Gifting remittances

Last updated

"Gifting remittances" describes a range of scholarly approaches relating remittances to anthropological literature on gift giving. The terms draws on Lisa Cliggett's "gift remitting", [1] but is used to describe a wider body of work. Broadly speaking, remittances are the money, goods, services, and knowledge that migrants send back to their home communities or families. Remittances are typically considered as the economic transactions from migrants to those at home. [2] While remittances are also a subject of international development and policy debate [3] and sociological and economic literature, [4] this article focuses on ties with literature on gifting and reciprocity or gift economy founded largely in the work of Marcel Mauss and Marshall Sahlins. While this entry focuses on remittances of money or goods, remittances also take the form of ideas and knowledge. For more on these, see Peggy Levitt's work on "social remittances" which she defines as "the ideas, behaviors, identities, and social capital that flow from receiving to sending country communities." [5]

Contents

Anthropologists on remittances

Anthropological work on remittances appears to be divided into two streams: one based on overseas diasporas of migrants (primarily in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia) and the other from urban areas to rural (primarily in Africa). While both are interested in the relationships among migrants and remittance recipients, the transnational work tends to approach financial remittances as a key source of support for rural households in the sending countries while the other focuses on monetary remittances as gifts, and on the intentionality of gift giving in maintaining relationships. All share a focus on the exchange within relationships, within the context of a household, family, kinship, community or other social network.

Within the transnationalism framework, Jeffrey Cohen and Dennis Conway have detailed a debate in which remittances are treated as either sources of development (for example by funding water infrastructure projects in sending communities) or dependency (by perpetuating a cycle migration and remittances to maintain households and communities). [6] They draw on their experiences with transnational migrants in Oaxaca, Mexico to show that this is a false divide. Their focus on the noneconomic, gender, and informal economy relationships that accompany migration, [7] highlights the shared emphasis on relationships and social context which marks anthropological treatment of remittances as distinct and which ties transnational work with that of those explicitly focusing on gift remitting.

Although in apparent disagreement with Cohen and Conway on the development/dependency debate, Leigh Binford strengthens the call for studying remittances as an international process, documenting the impact of remittances on both sides of the exchange, [8] an approach to which anthropologists are well trained. One space for such a transnational treatment of “gifting remittances” is in the analysis of barrels filled with new and recycled gifts sent home, typically to the Caribbean or Asia. [9]

Gift Remitting, Remitting the Gift

While remittances could also be theorized as gifts in the above-mentioned transnational work, the terms gift remitting and remitting the gift make explicit the focus on gifts and the accompanying social ties. Discussion of “gift remittances” goes back at least to Aderanti Adepoju's work in Nigeria on the socio-economic links between urban migrants and their rural sending communities in which money is remitted alongside gifts not readily available in the home country. In this work the focus on socio-cultural context and networks is strong. [10] That the economic cost may be high for the migrant head of household is highlighted as visiting and bringing the requisite gifts can be very expensive, a disincentive to visiting the non-migrating family and community members.

Margo Russell writes that defining remitted moneys as gifts rather than payments enhances freedom and flexibility for the giver. This works in Swaziland because moneys are not sent to a household but to “a range of individuals in urban and rural areas to whom, because of specific relationships, various workers feel a particular obligation.” [11] Here ties are not just of affect; they are of mutual obligation reinforced through the passage of gifts. Gifting remittances fits within and strengthens a larger pattern of reciprocity and obligation in Swaziland. [12]

Following on the work of these earlier anthropologists working in Africa, Lisa Cliggett uses the phrases "gift remitting" [1] and "remitting the gift" [13] to describe urban to rural gifting among Zambian families, highlighting that these remittances are more irregular, are of lesser amounts, and tend to be material as opposed to monetary. In Zambia, urban migration and remittance strategies serve to uphold ties, thereby reducing insecurity and allowing for return migration, particularly in old age. Unlike the interests of policy makers and scholars interested in remittances for development, Cliggett emphasizes that: "Zambia migrants do not remit large sums of cash or goods, and that the fundamental concern for migrants in Zambia is investing in people and relationships through remitting, rather than investing in development, improved living conditions or other capital in rural sending communities." [14]

Trager provides support from a similar phenomenon in Nigeria, where she has observed intentional use of even minimal remittances and services to maintain home-town ties with family, kin, and the community as a whole. [15] The regular giving of remittances and other services such as joining hometown associations and helping in community fund-raising maintained ties. Conway and Cohen also describe cases in which remittance to the community and communal reciprocal relationships were equally important to kin. [16] Along the lines of Mark Granovetter’s strength of weak ties, they describe non-kin relationships as even more important as household ties and obligations as the social aid networks are very flexible and reinforcing. [17]

Charles Piot’s Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa places the analysis of domestic gift remitting explicitly within a framework of global change, showing how remittances from wage workers and gifts from successful cash croppers are transforming landscape and relations of exchange, personhood, and social solidarity. His work reinforces that gifting exists alongside and within the capitalist world economy and represents an attempt to update Marcel Mauss’s theory of the gift for the 21st Century, a project more fully undertaken by Maurice Godelier.

Anthropology of Gifting

The Gift

In her forward to The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, Mary Douglas summarizes Marcel Mauss’s argument succinctly: “no free gift” as gifts entail maintenance of mutual ties. [18] In terms of potlatch in North America, this meant that each gift is “part of a system of reciprocity in which the honor of giver and recipient are engaged” and failing to return means losing the competition for honor.” A Maussian approach to giving and reciprocity provides useful insight into the analysis of “gifting remittances” precisely because of the focus on constructing and maintaining ties through the giving and receiving of such funds, goods, and services.

From the Spirit of the Gift to the Social Life of Things

Since Mauss discussed the ability of gifts to drive giving, receiving, and reciprocating gifting as animating objects through a piece of the giver going with the property, the spirit of the gift has been a subject of scholarship. [19] Mauss termed this spirit “hua” a Māori word describing “the spirit of things” [20] and discusses its mana, referring to a certain power or authority of the giver or the gift itself. Because of the “thing itself possesses a soul” for the Māori, and for Mauss's theory of the gift “to make a gift of something to someone is to make a present of some part of oneself” and “to accept something from somebody is to accept some part of his spiritual essence, of his soul.” [21] More simply put, receiving a gift carries with it an obligation to receive and to reciprocate, and the gift itself drives this system of exchange. It is based on this that the anthropology of gifting is located on the contextual and historically contingent relationship between giver and receiver turned reciprocator. [22]

Trager's work in Nigeria supports the sense of obligation tied to gift giving, or, conversely, the need for continued use of gifting remittances and services to maintain relationships with kin and community: “Even those with little interest in community affairs or in ever living in the home town themselves, feel obliged to maintain ties in these ways.” [23]

In Enigma of the Gift [24] Maurice Godelier summarizes and critiques Marcel Mauss’s work in “The Gift.”, [25] updating it to more explicitly treat interwoven domains of market exchange, gift exchange, and withholding [26] objects from the realm of exchange. [27] Mauss, however, had observed the persistence of gift giving in his contemporary society of early 20th century France in Chapter 4 of The Gift, wherein he raised an important criticism of the concept of utility and its attendant theories of value, which were coming to dominate economic theory of day, even so far as to inform the French policies that created the social welfare system (Fournier 2006, Gane 1992). Noting that Mauss did well to highlight the three obligations of gift exchange (gift, receipt, reciprocation) his focus was strongest on the question of reciprocity and he failed to pay sufficient attention to receiving or giving. Godelier suggests that Mauss's depiction of the spirit of the gift as the ultimate explanation for its reciprocation - not just as a symbol or bonds of knowledge of social relations – resulted from Mauss's inability to adequately resolve his own questions, thereby leaving objects with agency, free of the people who created it. ("It will basically look as if things themselves had persons in tow". [28] Godelier says this positioning of spirit and agency in the gift basically leaves all objects and all of nature as human and human centered, set in motion purely by human will. [29] )

All of the articles grouped here under the loose rubric of “gifting remittances” share this fundamental focus on locating exchange within socio-cultural relationships and using the insight that gifting/remitting grants broader insight into the broader economy and culture, approximating Mauss's treatment of the study of the gift as a window onto a study of the sum total of social life. [25] Yet none goes so far as to speak directly of the mana or hua of gifts or remittances even though the ability of gifts to spur reciprocation is part of the analysis and of the calculations of those doing the remitting. With his stance that the divide between gifts and commodity exchange is overstated, [30] Arjun Appadurai’s treatment of gifts and commodities [31] as, like people, having “social lives” [32] is closer to their work. However, with this definition of the commodity as "anything intended for exchange" (1986: 9), he thereby makes gift giving into a social act that is nearly indistinguishable from commodity exchange and ultimately emphasizes the economic value of giving, rather than the social, moral or spiritual values that people mark as important. By blurring the distinction between commodities and gifts, a distinction that ordinary people routinely make in their everyday lives as they give emphasis to the value they place on specific social relationships, Appadurai undermines the possibility of understanding the movement of goods and money, between life as a commodity embedded in a market to life as a gift embedded in intimate relationships of giving, receiving, and reciprocating. [33] For Appadurai [34] the definitions of both commodities and gifts are not only socially constructed but provisional. From his position Appadurai can only describe, but he cannot explain, how social acts of giving gifts seem to multiply with the advance of the market.

Motivations and gifting

Drawing on Marshall Sahlins, Pierre Bourdieu reminds us that gifting morphs with social distance: as social distance increases, self-interest and calculation increases and the importance of generosity and equity declines... the logic of warfare enters even as people look for ways to mediate the distance by “striv[ing] to substitute a personal relationship for an impersonal, anonymous one”. [35] Yet, while the capacity to calculate is universal the spirit of calculation (the presumed rationality of the economic actor) is culturally and historically contingent: the "economic habitus" of an actor is learned. [36] Understanding that gifts move in and out of overlapping economic systems and that the manner in which they move may be impacted by social and physical space, is useful in analyzing the transnational and market-based relations in which remittances are generated, transferred, and spent.

Similarly, the motivations of actors over time are contingent and may, at one point, be altruistic and at other self-interested. Tumama describes motivations for remitting among New Zealand migrants which range from future investments to maintaining kinship ties which pushed some to go without food while striving to remit. A motivation of self-interest may become necessary as “it is likely that the pressures of providing for a family in New Zealand may override the gift giving traditions for some younger Pacific people” [37] who are unable to meet the financial stress of general and traditional gift giving. Focusing on El Salvador, Ester Hernandez and Susan Bibler Coutin, take the discussion of motives – or portrayal of them – to the national level. They show that by treating remittances as “altruistic gifts or unrequited transfers,” [38] central banks can make them appear as cost free money transfers. In turn, those who do not save a significant portion of received remittances are portrayed as selfish, i.e. as self-interested instead of altruistic actors.

Gifting and Social Analysis

In her overview of anthropological theory from the perspective of the gift, Karen Sykes [39] presents analysis of the gift as a relationship between people in which the relationship is made substantial by the tangible exchange as encompassing not just ceremony (as with Malinowski) but all of social life (as with Mauss). For Sykes, focusing on the gift is a way to avoid the pitfall of focusing on the individual and having to conjecture individual motivations or on motivations and being locked into an abstract analysis of the contents of the human mind. Sykes argues that focusing on the relationship, or the exchange, keeps the analysis squarely within anthropological analysis of social relations. She concludes by arguing for focus on the gift as the focus of economic anthropology because, "when understood as a total social fact, gift giving concentrates many aspects of human relationships, but does not underwrite all of them as the economic." [40] In her summary of gifting, Lisa Cliggett concurs: "gift giving is a good way to see all the various aspects of human nature in action at one time because gifts can be simultaneously understood as rational exchange, as a way to build political and social relations, and as expressions of moral ideas and cultural meanings" [41] These insights, show that Mauss's assertion that gift exchange is about building social relationships remains a central part of gift theory to this day. Articulated as such (ex. Cliggett's work in Zambia) or not (Cohen's and Conway's work in Oaxaca), it is an insight that is also central to work within the general rubric of gifting remittances.

Related Research Articles

A gift economy or gift culture is a mode of exchange where valuables are not sold, but rather given without an explicit agreement for immediate or future rewards. Social norms and customs govern giving a gift in a gift culture, gifts are not given in an explicit exchange of goods or services for money, or some other commodity or service. This contrasts with a barter economy or a market economy, where goods and services are primarily explicitly exchanged for value received.

Economic anthropology is a field that attempts to explain human economic behavior in its widest historic, geographic and cultural scope. It is an amalgamation of economics and anthropology. It is practiced by anthropologists and has a complex relationship with the discipline of economics, of which it is highly critical. Its origins as a sub-field of anthropology began with work by the Polish founder of anthropology Bronislaw Malinowski and the French Marcel Mauss on the nature of reciprocity as an alternative to market exchange. For the most part, studies in economic anthropology focus on exchange. In contrast, the Marxian school known as "political economy" focuses on production.

Marcel Mauss French sociologist and anthropologist (1872-1950)

Marcel Mauss was a French sociologist. The nephew of Émile Durkheim, Mauss, in his academic work, crossed the boundaries between sociology and anthropology. Today, he is perhaps better recognised for his influence on the latter discipline, particularly with respect to his analyses of topics such as magic, sacrifice and gift exchange in different cultures around the world. Mauss had a significant influence upon Claude Lévi-Strauss, the founder of structural anthropology. His most famous work is The Gift (1925).

Social exchange theory

Social exchange theory is a sociological and psychological theory that studies the social behavior in the interaction of two parties that implement a cost-benefit analysis to determine risks and benefits. The theory also involves economic relationships—the cost-benefit analysis occurs when each party has goods that the other parties value. Social exchange theory suggests that these calculations occur in romantic relationships, friendships, professional relationships, and ephemeral relationships as simple as exchanging words with a customer at the cash register. Social exchange theory says that if the costs of the relationship are higher than the rewards, such as if a lot of effort or money were put into a relationship and not reciprocated, then the relationship may be terminated or abandoned.

In cultural anthropology, reciprocity refers to the non-market exchange of goods or labour ranging from direct barter to forms of gift exchange where a return is eventually expected as in the exchange of birthday gifts. It is thus distinct from the true gift, where no return is expected.

Kula ring

Kula, also known as the Kula exchange or Kula ring, is a ceremonial exchange system conducted in the Milne Bay Province of Papua New Guinea. The Kula ring was made famous by the father of modern anthropology, Bronisław Malinowski, who used this test case to argue for the universality of rational decision making, and for the cultural nature of the object of their effort. Malinowski's path-breaking work, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), directly confronted the question, "why would men risk life and limb to travel across huge expanses of dangerous ocean to give away what appear to be worthless trinkets?" Malinowski carefully traced the network of exchanges of bracelets and necklaces across the Trobriand Islands, and established that they were part of a system of exchange, and that this exchange system was clearly linked to political authority. Malinowski's study became the subject of debate with the French anthropologist, Marcel Mauss, author of The Gift. Since then, the Kula ring has been central to the continuing anthropological debate on the nature of gift giving, and the existence of gift economies.

The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies is a 1925 essay by the French sociologist Marcel Mauss that is the foundation of social theories of reciprocity and gift exchange.

Structural anthropology is a school of sociocultural anthropology based on Claude Lévi-Strauss' 1949 idea that immutable deep structures exist in all cultures, and consequently, that all cultural practices have homologous counterparts in other cultures, essentially that all cultures are equitable.

The Moka is a highly ritualized system of exchange in the Mount Hagen area, Papua New Guinea, that has become emblematic of the anthropological concepts of "gift economy" and of "Big man" political system. Moka are reciprocal gifts of pigs through which social status is achieved. Moka refers specifically to the increment in the size of the gift; giving more brings greater prestige to the giver. However, reciprocal gift giving was confused by early anthropologists with profit-seeking, as the lending and borrowing of money at interest.

Remittance Money transfer by a foreign worker to their home country

A remittance is a non-commercial transfer of money by a foreign worker, a member of a diaspora community, or a citizen with familial ties abroad, for household income in their home country or homeland. Money sent home by migrants competes with international aid as one of the largest financial inflows to developing countries. Workers' remittances are a significant part of international capital flows, especially with regard to labor-exporting countries.

Mixtec transnational migration is the phenomenon whereby Mixtec people have migrated between Mexico and the United States, for over three generations.

Market (economics) System in which parties engage in transactions according to supply and demand

A market is a composition of systems, institutions, procedures, social relations or infrastructures whereby parties engage in exchange. While parties may exchange goods and services by barter, most markets rely on sellers offering their goods or services to buyers in exchange for money. It can be said that a market is the process by which the prices of goods and services are established. Markets facilitate trade and enable the distribution and resource allocation in a society. Markets allow any trade-able item to be evaluated and priced. A market emerges more or less spontaneously or may be constructed deliberately by human interaction in order to enable the exchange of rights of services and goods. Markets generally supplant gift economies and are often held in place through rules and customs, such as a booth fee, competitive pricing, and source of goods for sale.

Codevelopment is a trend of thought and a development strategy in development studies which considers migrants to be a developing factor for their countries of origin.

Inalienable possessions are things such as land or objects that are symbolically identified with the groups that own them and so cannot be permanently severed from them. Landed estates in the Middle Ages, for example, had to remain intact and even if sold, they could be reclaimed by blood kin. As a legal classification, inalienable possessions date back to Roman times. According to Barbara Mills, "Inalienable possessions are objects made to be kept, have symbolic and economic power that cannot be transferred, and are often used to authenticate the ritual authority of corporate groups".

Educational capital refers to educational goods that are converted into commodities to be bought, sold, withheld, traded, consumed, and profited from in the educational system. Educational capital can be utilized to produce or reproduce inequality, and it can also serve as a leveling mechanism that fosters social justice and equal opportunity. Educational capital has been the focus of study in Economic anthropology, which provides a framework for understanding educational capital in its endeavor to understand human economic behavior using the tools of both economics and anthropology.

Several authors have used the terms organ gifting and "tissue gifting" to describe processes behind organ and tissue transfers that are not captured by more traditional terms such as donation and transplantation. The concept of "gift of life" in the U.S. refers to the fact that "transplantable organs must be given willingly, unselfishly, and anonymously, and any money that is exchanged is to be perceived as solely for operational costs, but never for the organs themselves". "Organ gifting" is proposed to contrast with organ commodification. The maintenance of a spirit of altruism in this context has been interpreted by some as a mechanism through which the economic relations behind organ/tissue production, distribution, and consumption can be disguised. Organ/tissue gifting differs from commodification in the sense that anonymity and social trust are emphasized to reduce the offer and request of monetary compensation. It is reasoned that the implementation of the gift-giving analogy to organ transactions shows greater respect for the diseased body, honors the donor, and transforms the transaction into a morally acceptable and desirable act that is borne out of voluntarism and altruism.

In anthropology, cultural remittances are the ensembles of ideas, values, and expressive forms introduced into societies of origin by emigrants and their families as they return home, sometimes for the first time, temporary visits, or permanent resettlement. The term, which has been summarized as "product sent back", developed in the early 2000s, is also used to describe "the way that migrants own and build homes in the country of origin."

The archaeology of trade and exchange is a sub-discipline of archaeology that identifies how material goods and ideas moved across human populations. The terms “trade” and “exchange” have slightly different connotations: trade focuses on the long-distance circulation of material goods; exchange considers the transfer of persons and ideas.

Hometown associations (HTAs), also known as hometown societies, are social alliances that are formed among immigrants from the same city or region of origin. Their purpose is to maintain connections with and provide mutual aid to immigrants from a shared place of origin. They may also aim to produce a new sense of transnational community and identity rooted in the migrants' country of origin, extending to the country of settlement. People from a variety of places have formed these associations in several countries, serving a range of purposes.

Christopher A. Gregory is an Australian economic anthropologist. He is based at Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, and has also taught at University of Manchester- where he was made Professor of Political and Economic Anthropology. He studied Economics at University of New South Wales and ANU before pursuing anthropology, following a period in Papua New Guinea. His main research has been in Papua New Guinea and Bastar District, central India, and he also co-authored a research methods manual for economic anthropology, 'Observing the Economy', with Jon Altman.

References

  1. 1 2 Cliggett 2003
  2. ↑ Trager 2005
  3. ↑ See Hernandez and Coutin (2006) for a discussion of how remittances are treated as national and international resources for development and migration policy.
  4. ↑ See, for example, Peggy Levitt 1998; 2001; Tumama Cowley 2004.
  5. ↑ Levitt 1998:927
  6. ↑ Cohen and Conway 2001
  7. ↑ Conway and Cohen 1998:29
  8. ↑ Binford 2003:325
  9. ↑ Moore, Waveney Ann (2007, December 2) Sending Love Home by the Barrelful. Saint Petersburg Times. . Accessed on May 6, 2008.
  10. ↑ Adepoju 1974
  11. ↑ Russell 1984:610
  12. ↑ Russell 1984:614
  13. ↑ Cliggett 2005
  14. ↑ Cliggett 2005:45
  15. ↑ Trager 1998
  16. ↑ Conway and Cohen 1998:36
  17. ↑ Conway and Cohen 1998:37
  18. ↑ Mauss 1990:vii
  19. ↑ Appadurai 1986; Godelier 1999; Helms 1998; Mauss 1990; Sykes 2005; Weiner 1992 and others.
  20. ↑ Mauss 1990:11
  21. ↑ Mauss 1990:12
  22. ↑ [Marshall Sahlins] (1972) further ties economic and social relations, linking material flows and social relations through redistribution into a series of exchange patterns based on See reciprocity (cultural anthropology): generalized (sociable extreme), negative (unsociable extreme), and in between them, balanced reciprocity (a more direct, impersonal exchange). Though familiar from introductory anthropology classes, this typology is little used in contemporary literature.
  23. ↑ Trager 1998:364
  24. ↑ Godelier 1999
  25. 1 2 Mauss 1990
  26. ↑ Weiner (1992) discusses at length the motives and power involved in keeping objects from the realm of exchange, including reciprocial gift giving, through the concept of inalienable possessions such as heirlooms and sacred knowledge which are “imbued with the intrinsic and ineffable identities of their owners which [unlike most commodities] are not easy to give away” (1992:6).
  27. ↑ See Chapter 4, “The Disenchanted Gift” in Godelier 1999
  28. ↑ Godelier 1999:105
  29. ↑ Godelier 1999:102
  30. ↑ Appadurai 1986:11
  31. ↑ Appadurai defines a commodity as “any thing intended for exchange” (1986:9).
  32. ↑ Appadurai 1986:3
  33. ↑ Wilk and Cliggett (2007:159) differentiate between a commodity and a gift, suggesting that with gifting goes a desire to generate or reciprocate exchange, action, solidarity, etc. and more direct social relations. For a full treatment of the problem of why there is an efflorescence of gift exchange within conditions of market penetration see Gregory, C.A. (1982) "Gifts and Commodities". London: Academic Press.
  34. ↑ (1986:9)
  35. ↑ Bourdieu 2000:20
  36. ↑ Bourdieu 2000:25
  37. ↑ Tumama 2004:441
  38. ↑ Hernandez and Coutin 2006:201
  39. ↑ Sykes 2005
  40. ↑ Sykes 2005:75
  41. ↑ Wilk and Cliggett 2007:159

Bibliography

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.