benedict, 1946), has been challenged by recent
psychological research (Tangney et al., 1996). However, there con-
tinues to be general agreement among psychologists that they are
distinct emotions (Keltner and Buswell, 1996). Shame is generally
thought to be more painful than guilt and to involve a negative
assessment of the whole self eI am bad [shame], rather than of
some specific action, or failure to act eI have done a bad thing [guilt]
(Lewis, 1971).
Baumeister et al. (1994, 244) point out that when guilt is
examined in the psychological literature, it is primarily theorised as
largely or entirely linked to private self-consciousness (e.g. Buss,
1980: 159), defined as ‘a solitary affair and a product of mainly
intrapsychic processes’. The central aim of my paper is to confirm
Baumeister et al.'s (1994) critique of this view and to extend their
analysis of guilt as ‘an intrapsychic phenomenon that originates in
interpersonal attachments and social exchange’(p261) through an
examination of its role as a motivating emotion in the migration
process. This view of guilt reflects the relatively recent shift in social
psychology to theorise emotions as relational rather than intra-
psychic. For example, the psychologist De Rivera (1984) proposed
that all emotional states are based on interpersonal relationships
and, indeed, that all emotions are fundamentally concerned with
adjusting these relationships (see also Frijda, 1986). I apply an
anthropological approach to emotion to examine how emotions
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Emotion, Space and Society
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/emospa
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2014.09.003
1755-4586/Crown Copyright ©2014 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Emotion, Space and Society xxx (2014) 1e9
Please cite this article in press as: Baldassar, L., Guilty feelings and the guilt trip: Emotions and motivation in migration and transnational
caregiving, Emotion, Space and Society (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2014.09.003
arise out of social and cultural processes (e.g. Harre, 1986;
Bendelow and Williams, 1998; Parkinson et al., 2005). I am
particularly interested in social science discussions about the
relationship between morality and emotions. Some anthropolo-
gists, for example Michelle Rosaldo (1984), argue that emotions are
moral statements. Similarly, the psychologist Janice Lindsay-Hartz
(1984) argues that guilt experiences are characterised by “a viola-
tion of the moral order”.
My hypothesis is that the act of migration, by causing physical
separation, absence and longing, places the migrant in a difficult
moral bind, in particular concerning their obligations to care for
ageing parents. The normative expectations of ideal family care-
giving, at least in dominant Western configurations, assume kin
must be physically present to adequately care for each other
(Jamieson, 1998).
1
For example, the major bodies of literature on
caring (including feminist, gerontology and nursing) all pose a very
narrow definition of care as dependant or ‘hands on’that, by
definition, demands physical co-presence. In addition, research on
Italian conceptions of care and wellbeing suggest that the elderly
commonly define their health in direct relation to how regularly
they see and how close (both emotionally and geographically) they
feel they are to their children, particularly daughters, who are ex-
pected to provide for all the care needs of their ageing parents and
parents-in-law (Zontini, 2007; MacKinnon, 1998; Di Leonardo,
1987; Baldassar, 2011a). The data I report on in this paper suggest
that migrants feel guilty because the physical separation and
absence imposed by their migration severely restricts their ability
to fulfil their caregiving obligations to their elderly parents, which
prioritise physical co-presence. These ‘guilty feelings’motivate
them to ‘stay in touch’as often and as effectively as they can by
creating opportunities in which they can exchange virtual (and
other forms of) co-presence across distance in an attempt to fulfil
their sense of moral obligation. Here the relationship between guilt
and obligation requires unpacking and is relevant to all family
contexts, whether migration is involved or not.
In focussing on guilt as an interpersonal and social construct,
Baumeister et al. (1994) argue that guilt is especially prevalent in
certain types of relationships:
“People appear to feel guilty when they hurt, neglect, or
disappoint others and when they benefit unfairly vis-
a-vis
others or at others' expense. Communal relationships, based on
expectations of mutual concern for each other's welfare, are
particularly relevant to causing guilt (p261)”
In anthropological and sociological terms, these ‘communal re-
lationships’might be more clearly defined as social relationships
characterised by shared moral obligations. For example, family
caregiving relationships are defined by the ‘norm of generalised
reciprocity’in which people give care without measuring exactly
the amount they receive, but with the expectation and obligation
that care will be returned to them (Baldassar and Merla, 2014: 7). A
pertinent exemplar of this norm in the context of this paper is what
family and gerontology studies refer to as the ‘generational con-
tract’, where parents care for their young who in turn care for them
when they age (Bengtson and Achenbaum, 1993). In the words of an
Italian migrant daughter;
I would feel guilty …Because I feel that you know, they have
cared for me, and I should care for them, I feel that that's why
they're ethat's why they lived all their lives for their children.
So, holy cow! If we can't even care for them in the end! I am a bit
shocked [by] the Australian system, because as you know, I am
married into an Australian family, and [my husband] has a
grandmother who needs care and she doesn't get it.
This said, not all family members give and receive care equally.
Women typically shoulder a far greater burden of care and gener-
ally give more than they receive, an issue I have discussed exten-
sively elsewhere:
…care and the ability to exchange it can be considered a type of
resource or form of social capital …that is unevenly distributed
within families, subject to cultural notions of gender and iden-
tity roles relating to rights and obligations to care, which
intersect with, and interrelate to, the historical care regimes of
the various nation-states and communities in which families
reside. (Baldssar and Merla, 2014:7)
Guilt as a motivating emotion in this context is particularly
interesting as it can be conceived as a resource that can be used by
the less powerful, often women and the elderly, to elicit caregiving
responses from those with more power. The ability to employ guilt
in this way, colloquially referred to as the ‘guilt trip’, relies heavily
on the norm and culturally defined moral obligations of generalised
reciprocity that are constitutive of family (and ‘communal’) re-
lationships. This interpretation confirms and extends Baumeister
et al.'s (1994) emphasis on the interpersonal by examining guilt
as a set of moral relationships that reproduce gendered cultures of
care. What follows is an analysis of the relational and cultural
features of guilt in the context of the migration process, including
how guilt is expressed in discursive performances across trans-
national social fields.
1.1. Migration research methods and transnational caregiving data
As noted above, this paper is informed by two substantial
migration research projects. The first project, ‘visits home’, involved
several years of ethnographic research conducted in the 1990s
comprising extensive participant observation with approximately
40 families (including over 80 interviews) exploring the relation-
ships between migrants in Perth, Western Australia and their
homeland kin in the Veneto region of north-eastern Italy. Through a
detailed analysis of the increasingly regular visits these labour
migrants made to their native towns over the course of a century,
the visit home is conceptualised as a symbolic act of recompense in
response to the culturally defined moral obligation to return to kin
and country (Baldassar, 2001, 2011a,b). In this historical and cul-
tural context, feelings of guilt, often combined with a sense of
longing in the form of homesickness (expressed by informants
using the Italian term ‘nostalgia’) appears to be a central motivation
in migrant's continuing ties to homeland. I return to an analysis of
this data later to explore the relational and cultural features of guilt
in the migration process in a broader context. First, I examine the
role of guilt and motivation in the more micro processes of cultures
of care.
The second project, ‘transnational caregiving’, is a collaborative
study comprising over 200 ethnographic life-history interviews
and participant observation conducted between 2000 and 2004
(Baldassar et al., 2007), with on-going follow up research. Data
collection includes a ‘two-ended’study design involving families
living in Perth as well as with their kin living in the countries of
1
While there is no room for extensive discussion in this paper, there are
important examples of cultural traditions that do not equate appropriate caregiving
with physical co-presence. For example, Olwig (2014) argues that the migration of
women from the lower classes is part of a system of circulation of care that is an
integral and accepted aspect of family and kinship in Caribbean societies (see also
McKay, 2007).
L. Baldassar / Emotion, Space and Society xxx (2014) 1e92
Please cite this article in press as: Baldassar, L., Guilty feelings and the guilt trip: Emotions and motivation in migration and transnational
caregiving, Emotion, Space and Society (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2014.09.003
origin, including Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Singapore, New
Zealand and Iran. The findings document the various practices and
processes of caregiving exchanged between adult migrants and
refugees and their ageing parents living great distances away. For
the purposes of this paper, I focus primarily on the approximately
24 families (over 40 interviews) in the Italian migrant sample (from
both labour and middle-class backgrounds). I also draw some
tentative comparisons using data from the Dutch (mostly skilled
migrants and expatriates) and refugee samples. A feature of the
study's design that is particularly relevant to this paper is that we
first contacted adult migrant children in Australia and through
them requested permission to contact their parents living abroad.
This meant that the study contains a predominance of women (the
main carers) and that most of the families who elected to partici-
pate (though certainly not all) are generally on good terms with
each other. It should be stressed that migration is obviously not the
only cause of guilt in family relationships and I do not want to
suggest that family life is a necessarily harmonious experience in
the absence of migration. Rather, I am examining how migration
provokes feelings of guilt in the context of family relations.
To return to my hypothesis: the act of migration, by causing
physical separation, absence and longing often results in migrants'
‘feeling guilty’about not being physically present to fulfil the moral
obligation of caring for their ageing parents. These ‘guilty feelings’
provide strong motivation for adult children to put significant time
and energy into ‘keeping in touch’and ‘staying in contact’from a
distance. The provision and exchange of this ‘distant care’in migrant
and transnational settings relies on the exchange of communication
(and finances) through various technologies including, most
commonly, the telephone, email, SMStexting, skype calls, letter and
card writing as well as postal and international banking services. As
the idiomatic expressions indicate, the exchange of communication
involved in ‘keeping in touch’and ‘staying in contact’produces co-
presence across distance. Thus, co-presence in transnational set-
tings can take a variety of forms, which I have examined in detail
elsewhere (Baldassar, 2008a) including virtual - provided by phone
conversations, skype calls and emails; proxy - transmitted via special
objects, including gifts, photos and recipes or persons who embody
the longed for loved one; imagined ethrough regular evocations of
distant kin, such as daily prayers and conversations with proximate
family and friends; and physical eachieved during visits, which are
a common feature of transnational family relations.
These processes of creating ‘distant’co-presence are not neces-
sarily dissimilarto those employed in proximate caregiving contexts,
(although, arguably, the migration process serves to intensify and
heighten their importance given the greater limitation on opportu-
nities for physical co-presence.) Indeed, caregiving (whether proxi-
mate or distant), particularly the exchange of moral and emotional
support, involves being available emotionally to give of one's self (to
create co-presence) as a way of expressing and delivering care. Such
kin-work (Di Leonardo, 1987) and emotional labour (Hochschild,
1983) are bound up in notions of obligation and morality that
involve a reciprocity of self. Relevant here is Mauss's (1969) classic
work on giftexchange, only in thiscase what is being exchangedis the
gift of one's presence, of, ‘just being there’. To give of the self through
the exchange of co-presence in transnational settings sets up further
obligations for continued exchanges. What motivates this obligation
to give of the self,as well as how this giving is tobe performed, are the
particularistic ties of kinship as well as the culturally constructed
normativeideals about kin roles and obligationthat serve to maintain
family and community networks. These may differ significantly
across cultures and by gender, class, age and generation.
I am not suggesting that guilt is necessarily integral to the migra-
tionprocess acrossall migration types,historicalcontextsand cultures
eas an inevitable result of the absence caused by migration. Rather,
guilt appears to be a dominant emotional grammar (Beatty, 2005;
McKay, 2007) that is performed in the transnational families in my
studies, particularly among the lifestyle/skilled Italian migrants. This
interpretation of guilt supports the view that emotions can be
considered tostem from socialand culturalprocesses (Parkinsonet al.,
2005). All migrations result in fractured family and community his-
tories as the migrants and the stay-behinds experience a variety of
breaks and limitations on their relationships. I would argue that in
Italian conceptions of migration (both labour and lifestyle), cultural
constructions of guilt may play a centralrole in helping to restore and
sustain transnational relationships. Guilt can thus have both positive
and negative effects (often simultaneously) in sustaining communal
relationships, although sometimes to the detriment of individual
autonomy, and these are explored in the next section.
2. That guilty feeling: the form and function of the obligation
to be co-present
While it was not an overt focus of the study, for the purposes of
this paper, I analysed the 200 interview transcripts from the
transnational caregiving study for evidence of the experience and
expression of guilt. Due to space constraints, I focus on guilt and
motivation from the adult migrant children's perspective only, us-
ing 7 representative examples from the Italian case study. I have
also included 7 examples form the Dutch case study to suggest
tentative comparisons. Individuals from all country samples
expressed similar feelings of guilt associated with their absence
from family back home as a result of migration. No questions spe-
cifically about guilt were asked. Rather, these expressions of guilt
arose in the context of ethnographic oral history interviews that
invited adult migrant children living in Australia to reflect on the
ways they managed to care for theirageing parents who were living
in the home country. As the examples that follow make clear, a
common theme was the articulation of guilt feelings in terms of a
sense of obligation to ‘be there’; to be co-present with kin:
I'm starting to feel a little bit guilty about not being able to spend
a longer period of time with [my mother]. She would really like
it if I were there for three months for instance. (Italian migrant
son)
[My grandmother] has been waiting for me to go back and I feel
so much guilt about it. (Italian migrant granddaughter)
To some degree you actually feel a sense of guilt because I
dragged my wife away from her family so I feel a sense of re-
sponsibility as well …so I am just always very aware of that
responsibility, and I think it is important that we keep the
communication open and involve people. It is important to me
that yes we do go to the Netherlands when we have our holiday.
(Husband of Dutch migrant)
Yes, baby sitting, but also just, um, going for walks together, um
…do reading with him, just very enjoyable, together. And that's
what you miss. And I think it's a feeling of guilt that you take
yourself away from someone. Especially if it is the first grand-
child, it's the only grandchild at the moment, so then …yes,
then it's part of it, of the emigration. (Dutch migrant daughter)
And …Yes, at the moment, I'm happy to have emigrated, except
when something terrible happens. Because often then you can't
be there ….That I think is very hard. …because I always have a
bit of a feeling of guilt, I think …gosh, it has been my decision. It
L. Baldassar / Emotion, Space and Society xxx (2014) 1e93
Please cite this article in press as: Baldassar, L., Guilty feelings and the guilt trip: Emotions and motivation in migration and transnational
caregiving, Emotion, Space and Society (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2014.09.003
was not her [mother's] decision to send me out of the country, it
was my decision... (Dutch migrant daughter)
While Baumeister et al. (1994) focus on the sociality of emotion,
they are certainly not arguing that there is nothing intrapsychicabout
guilt. Their definition of guilt, which seems to reflect my informant's
experiences of this emotion, highlights its interpersonal nature: ‘By
guilt we refer to an individual's unpleasant emotional state associated
with possible objections to his or her actions, inaction, circumstances,
or intentions' (p243). However, they point out that guilt can be
experienced “in the privacy of one's individual psyche, in social
isolation’(p243). What they highlight in their analysis is that ‘the
causes, consequences, and functions of this intraspsychic response
have substantial interpersonal aspects’(p245).
2
They propose two
sources of guilt: empathic arousal and anxiety of social exclusion
(p246), both of which are interpersonal in nature. Empathy is the
ability to identify with others and their needs and to feel some mea-
sure of responsibility for their wellbeing. Hoffman (198 2: 302) sug-
gests that guilt develops out of empathy and that the two are
“quintessential prosocial motives”. Similarly, exclusion anxiety is a
powerful source of affective response. People fear exclusion from
significant others and any behaviour that threatens their sense of
belonging and attachment to others is likely to result in feelings of
guilt.
Clearly, the separation from kin that characterises migration is a
powerful potential source of exclusion and anxiety. Findings from
both studies suggest that all migrants feel increased empathy to-
wards their parents as the latter become less independent. The
ageing process tends to emphasise the physical absence of adult
migrant children who are not present to respond to their parents'
increasing care needs. At the same time, migration can increase
deep seated anxieties of exclusion (about, for example, not being
loved), particularly in cases where parents are unhappy about their
children's decision to migrate. The resultant ‘guilty feelings’are
likely to make migrants especially sensitive to their transnational
caregiving responsibilities as a way of reinforcing their social bonds
and attachments to their hometown kin and community.
This interpersonal understanding of guilt leads to a discussion of
the social functions of guilt. Baumeister et al. (1994) identify three
broad functions of guilt for strengthening and sustaining social
relationships: it motivates relationship-enhancing patterns of
behaviour; it is a tool for exerting influence over others; and it is a
mechanism for alleviating imbalances or inequities in relationships.
These researchers are careful to point out that while guilt has the
capacity to enhance social relationships, it can also be used to serve
destructive ends that have a negative impact on sociality (p247), a
point I return to. Below I consider the three functions of guilt in
turn in relation to transnational caregiving.
First, guilt motivates relationship-enhancing patterns of
behaviour. In other words, guilt helps enforce the communal
norms that prescribe mutual concern, respect, and positive
treatment in the absence of self-interested return. Guilt may
punish and hence reduce the frequency of interpersonal trans-
gressions so that it makes people less likely to hurt, disappoint,
or alienate their [transnational] kin. Guilt may also motivate
people to pay attention and express positive feelings to [such
kin] …. In general, if people feel guilty for hurting their kin, for
neglecting them, and for failing to live up to their expectations,
they will alter their behaviour (to avoid guilt) in ways that seem
likely to maintain and strengthen the relationship.
(Baumeister et al., 1994:247)
As noted above, in the case of transnational caregiving, a sense
of guilt usually manifests over not ‘being in touch’enough. The
guilty feeling is thus alleviated by exchanging the gift of self
through co-presence via transnational communication:
That's been what relieved me of the guilt, actually, I was feeling
so guilty that they were lonely, they were missing me, and I had
left them and all that and then I gave them the gift of commu-
nication, and said look …‘here is a computer and I will teach you
to use it’. And also the telephone was too costly at that time and
so; 'Yes I am fine, yes you are fine' …and you'd hang up because
it cost too much. Email is virtually free for them too, and so we
can almost have a conversation, and that is really good. (Italian
migrant daughter)
I had a problem with guilt for a long time …I think to myself: 'I'll
call her more often, [even] when it is hard [work] for [me to do
so]. (Dutch migrant daughter)
Baumeister et al.'s (1994) second function of guilt highlights
how ‘guilt may operate as an interpersonal influence technique that
allows even a relatively powerless person to get his or her way’
(p247). In the transnational families research project (unlike the
visits home project), parents were commonly in positions of less
power than their migrant children because it was the latter who
most often decided to leave, in some cases against the wishes of
their parents. Guilt is commonly induced by parents who convey
their own sense of suffering over the failure of their migrant chil-
dren to act in the desired fashion, that is, by remaining co-present.
This was a particularly common theme for all the skilled/lifestyle
Italian migrant women in the sample, and the following case is
emblematic;
My parents were dead against my migration. They did not
respond very well at all
…
and I think they had a couple of family
councils and there were a couple of attempts to guilt-trip me
into coming back ….‘What will happen to your parents when
they grow old and they need their daughter to look after them?’
…(Italian migrant daughter)
Although her parents were not able to change their daughter's
mind about not migrating, their attempts to ‘guilt trip’her did
impact on her feelings about their right to visit for the birth of their
grandson. The feeling of guilt here clearly increases the influence of
the parents' wishes, even though ultimately unsuccessfully, they
serve to make the daughter feel bad.
Yes, they have already said as soon as he is born they are
coming ein fact they demanded to be here when he [is] born,
and I am sorry I said no. I feel guilty about that …. I guess, when
the kid is born they are going to come, I cannot keep them away,
in fact I am feeling guilty already, I am thinking maybe I should
let them come for the birth. (Italian migrant daughter)
In this example, it is evident that feelings of guilt motivate
people to do what is expected of them in order to avoid the
negative emotion. At the same time, ‘feeling guilty’is an appro-
priate response, providing evidence of care and concern. However,
2
It is beyond the scope of this paper to examine whether Baumeister et al.'s
(1994) analysis of guilt would stand up to cross-cultural analysis. However, their
arguments do appear to be premised on the assumption that guilt is a universal
emotion. I think a more pertinent approach is to examine emotions as historical and
cultural processes (Wierzbicka, 2004).
L. Baldassar / Emotion, Space and Society xxx (2014) 1e94
Please cite this article in press as: Baldassar, L., Guilty feelings and the guilt trip: Emotions and motivation in migration and transnational
caregiving, Emotion, Space and Society (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2014.09.003
guilt may depend on the parent's appraisal as well as on the mi-
grant's self-appraisal, and so, as Baumeister et al. point out, ‘some
people could conceivably feel guilty despite believing that
they have done nothing wrong’(p247) as the following cases make
clear.
When I finally announced that I was going to Australia, [my
family] were happy for me but I think quite concerned and they
ethey made me swear you will come back no matter what …
but I received a letter from my mother nearly every day! And …
it made me feel very guilty for havingleft …. My mother sent me
presents and she would make dresses for me …It was quite
incredible …She was missing me incredibly and I think her idea
was, if she was writing to me or sending me things, I would not
forget her! …Or it would remind me of her. I was a bit irritated
by that! …I thought it was too much and I couldn't give that
intensity in our relationship …. Oh, I felt a bit guilty because I
would answer, write, maybe only once a fortnight and some-
times less and you know …I felt guilty all the time. (Italian
migrant daughter)
I said goodbye to Mum and Dad and I said goodbye to Dad,
knowing I was never going to see him again. Because I didn't
want to see him again. I still don't feel bad about thinking like
that, you know, because sometimes you feel guilty. But I didn't
…in my mind, do anything that was wrong. But of course, it was
hard on Mum. (Dutch migrant daughter)
These transnational caregiving examples serve to show how
guilt occurs in ‘an interpersonal context of shared values’(Brooke,
1985: 37) or moral obligations. As Baumeister et al. point out,
‘The fact that one can be innocent in one's own eyes but still feel
guilty as a result of another person's evaluation underscores the
need for an interpersonal understanding of guilt’(248). Similarly,
scenarios in which one may not feel guilty but be aware that
another person would expect them to feel guilty also highlight the
way guilt is a product of interpersonal relations that are themselves
shaped by cultural understandings of obligation. For example, in
the following quotation a Dutch migrant daughter describes an
incident where she felt innocent in her own eyes even though she
was aware that her mother's actions were an attempt to make her
feel guilty:
My mother had her birthday on a Thursday …. but …I did not
call her until the Sunday, because it is much cheaper to call on
the weekend. But when I called her, she put the phone down. So
I called her again and said, ‘Oh, Oh, Oh, and many happy returns
still for your birthday’. And she said, ‘It is not my birthday
anymore’and put the phone down. Just like that. And I thought,
in my innocence, something is wrong with the telephone
connection [laughs]. So I call [my brother and sister-in-law] and
Isay,‘Could you please try Mum's telephone number, because I
tried to call, but there is something wrong with the phone
[laughs] …. So, anyway, I call back after fifteen minutes and he
said, ‘This is really a strange problem because there is nothing
wrong with the phone, but Mum does not want to talk to you’.I
say, ‘What the hell is going on?’And he says, ‘You did not call her
on her birthday’. And I said, ‘Jesus, what an ado’.Anyway…[my
brother] took that in hand, because he can't stand that sort of
thing …He went immediately to my mother, and said to her,
‘Are you absolutely mad, if you are angry with your daughter,
suit yourself, but you can't put the phone down, because she
can't jump on her bike and come to you to ask whatever is going
on’. He says [to her], ‘You must absolutely never do that again …
’. But that sort of things happens sometimes, once in a while.
And I never felt very guilty about not being there …. (Dutch
migrant daughter)
The daughter clearly interpreted her mother's refusal to accept
her belated birthday call as an attempt to elicit a ‘guilt trip’response
in her, (so that she might deliver more timely care), making evident
the differentiated and often divergent sense of obligation held by
adult children and their parents. Pertinent here is the recent work
of Madianou and Miller (2012) on the moral and emotional impli-
cations of what they call ‘conditions of polymedia’ewhere high
levels of access to a variety of forms of communication permits a
degree of choice about how, when and how often people can ‘be
there’for transnational kin. In other words, people now evaluate
the form and mode of communication as well as its content. So, for
example, birthday wishes sent by email may be considered an
appropriate form of communication between friends but inappro-
priate for close kin, where a phone or skype call is expected. This
level of access and diversity of modes of communication were
characteristic of the families in the study, making an analysis of
people's experiences of the technologies and integral part of the
research.
Baumeister et al. (1994) identify the third function of guilt as a
way to redistribute emotional distress within the family. If one
party feels wronged and the other then feels guilty, the wronged
party may feel better and so emotional equity is restored. They note
that ‘the transgressor's guilt affirms a commitment to the rela-
tionship, which is thus a potentially powerful indication of affec-
tion, caring and intimacy’that may reassure the other (p247).
I actually have to say that the last time that my mother came I
have a few regrets. I think we had a most wonderful time, but
I'm giving so much to my baby …I'm so involved giving love to
this child that sometimes I feel that I'm not expressing what I
feel inside for my mother …And I could sense she was feeling
sad about this. I think that I wasn't so physically close to her ….
Because we've been also very close, and also physically, you
know, like cuddles and kisses and, this time they didn't happen
very much …So I felt that, and before she left we went for
dinner and the only thing that I told her was like ‘you know
Mum, I know that I'm not being my normal self …but I love you
very much’, and, you know, she was like, ‘yeah I know that’,soI
think she felt better because she could see how guilty I was
feeling …(Italian migrant daughter)
A feature of transnational communication that is of relevance to
this third function of maintaining emotional equity is the practice
of avoiding the exchange of potentially upsetting news. The
ambivalence of transnational communication is a theme also
explored by Madianou and Miller (2012). Elsewhere (Baldassar,
2007b), I have discussed the relatively common practice in Italian
migrant families of hiding the truth about ‘bad news’, usually
serious illness and relationship breakdown, in an effort to protect
family from ‘feeling bad’. On closer analysis, much of this ‘bad
feeling’that results from hearing ‘bad news’is a feeling of guilt
associated with not being able to be physically co-present to ‘just be
there’to provide emotional and practical support. Hence, the
practice of hiding the truth from distant loved ones is a way of
protecting them from the guilt of long distance relationships, which
manifests as a sense of obligation to be there in times of need.
Hiding the truth from transnational kin is also a way of stemming
the obligation for reciprocation. If the information that would
L. Baldassar / Emotion, Space and Society xxx (2014) 1e95
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caregiving, Emotion, Space and Society (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2014.09.003
foster obligation, and be a potential source of guilt, is kept secret
(for example, the truth about illness), then the distant kin is
effectively relieved of their obligations.
This practice of hiding the truth to protect kin from potential
guilt feelings and so maintain emotional equity within the rela-
tionship is a very fraught issue and comes with considerable risk.
There were several cases in the study where family members
become very upset when they were excluded from kinship re-
lations in this way. Here, it is evident that guilt also functions as a
way of strengthening social bonds and attachments, ‘protecting’
people from guilt can result in them feeling distanced or unwel-
comed and may undermine their sense of belonging and attach-
ment to the family. On one hand they are protected from obligation,
on the other they are excluded from reciprocal exchange relations
(a kind of social death) cutting them out of the family networks of
care and information. Herein lies the ambiguity of the gift of self.
Tesser and Rosen (1972) showed that people feel guilty when they
are not sharing the misfortune of another. Johnson et al. (1974: 252)
showed that such guilt feelings are correlated with a reluctance to
transmit bad news.
Importantly, overwhelming guilt, as was reported in the refugee
case study, including survivor guilt, often results in a breakdown in
kinship relations and a withdrawal of the migrant from the recip-
rocal exchange of co-presence. Most of the parents of the refugees
in our study were deeply grateful that their adult children had
managed to migrate successfully, even though their departure
resulted in considerably increased financial and physical hardship
for the parents. As a result there is significant and often continuing
and extensive expectation from extended family and friends that
refugees who manage to settle abroad provide them with financial
and other forms of support. In the refugee case study, individuals
withdrew (often temporarily) from kinship relations as a way of
avoiding their obligations to provide care (usually in the form of
remittances) in instances where these obligations were felt to be
overwhelming and unsustainable and to pose a threat to the mental
and physical health of the refugee (see Baldassar, 2008b). Bau-
meister et al. (1994: 262) highlight a similar finding that ‘too much
guilt may cause people to abandon a relationship simply to avoid
unpleasant feeling states’.
Similarly, in situations where relationships breakdown, in-
dividuals may no longer feel a sense of obligation and feelings of
guilt strong enough to elicit caregiving responses may dissipate,
although guilty feelings may linger even in cases where sense of
obligation is differentially understood. For example, an Italian and a
Dutch daughter who experienced abuse by their fathers both
emphatically expressed no sense of obligation to care for them in
their old age. However, normative expectations about proper child
behaviour, in particular in the case of the Italian daughter, whose
father expressed these expectations, resulted in her feeling guilty
despite not feeling obligated. The Dutch daughter instead said she
‘sometimes felt a bit guilty’about her mother. These examples
show how powerful the social and relational elements of guilt are
in that guilt is borne of the social and cultural expectations that
define moral obligations even when the particular family rela-
tionship is judged unworthy.
Baumeister et al.'s (1994) analysis of the interpersonal aspects of
guilt can be further extended through an examination of the
broader context of cultural processes of obligation, which are
influenced by structural and other, including economic, factors.
While there is no space to explore these in any depth here, it must
be noted that the limited availability and relatively high cost of
institutional health care in the Italian and refugee cases (compared,
for example, to the Dutch) contribute to the need and obligation of
these children to provide hands-on care for their ageing parents. A
social and cultural approach to guilt makes it imperative to
consider the intersections of individual choice within structures of
kinship and cultural obligation as well as within the infrastructures
(or absence of them) of relevant services at state and community
levels (Baldassar, 2008b). The examples discussed in this section
would appear to indicate that the feeling of guilt can be regarded as
an intrapsychic outcome and mediator of not just interpersonal
processes, but cultural ones as well. In the next section I examine
guilt in the broader cultural context of the migration process.
3. Migration guilt: guilt as cultural process
Drawing on findings from the first project, visits home, guilt
appears to be an important cultural and relational feature of the
migration project as a whole. Here, the migration process is con-
ceptualised as a cultural process, referring to the way migration is
interpreted or made sense of through a set of cultural un-
derstandings (including regional, class, gender, generation and so
on). In the particular cultural and historical context of post-WWII
Veneto labour migration to Australia, the act of migration itself
sets up a moral obligation for migrants to return (Baldassar, 2001,
2011b). Migration from this area was a generations-old family
economic strategy to raise remittances that could be used to secure
the viability of the natal household in this once starkly economi-
cally depressed region of Italy. The intended outcome of the
migration was an eventual repatriation to some level of prosperity
in the homeland.
3
Following this argument, those individuals who
did not repatriate failed in their moral obligation to return and are
motivated by a resultant sense of guilt to spend a great deal of
money, time and effort maintaining regular transnational contact
(‘staying in touch’) and undertaking expensive return visits in an
effort to make up for their absence. The importance of being a
‘successful’migrant is a closely related point. Those few migrants in
the ‘visits home’study who refused to visit at all felt that their
migration had not been a success (usually judged in economic
terms) (Baldassar, 2007a). Closely connected to feelings of guilt is
the painful experience of nostalgia elonging for home or home-
sickness ewhich informants explained can only be alleviated by
a return home.
The thesis that a moral obligation to return is implicit in the
migration process comes out of a specific example of labour
migration from northern Italy in the 1960s. Contemporary migra-
tion to Australia is strikingly different and overwhelmingly com-
prises lifestyle, skilled/professional and more recently youth,
4
migration and a small proportion of humanitarian entrants. This
migration, particularly of the lifestyle/skilled migrants of the 1980s
prevalent in the transnational caregiving study, did not represent
an economic necessity for themselves or their families back home.
Hence, remittances were rare and if money was exchanged it
usually flowed from parents to migrants. But even for these rela-
tively affluent migrants, the obligation to care remains clear. It
would appear that guilt is greatest among those migrants who were
not given ‘license to leave’by their parents, particularly women.
Here, the distinctions in migration projects according to class and
gender are salient. While the Italian labour migrants expressed
high levels of guilt for their failure to repatriate, the skilled recent
migrants report high levels of guilt associated with their decision to
leave. The labour migrants were justified in their departure, as an
economic necessity. In contrast, the most common reasons for
3
Australian statistics indicate that between 1960 and 1969 there was a stag-
gering 71.3% return rate among Veneto migrants. The proportion of Sicilian im-
migrants returning to Italy was 19.7% and of Calabrians, 14% (Thompson, 1980: 231).
4
The cohort of very recent and significant working holiday visa migration from
Italy to Australia are not examined in this paper, but see Baldassar and Pyke (2014).
L. Baldassar / Emotion, Space and Society xxx (2014) 1e96
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migration among the skilled/lifestyle migrants were romantic at-
tachments with Australian partners and career opportunities. Their
sense of guilt appears to be related to the absence of a legitimate
(e.g. economic) justification for their departure. It was common for
the parents of these migrants (especially the daughters) to judge
these reasons as insufficient to warrant a migration.
Focussing on guilt, and emotions in general, as central moti-
vating forces in the maintenance of transnational family relations
also disrupts normative understandings of the migration process in
general. Theories of migration have tended to focus on economic
motivations to explain and justify movements of people and these
financial pressures are assumed to outweigh any emotional re-
sponses (McKay, 2007). Mai and King (2009: 297) argue compel-
lingly that economic and emotional dimensions cannot be
productively separated in migration studies. A similar point is made
by Conradson &McKay (2007: 172); ‘feelings may act to enhance
and secure particular forms of transnational labour mobility, whilst
also disrupting or undermining capitalist economic logic. My
research makes abundantly clear that obligations of transnational
caregiving often lead people to make non-economic (or even bad
economic) decisions to put time, effort and resources into care-
giving. Often these bad economic decisions could be simulta-
neously defined as excellent kinship relationship decisions (which
also impact on individual autonomy). This is a point also identified
by Baumeister et al. (1994: 246); if one analyses guilt in terms of
communal relationships, however, cost-benefit analyses lose their
central importance. Instead, one can see guilt as designed to
enforce the communal norms of mutual concern and nurturance
and to protect the interpersonal bond between close individuals.
The function of guilt should, therefore, be relationship enhancing.
For example, an Australian born man, an only child, sold his
prosperous business in Australia and uprooted his (non-Italian
speaking) wife and daughter to return to Sicily and certain unem-
ployment so that they could care for his demented mother. Simi-
larly, a young woman and her Australian husband moved to Rome
in order to care for her mother who had developed a serious illness.
In both these cases, kinship obligations involved negative financial
returns and significant levels of giving of one's self (involving
physical co-presence). The kin-work and emotional labour pro-
vided was not necessarily carried out ‘by choice’or ‘for love’. Here,
cultural constructions of appropriate kin roles are evident. Despite
having brothers living nearby, the young Roman woman felt that,
being the only daughter, she needed to take on the primary role of
carer for her mother. In the case of the Sicilian son, in the absence of
any sisters, he and his wife felt obliged to take on the task. Both
couples explicitly described their sense of obligation to care for
ailing mothers as ‘a duty’they would rather not have to perform
and were less than enthusiastic about the financial and emotional
costs involved.
Indeed, in both research projects, interviews with informants
elicited emotional contradiction and ambivalence: the longing of
nostalgia and return as well as the excitement of freedom that
comes with departure; the love and resentments for kin and
country; the guilt and obligation of absence and so on. It is also
important to note that it is possible that caregiving duties may be
performed in the absence of feelings of love or mutual concern
(and/or these feelings may be ambivalent as well as change over
time). There may be strong cultural beliefs and expectations
regulating behaviour and the interpretation of behaviour, such that
caregiving exchanges may be motivated more by the desire to avoid
guilt and shame for not meeting these expectations than by feelings
of love and concern for the individuals involved. In addition,
practical acts of care that fulfil cultural obligations may be under-
stood by both giver and receiver as appropriate expressions of love
(Jamieson, 1998).
For both the labour and skilled/lifestyle Italian migrants in both
studies, feeling guilty about being absent is particularly pro-
nounced during times of family and community ‘crisis’(e.g. births
and deaths), as well as when community obligations dictate that
people should be physically present, for example during prolonged
periods of illness and when parents lose their ability to be inde-
pendent due to ageing. What I argue in this paper is that the
inability to fulfil cultural obligations of repatriation and/or caring
for parents results in feelings of guilt that motivates transnational
caregiving relations. It can also manifest in feelings of shame about,
for example not being a ‘good’daughter or ‘good’townsman in the
eyes of the broader community and potentially damaging the
public standing and reputation of the whole family.
4. Conclusion
While the term ‘shame’was rarely mentioned by people in the
two migration research projects I draw on for this paper, the term,
idea of and feelings about ‘guilt’were very common. Sociologist
Elspeth Probyn (2005) has explored shame as a positive force in
society. While my research findings tend to question her assess-
ment that guilt is ‘easier to get rid of [than shame] and once dealt
with is forgotten’(a question which warrants further research), I
am inspired by her work, as well as Baumeister et al.'s (1994) to
consider the potential positive social aspects of guilt and its ca-
pacity for relationship building, in particular as a motivating
emotion in sustaining family networks and kinship relationships
over distance and time.
My findings indicate that a characteristic feature of ‘feeling
guilty’, particularly for the women in my studies, is precisely that it
is a ubiquitous and ever-present feeling of not having adequately
met kinship obligations to care. While guilt was often described by
migrants as a feeling that ‘is always there’and that they could
‘never really get rid of’, this constant ‘guilty feeling’can arguably be
defined as a mostly positive motivating force in maintaining and
sustaining relationships over time and distance. In other words, to
feel guilty, although it is not a pleasant emotion, is one way of
expressing appropriate levels of care and concern, and is therefore
in itself a confirmation of appropriate behaviour or of being a ‘good’
or ‘attentive’child/grandparent. This argument is not intended to
debunk conceptualisations of guilt as a negative and damaging
emotion, but instead to acknowledge guilt as also a potentially
positive and constructive social response.
By attending to the cultural specificities of both the processes of
migration and of family relationships, this paper demonstrates how
migrants and their homeland kin sustain transnational emotional
fields that develop out of histories of previous co-present negoti-
ated relationships, culturally informed notions of obligation in
which feeling guilty and guilt trips are performed as a kind of
emotional grammar that constitutes and reaffirms these relations.
In many ways guilt is performed and functions much like the
emotion of iliw described by McKay (2007) among Ifugo Filipinos.
5
The Italian migrants and their homeland kin in my studies appear
to mediate their connections across transnational social fields,
‘showing’and ‘sharing feeling’through the performance of guilt.
McKay (2007) argues that, ‘Within this new emotional field, we
find new and distinctive forms of agency and subjectivity produced
5
McKay (2007) defines Iliw as an emotion similar to homesickness. Like the
Italian post-war labour migrants (and unlike the more recent skilled Italian mi-
grants), the migrants in McKay's (2007) study have ‘license to leave, reflecting the
centrality of economic drivers in contexts of labour migration. Interestingly, a
strong theme, or emotional grammar, of the post war Italian migrants was also the
feeling of nostalgia (homesickness).
L. Baldassar / Emotion, Space and Society xxx (2014) 1e97
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through long-distance emotional connections.’The relevance of
new technologies and their role in transnational family commu-
nication is pertinent here. In previous work, I have argued that
access to new communication technologies increases not only the
desire for regular transnational family contact, but also the obli-
gation to be in touch (Baldassar, 2011b; Baldassar et al., 2007: 223).
In other words, the capacity to be in touch when and as often as one
chooses eliminates any acceptable excuse not to be in frequent
contact and therefore, failure to be in touch can be judged as poor
caregiving or poor kin behaviour. In contemporary transnational
relationships with high access to technologies of communication,
the choice and use of media is itself ‘a major communicative act’
(Madianou and Miller, 2012, 139) providing potential new sources
of guilt-induced motivation.
The process of migration, which by definition is characterised by
the separation of family and loved ones, offers fertile ground for the
exploration of the sociality of emotions as they relate to ties of
kinship, obligation and reciprocity. In the case of the migrant
transnational families examined in this paper, guilt appears to be a
commonly expressed emotion triggered by absence and separation.
However, despite the impediments of distance, caregiving can take
place transnationally, particularly if we recognise the central role
and importance of the gift of self. In migration processes, the
caregiving exchanges of the gift of self are motivated by a set of
obligations implicit in cultural understandings of gender roles and
of the migration project itself. A sense of obligation to care is
defined by shared cultural understandings embedded in particu-
laristic kin relationships. Notions of obligation are differentiated
and divergent as they are experienced by, and apply differently to,
various family members depending on gender, age and the nego-
tiation of family relationships over time. Guilty feelings and guilt
trips are mapped out onto these relationships in response to these
deeply relational but potentially divergent understanding and ex-
pectations of caregiving obligation.
Central to Italian conceptions of the labour migration experi-
ences presented in this paper is the moral obligation to return.
Similarly, for the skilled/lifestyle Italian migrants discussed here,
the separation that characterises migration sets up a moral obli-
gation to remain in touch and to facilitate co-presence. Failing to
meet these obligations results in feelings of guilt that serve to
motivate the activity and practice of transnational communication.
The expression of guilt is also a culturally appropriate response that
is a social statement of care. In this way, guilt can be defined, not
only as a type of interpersonal sensitivity, but also as an expression
of cultural processes.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Paolo Boccagni, Katie Walsh and the
anonymous reviewers for their extremely helpful comments on this
paper.
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