Summary

Remittances (i.e., the money, objects, ideas, and social capital migrants send to their families, kin, and communities in their places of origin) are a crucial part of the global economy and migration dynamics. On a micro level, they recognize, maintain, affirm, and disrupt social relationships across the world, mapping out a transnational space in which people work, live, and communicate with multiple belongings. In 2022, migrants sent 836 billion US dollars via official channels worldwide, causing social change in both the places of origin and destination. As such, remittances improve living conditions, facilitate access to education and health, enable the building of infrastructure, and boost the economy in the countries of origin. However, the power to improve individual and communal living conditions or even increase the gross domestic product mainly results from global inequality, and remittances mirror these asymmetrical relationships. Thus, they increase dependencies between sending and receiving countries, disrupt family relations, and create new inequalities along postcolonial routes.

As a key driver of the global economy, remittances have received a significant amount of attention from global institutions, policymakers, and researchers of various disciplines, maintaining a focus on the nexus of migration and development. However, studies in social science and humanities have also shown that transnational money transfers are often accompanied or reciprocated by social (ideas, know-how, norms), political (narratives, voting patterns), or material (gifts, objects) remittances.

From an anthropological perspective, remittances are social practices. By earning, sending, receiving, and spending remittances, actors establish, sustain, erode, or even control relations between families, kin, and communities in the places of destination and origin. The focus on individuals and their practices reveals connections as well as frictions in remittance relations, challenging the remittance mantra (i.e., the assumption that the multiple transfers from the Global North bring nothing but wealth and knowledge to the Global South). However, it should not be overlooked that through remittances, global inequalities are projected onto personal relationships, generating cross-border forms of participation and belonging as well as exclusion and discrimination.