Scripting Remittances: Making Sense of Money Transfers in Transnational Relationships

Abstract

This article proposes a conceptual framework for studying remittances as social transactions that can take a number of different forms. For the past three decades, the dominant framework for understanding remittance relationships has been the continuum of senders' motives from altruism to self-interest. This approach has its roots in economics and has shaped much of the quantitative research on remittances. In parallel, a growing body of ethnographic research has examined transnational money transfers with perspectives and data that differ from those of economists. The insights from these ethnographic studies are valuable, but remain fragmented and marginal in research on remittances. Two key points emerge from the ethnographic literature: Remittances are at the core of composite transactions with material, emotional, and relational elements, and there is great variation in the nature and logic of these transactions. The framework proposed here is designed to engage with both complexity and variation. It systematically draws upon a large body of ethnographic literature and introduces remittance scripts as an analytical tool.

Financial remittances, trans-border conversations, and the state

“…9 in Appendix C shows. This finding resonates with the literature that, rather than discussing social and financial remittances as independent phenomena, sees them as complementing each other (Batista & Narciso, 2013) and conceptualizes financial remittances as a social act with multiple "scripts" (Carling, 2014). Finally, it could be argued that it does not make much sense to look at all Latin American countries given that some of them have very low rates of emigration and hardly receive remittances (for instance, Brazil or Argentina).…”

The Migration of Women in the Light of the Backward and Forward Linkages

“…The issue of female migration was definitively consolidated in the late 1990s (Pessar, Malher 2003, Malher, Pessar 2006 thanks to the many empirical international studies (Anthias, Lazaridis 2000;Carling 2005;Casas, Garson 2005;Morrison, Schiff, Sjöblom 2007) which highlighted the wide differences among ethnic groups.…”

“…5(1), June 2017 However, a certain body of ethnographic literature provided on the one hand a conceptual framework for rethinking remittances (Carling 2014) and on the other it shed light on the concept of "social remittance" as opposed to "economic remittance" as usually understood. It refers to forms of cultural diffusion locally induced by migration: "they are ideas, behaviors, identities and social capital that fluctuate by the communities of the destination country to those of sending country" (Levitt 1998;Levitt, Lamba-Nieves 2011).…”

Measuring remittances through surveys

“…A recent series of ethnographical studies on remittances has looked explicitly at the elusive elements of reciprocity (e.g., Åkesson 2011;Singh and Cabraal 2013;Thai 2014). This ethnographic literature has provided us with fresh insights into the dynamics of remitting behaviour which have yet to be integrated into survey-based approaches (Carling 2014).…”