"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",Cliggett 2003 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.Trager 2005 While remittances are also a subject of international development and policy debate See Hernandez and Coutin (2006) for a discussion of how remittances are treated as national and international resources for development and migration policy. and sociological and economic literature,See, for example, Peggy Levitt 1998; 2001; Tumama Cowley 2004. 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."Levitt 1998:927
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).Cohen and Conway 2001 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,Conway and Cohen 1998:29 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,Binford 2003:325 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.Moore, Waveney Ann (2007, December 2) Sending Love Home by the Barrelful. Saint Petersburg Times. . Accessed on May 6, 2008.
Gift Remitting, Remitting the Gift While remittances could also be theorized as gifts are not considered as remmitance 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.Adepoju 1974 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.”Russell 1984:610 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.Russell 1984:614
Following on the work of these earlier anthropologists working in Africa, Lisa Cliggett uses the phrases "gift remitting" and "remitting the gift"Cliggett 2005 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."Cliggett 2005:45
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.Trager 1998 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.Conway and Cohen 1998:36 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.Conway and Cohen 1998:37
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.Mauss 1990:vii 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.Appadurai 1986; Godelier 1999; Helms 1998; Mauss 1990; Sykes 2005; Weiner 1992 and others. Mauss termed this spirit “hua” a Māori word describing “the spirit of things”Mauss 1990:11 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.”Mauss 1990:12 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.[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.
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.”Trager 1998:364
In Enigma of the GiftGodelier 1999 Maurice Godelier summarizes and critiques Marcel Mauss’s work in “The Gift.”,Mauss 1990 updating it to more explicitly treat interwoven domains of market exchange, gift exchange, and withholdingWeiner (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). objects from the realm of exchange.See Chapter 4, “The Disenchanted Gift” in Godelier 1999 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".Godelier 1999:105 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.Godelier 1999:102)