Remittances and Relationships: Exchange in Cape Verdean Transnational Families

Abstract

This article examines migrant remittances through the lens of anthropological theories of gift relationships. I explore remittance transactions as perceived and practised by people in Cape Verde, a country in which many households receive money from abroad. The article highlights three key dimensions. The first dimension is the transactors' (senders and receivers of remittances) relations and obligations to each other, the second is the degree to which remittances are seen as voluntary gifts or, alternatively, as elements in an obligatory reciprocal exchange, and the third is the relation between the transactors and money as an object of exchange. I argue that these dimensions together open up for a holistic understanding of the dynamic interplay between remittances and relationships. In contrast to mainstream remittance studies, with their conventional focus on economic rationality, this is an approach that illuminates what remittances mean, as social practice, to those involved.

Keywords:

• Remittances
• Cape Verde
• exchange
• transnational families
• migration
• gift relationships

Notes

Carriers original questions are ‘… how much and in what way is the transaction obligatory, how much and in what way is what is transacted associated with the transactors, how much and in what way are the transactors linked with and obligated to each other’ (Carrier 1995:21).

The view of migrants who fail to send remittances as ingrates is not limited to the Cape Verdean context. Glick Schiller and Fouron (2001:79) cite a Haitian man who says ‘In the case of someone who leaves Haiti and doesn't help the family s/he left behind, I would send him/her to a doctor to see if s/he is sick. Because a brother, father, mother [or] sister who takes care of you since you are a little baby, and gives you and education, and when you reach a certain age sends you abroad, and when you go abroad and forget them, this kind of individual, don't criticize them outright. You can say, for sure, s/he is not normal. That person should go get a check up’.

There has been little critique of Sahlins' tripartite model. Wilk and Cliggett (2007:164) suggest this is because Sahlins' framework make inituitive sense in relation to many different situations of exchange. On a more general level there has been a critique against the reliance on the principle of reciprocity. Weiner (1992:28–30) argues that the notion of reciprocity is deeply rooted in Western thought. This may be true, but in that case Cape Verdeans' understandings of remittances are quite ‘Western’.