Gendered Relations and Filial Duties Along the Greek‐Albanian Remittance Corridor

Abstract

Remittances stand at the heart of the migration-development debate. However, they are overwhelmingly considered in financial and economic terms, neglecting important dimensions such as gender and patriarchal family structures. This paper contributes to rectifying this oversight by analyzing remittance flows resulting from Albanian migration to neighboring Greece. We draw on a detailed questionnaire survey with 350 remittancerecipient households in rural south-east Albania and 45 in-depth interviews with a selection of these respondents and with remitters living in the Greek city of Thessaloniki.We find that gender is interlinked with generation and life-course stages within the context of Albanian patriarchal norms; and that remittances are shaped accordingly.Whilst remitting to older parents is a filial duty for unmarried sons, upon marriage only the youngest son has this responsibility -other sons send small amounts as tokens of respect and love. Sending remittances is overwhelmingly seen as a 'male thing'. Single young women rarely migrate for work on their own abroad. Meanwhile any remittances sent by married daughters to their parents are considered 'unofficial', referred to as 'coffee money'. Within nuclear households, some increased power-sharing among husband remitters and wife-recipients takes place. However, the latter are far from passive recipients, as they struggle to combine caring for children and the elderly with farm work or day laboring. We conclude that a deeper understanding of how remittances are gendered can be gained by placing their analysis within the migratory and socio-cultural context into which they are embedded.Key words: gender, patriarchy, remittances, Albania, migration [The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published and is available in Economic Geography; November 2011; DOI: 10.1111DOI: 10. /j.1944DOI: 10. -8287.2011.Accepted Manuscript (AM) of Gendered relations and filial duties along the Greek-Albanian remittance corridor. Economic Geography 87(4): 393-419 [DOI: 10.1111393-419 [DOI: 10. /j.1944393-419 [DOI: 10. -8287.2011 [accepted 20 March 2011; published November 2011]. 2In the fast-growing array of studies on remittances and their contribution to development, a gendered perspective is usually lacking. We seek to rectify this oversight by analyzing migration from Albania to Greece, and the remittances flowing in the opposite direction. We select this 'migration and remittance corridor' because of the scale of Albanian migration to Greece (roughly one in five of the Albanian population now lives there) and its concentration in time -the past twenty years.How are remittances gendered? In the literature on this theme, the question is generally reduced to a consideration of whether women are 'better' remitters than men -in terms of amounts sent, regularity of sending, and use of the money.Using the terminology of Lucas and Stark (1985), women are thought to be more likely to act out of altruism towards their family members than self-interest.However, in a ...

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