ARI Working Paper Series

This paper seeks to locate the household in research on global migration and transborder social and economic integration. The focus is on the household as a basic institution in social reproduction. The discussion begins by comparing concepts of the household in society, starting with peasant studies of the household as a self-sufficient unit of production. It then considers feminist critiques, including transnational family research as a way of looking inside of the household in its relationship to a changing world economic and political order. A political economy assessment of the shift from the “Keynesian” to the “neoliberal” household is made. The quest is to draw from these paradigms a better understanding of householding as a dynamic social process that is now going beyond national and territorial borders in all of its dimensions. The idea of global householding is introduced as a framework for providing evidence from East and Southeast Asia showing how the daily and generational reproduction of the household is occurring through marriage, childbearing, educating and raising children, household maintenance, migrant remittances, and care of the elderly. It concludes by drawing implications from global householding for a world system that continues to be based on the nation-state as a cultural as well as political sphere with discrete territorial borders used to regulate citizenship, loyalties and social identities.