Gifting remittances
Encyclopedia
"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,” 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. While remittances are also a subject of international development
and policy
debate and sociological and economic literature, 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.”
s 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). 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, 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
, 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.
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. 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.” 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.
Following on the work of these earlier anthropologists working in Africa, Lisa Cliggett uses the phrases "gift remitting" and "remitting the gift" 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."
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. 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. 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.
Piot Foster’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
.
summarizes Marcel Mauss
’s argument succinctly: “no free gift” as gifts entail maintenance of mutual ties. 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.
word describing “the spirit of things” 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.” 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.
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.”
In Enigma of the Gift Maurice Godelier
summarizes and critiques Marcel Mauss
’s work in “The Gift.”, updating it to more explicitly treat interwoven domains of market exchange, gift exchange, and withholding objects from the realm of exchange. 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 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.)
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. 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, Arjun Appadurai
’s treatment of gifts and commodities as, like people, having “social lives” 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. For Appadurai 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.
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”. 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. 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” 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,” central banks can make them appear as cost free money transfer
s. 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.
) 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." 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" 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.
Remittances
A remittance is a transfer of money by a foreign worker to his or her home country. Note that in 19th century usage a remittance man was someone exiled overseas and sent an allowance on condition that he not return home....
to anthropological literature on gift
Gift
A gift or a present is the transfer of something without the expectation of receiving something in return. Although gift-giving might involve an expectation of reciprocity, a gift is meant to be free. In many human societies, the act of mutually exchanging money, goods, etc. may contribute to...
giving. The terms draws on Lisa Cliggett’s “gift remitting,” but is used to describe a wider body of work. Broadly speaking, remittances are the money
Money
Money is any object or record that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services and repayment of debts in a given country or socio-economic context. The main functions of money are distinguished as: a medium of exchange; a unit of account; a store of value; and, occasionally in the past,...
, goods, services, and knowledge
Knowledge
Knowledge is a familiarity with someone or something unknown, which can include information, facts, descriptions, or skills acquired through experience or education. It can refer to the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject...
that migrants send back to their home communities or families. Remittances are typically considered as the economic transactions from migrants to those at home. While remittances are also a subject of international development
International development
International development or global development is a concept that lacks a universally accepted definition, but it is most used in a holistic and multi-disciplinary context of human development — the development of greater quality of life for humans...
and policy
Policy
A policy is typically described as a principle or rule to guide decisions and achieve rational outcome. The term is not normally used to denote what is actually done, this is normally referred to as either procedure or protocol...
debate and sociological and economic literature, this article focuses on ties with literature on gifting and reciprocity
Reciprocity (cultural anthropology)
In cultural anthropology and sociology, reciprocity is a way of defining people's informal exchange of goods and labour; that is, people's informal economic systems. It is the basis of most non-market economies. Since virtually all humans live in some kind of society and have at least a few...
or gift economy
Gift economy
In the social sciences, a gift economy is a society where valuable goods and services are regularly given without any explicit agreement for immediate or future rewards . Ideally, simultaneous or recurring giving serves to circulate and redistribute valuables within the community...
founded largely in the work of Marcel Mauss
Marcel Mauss
Marcel Mauss was a French sociologist. The nephew of Émile Durkheim, Mauss' academic work traversed the boundaries between sociology and anthropology...
and Marshall Sahlins
Marshall Sahlins
Marshall David Sahlins is a prominent American anthropologist. He received both a Bachelors and Masters degree at the University of Michigan where he studied with Leslie White, and earned his Ph.D. at Columbia University in 1954 where his main intellectual influences included Karl Polanyi and...
. 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
Peggy Levitt
Peggy Levitt is Chair and Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Wellesley College. Peggy specializes in religious transnationalism, the immigrant experience, the migration and development nexus, and economic, political and cultural globalization.- Biography :Peggy Levitt is an...
's work on "social remittances" which she defines as “the ideas, behaviors, identities, and social capital that flow from receiving to sending country communities.”
Anthropologists on remittances
Anthropological work on remittances appears to be divided into two streams: one based on overseas diasporaDiaspora
A diaspora is "the movement, migration, or scattering of people away from an established or ancestral homeland" or "people dispersed by whatever cause to more than one location", or "people settled far from their ancestral homelands".The word has come to refer to historical mass-dispersions of...
s of migrants (primarily in Latin America
Latin America
Latin America is a region of the Americas where Romance languages – particularly Spanish and Portuguese, and variably French – are primarily spoken. Latin America has an area of approximately 21,069,500 km² , almost 3.9% of the Earth's surface or 14.1% of its land surface area...
, the Caribbean
Caribbean
The Caribbean is a crescent-shaped group of islands more than 2,000 miles long separating the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, to the west and south, from the Atlantic Ocean, to the east and north...
, and Asia
Asia
Asia is the world's largest and most populous continent, located primarily in the eastern and northern hemispheres. It covers 8.7% of the Earth's total surface area and with approximately 3.879 billion people, it hosts 60% of the world's current human population...
) and the other from urban areas to rural (primarily in Africa
Africa
Africa is the world's second largest and second most populous continent, after Asia. At about 30.2 million km² including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of the Earth's total surface area and 20.4% of the total land area...
). 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
Social network
A social network is a social structure made up of individuals called "nodes", which are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as friendship, kinship, common interest, financial exchange, dislike, sexual relationships, or relationships of beliefs, knowledge or prestige.Social...
.
Within the transnationalism
Transnationalism
Transnationalism is a social movement and scholarly research agenda grown out of the heightened interconnectivity between people and the receding economic and social significance of boundaries among nation states....
framework, Jeffrey Cohen and Dennis Conway have detailed a debate in which remittances are treated as either sources of development
Regional development
Regional development is the provision of aid and other assistance to regions which are less economically developed. Regional development may be domestic or international in nature...
(for example by funding water infrastructure projects in sending communities) or dependency (by perpetuating a cycle migration and remittances to maintain households and communities). They draw on their experiences with transnational migrants in Oaxaca
Oaxaca
Oaxaca , , officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Oaxaca is one of the 31 states which, along with the Federal District, comprise the 32 federative entities of Mexico. It is divided into 571 municipalities; of which 418 are governed by the system of customs and traditions...
, Mexico
Mexico
The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...
to show that this is a false divide. Their focus on the noneconomic, gender, and informal economy relationships that accompany migration, 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
Trade
Trade is the transfer of ownership of goods and services from one person or entity to another. Trade is sometimes loosely called commerce or financial transaction or barter. A network that allows trade is called a market. The original form of trade was barter, the direct exchange of goods and...
, 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.
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 NigeriaNigeria
Nigeria , officially the Federal Republic of Nigeria, is a federal constitutional republic comprising 36 states and its Federal Capital Territory, Abuja. The country is located in West Africa and shares land borders with the Republic of Benin in the west, Chad and Cameroon in the east, and Niger in...
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. 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
Swaziland
Swaziland, officially the Kingdom of Swaziland , and sometimes called Ngwane or Swatini, is a landlocked country in Southern Africa, bordered to the north, south and west by South Africa, and to the east by Mozambique...
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.” 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.
Following on the work of these earlier anthropologists working in Africa, Lisa Cliggett uses the phrases "gift remitting" and "remitting the gift" 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
Zambia
Zambia , officially the Republic of Zambia, is a landlocked country in Southern Africa. The neighbouring countries are the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the north, Tanzania to the north-east, Malawi to the east, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Botswana and Namibia to the south, and Angola to the west....
, 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."
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. The regular giving of remittances and other services such as joining hometown associations
Hometown society
A Hometown society is a society of immigrants from the same town or region. These aid organizations were established to deal with social, economic, and cultural problems, and provided a social framework for mutual assistance. Among the most common activities was the provision of insurance...
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. Along the lines of Mark Granovetter
Mark Granovetter
Professor Mark Granovetter is an American sociologist at Stanford University who has created theories in modern sociology since the 1970s. He is best known for his work in social network theory and in economic sociology, particularly his theory on the spread of information in social networks known...
’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.
Piot Foster’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
Capitalism
Capitalism is an economic system that became dominant in the Western world following the demise of feudalism. There is no consensus on the precise definition nor on how the term should be used as a historical category...
world economy
World economy
The world economy, or global economy, generally refers to the economy, which is based on economies of all of the world's countries, national economies. Also global economy can be seen as the economy of global society and national economies – as economies of local societies, making the global one....
and represents an attempt to update Marcel Mauss
Marcel Mauss
Marcel Mauss was a French sociologist. The nephew of Émile Durkheim, Mauss' academic work traversed the boundaries between sociology and anthropology...
’s theory of the gift for the 21st Century, a project more fully undertaken by Maurice Godelier
Maurice Godelier
Born in Cambrai, France in 28 February 1934, Maurice Godelier is one of the most influential names in French anthropology. Directeur d'études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales...
.
The Gift
In her forward to The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, Mary DouglasMary Douglas
Dame Mary Douglas, DBE, FBA was a British anthropologist, known for her writings on human culture and symbolism....
summarizes Marcel Mauss
Marcel Mauss
Marcel Mauss was a French sociologist. The nephew of Émile Durkheim, Mauss' academic work traversed the boundaries between sociology and anthropology...
’s argument succinctly: “no free gift” as gifts entail maintenance of mutual ties. In terms of potlatch
Potlatch
A potlatch is a gift-giving festival and primary economic system practiced by indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast of Canada and United States. This includes Heiltsuk Nation, Haida, Nuxalk, Tlingit, Makah, Tsimshian, Nuu-chah-nulth, Kwakwaka'wakw, and Coast Salish cultures...
in North America
North America
North America is a continent wholly within the Northern Hemisphere and almost wholly within the Western Hemisphere. It is also considered a northern subcontinent of the Americas...
, this meant that each gift is “part of a system of reciprocity
Reciprocity (cultural anthropology)
In cultural anthropology and sociology, reciprocity is a way of defining people's informal exchange of goods and labour; that is, people's informal economic systems. It is the basis of most non-market economies. Since virtually all humans live in some kind of society and have at least a few...
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. Mauss termed this spirit “hua” a MāoriMaori language
Māori or te reo Māori , commonly te reo , is the language of the indigenous population of New Zealand, the Māori. It has the status of an official language in New Zealand...
word describing “the spirit of things” and discusses its mana
Mana
Mana is an indigenous Pacific islander concept of an impersonal force or quality that resides in people, animals, and inanimate objects. The word is a cognate in many Oceanic languages, including Melanesian, Polynesian, and Micronesian....
, 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.” 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.
Trager’s work in Nigeria
Nigeria
Nigeria , officially the Federal Republic of Nigeria, is a federal constitutional republic comprising 36 states and its Federal Capital Territory, Abuja. The country is located in West Africa and shares land borders with the Republic of Benin in the west, Chad and Cameroon in the east, and Niger in...
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.”
In Enigma of the Gift Maurice Godelier
Maurice Godelier
Born in Cambrai, France in 28 February 1934, Maurice Godelier is one of the most influential names in French anthropology. Directeur d'études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales...
summarizes and critiques Marcel Mauss
Marcel Mauss
Marcel Mauss was a French sociologist. The nephew of Émile Durkheim, Mauss' academic work traversed the boundaries between sociology and anthropology...
’s work in “The Gift.”, updating it to more explicitly treat interwoven domains of market exchange, gift exchange, and withholding objects from the realm of exchange. 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 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.)
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. 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
Commodity
In economics, a commodity is the generic term for any marketable item produced to satisfy wants or needs. Economic commodities comprise goods and services....
exchange
Trade
Trade is the transfer of ownership of goods and services from one person or entity to another. Trade is sometimes loosely called commerce or financial transaction or barter. A network that allows trade is called a market. The original form of trade was barter, the direct exchange of goods and...
is overstated, Arjun Appadurai
Arjun Appadurai
Arjun Appadurai is a contemporary social-cultural anthropologist focusing on modernity and globalization, based in New York.Appadurai was born in Mumbai , India and educated in India before coming to the United States. He graduated from St...
’s treatment of gifts and commodities as, like people, having “social lives” 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
Market
A market is one of many varieties of systems, institutions, procedures, social relations and 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 in exchange for money from buyers...
to life as a gift embedded in intimate relationships of giving, receiving, and reciprocating. For Appadurai 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 BourdieuPierre Bourdieu
Pierre Bourdieu was a French sociologist, anthropologist, and philosopher.Starting from the role of economic capital for social positioning, Bourdieu pioneered investigative frameworks and terminologies such as cultural, social, and symbolic capital, and the concepts of habitus, field or location,...
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”. 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. 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
New Zealand
New Zealand is an island country in the south-western Pacific Ocean comprising two main landmasses and numerous smaller islands. The country is situated some east of Australia across the Tasman Sea, and roughly south of the Pacific island nations of New Caledonia, Fiji, and Tonga...
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” who are unable to meet the financial stress of general and traditional gift giving. Focusing on El Salvador
El Salvador
El Salvador or simply Salvador is the smallest and the most densely populated country in Central America. The country's capital city and largest city is San Salvador; Santa Ana and San Miguel are also important cultural and commercial centers in the country and in all of Central America...
, 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,” central banks can make them appear as cost free money transfer
Money transfer
Money transfer generally refers to one of the following cashless modes of payment or payment systems:*Wire transfer, an international expedited bank-to-bank funds transfer*Electronic funds transfer, an umbrella term mostly used for bank card-based payments...
s. 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 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 MalinowskiMalinowski
Malinowski is a Polish surname. It may refer to the following:People:*Bronisław Malinowski , a Polish anthropologist.*Bronisław Malinowski , a Polish athlete.*Donald Malinowski , a Catholic priest and politician....
) 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." 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" 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.