Global gifts

Global gifts

Week 5: Transnational families and global gifts

Ryan Schram
ANTH 1002: Anthropology in the world
Monday, August 26, 2024

Slides available at https://anthro.rschram.org/1002/2024/5.1

Main reading: Wright (2020)

Other reading: Leinaweaver (2010)

What do you want to know?

The cover of a 2024 report on food security in rural PNG, depicting two woman tending a food garden with a shovel and hand tools near a simple house constructed with bush materials and a thatched roof at the top of a steep hill, set against the background rugged, lush forested mountains and a brilliant clear blue sky (Schmidt et al. 2024).

The cover of a 2024 report on food security in rural PNG (Schmidt et al. 2024).

Write your first thoughts down on a sheet of paper now, and talk to each other when you get stuck.

Family and household

As Carsten notes, when the doing of kinship through care is important, then you don’t really need a long genealogical memory of descent.

Imagine conducting a population survey or census in this community. Can you ask about parents and children? Does that matter to understanding people’s economic status, health, or residence?

What is the best first question for a household survey?

The question “Who eats here?” will tend to reveal a mostly-stable group of individuals who depend on each other on a regular basis. (And Carsten would approve, I think, at least in the context of her Pulau Langkawi project.)

Sending so much more than money

But “Who eats here?” also needs to be culturally contextualized. Why do we assume that the people here are a group that should get special attention in a study of people’s lives?

In many countries, people are members of households, but households don’t have one location—they span continents.

Remittances are like an invisible global economy. Even where remittances are not prominent, they are very valuable to many millions of people. They are for many people the main and perhaps only involvment they have in global capitalism. And they are a major part of global capitalism itself.

(For these facts about remittances, see the charts and tables available at the World Bank Open Data web site, especially World Bank 2024a; World Bank 2024b.)

Come rain or come shine

From 2009 to now, the global economy has been on a rollercoaster ride. But in the background, labor migrants keep sending more and more money home.

A chart showing the trends over time of foreign direct investment, overseas aid, and remittances (“International Remittances” 2024).

A chart showing the trends over time of foreign direct investment, overseas aid, and remittances (“International Remittances” 2024).

Stories of migration

What do remittances mean?

People learn to read the presence of immigrants in their society through the lens of narratives of migration

In the film An American Tail (Bluth 1986), a family of mice become new citizens in a “nation of immigrants.” Migration is a symbol, something that stands for something else.

Despite these powerful migration narratives, there are a lot of other ways to be a migrant

Each is an alternative perspective on the act of migration that one can take. Neither is more real or more correct than the other.

In the migration story of reunification, money creates kinship

Sending money home is often not about material or practical concerns. It is not an act of desparation; it’s a specific way of being a global worker, consumer, and citizen.

If you assume that kinship relations are completely different from economic relations, then temporary migration and remittance networks seem strange.

But this is just one example in which the domain of kinship and economic activity are merged. Global capitalism is for many a global informal economy.

References and further reading

Bluth, Don, dir. 1986. An American Tail. Animation, Adventure, Comedy. Universal Pictures, U-Drive Productions, Sullivan Studios.

Carsten, Janet. 1995. “The Politics of Forgetting: Migration, Kinship and Memory on the Periphery of the Southeast Asian State.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 1 (2): 317–35. https://doi.org/10.2307/3034691.

Gershon, Ilana. 2012. No Family Is an Island: Cultural Expertise Among Samoans in Diaspora. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

“International Remittances.” 2024. International Organization for Migration: World Migration Report. 2024. https://worldmigrationreport.iom.int/what-we-do/world-migration-report-2024-chapter-2/international-remittances.

Leinaweaver, Jessaca B. 2010. “Outsourcing Care: How Peruvian Migrants Meet Transnational Family Obligations.” Latin American Perspectives 37 (5): 67–87. https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X10380222.

Schmidt, Emily, Peixun Fang, Mekamu Jemal, Kristi Mahrt, Rishabh Mukerjee, Gracie Rosenbach, and Shweta Yadav. 2024. “2023 PNG Rural Household Survey Report.” Washington, D.C.: International Food Policy Research Institution. https://cgspace.cgiar.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/0e75fa44-3fde-4242-9738-50b435df9b9b/content.

World Bank. 2024a. “Personal Remittances, Paid (Current US$).” World Bank Open Data. 2024. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/BM.TRF.PWKR.CD.DT.

———. 2024b. “Personal Remittances, Received (Current US$).” World Bank Open Data. 2024. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/BX.TRF.PWKR.CD.DT.

Wright, Andrea. 2020. “Making Kin from Gold: Dowry, Gender, and Indian Labor Migration to the Gulf.” Cultural Anthropology 35 (3): 435–61. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca35.3.04.

 

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