Remittances as Social Practices and Agents of Change

This edited volume explores the multiple effects of remittances. Remittances are money transfers from migrants to their families, friends and neighbors in their places of origin. Financially, remittances impress by sheer numbers: Private money transfers amount to almost four times the budget of official development assistance worldwide. It is therefore no surprise that remittances have a deep impact on the people, economies, consumption spheres, built landscapes and infrastructures around the globe. But: Remittances are much more than money. They comprise objects, ideas, traditions, or political values, mapping out a cross-border space in which people live, work, and communicate with multiple belongings. Remittances are sent to individuals, families, or neighborhoods, and they can be spent individually or collectively, for example in health and education infrastructures, in businesses and in houses. By doing so, they effect social change both in places of origin and destination. However, their power to improve individual living conditions and community infrastructure mainly results from inequality between the global North and the global South. Therefore, our edited volume challenges the master narrative of the modernizing, salutary remittance transfers and reveals dependencies and frictions beyond the migration-development-nexus. Remittances are thus scrutinized in their effects on both social cohesion and social rupture. By highlighting the transformative effects of remittances in the context of conflict, climate change, and the postcolonial, we shed light on the future of transnational society. We explore remittance relations from a range of disciplines including anthropology, sociology, history, design, architecture, governance, and peace studies. This transdisciplinary approach goes hand in hand with a wide range of methodological approaches to research on remittances, namely ethnography, discourse analysis, archival analysis, comparative studies, visual field research, narrative analysis, household surveys and statistical analysis. We furthermore present empirical case studies from a variety of geographical regions, including Ghana, Burkina Faso, Sri Lanka, New Zealand, Turkey, Lebanon, USA, Japan, and various European countries, as well as historical North America and the Habsburg Empire.