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 article contributes to rectifying this oversight by analyzing flows of remittances resulting from Albanian migration to neighboring Greece. We draw on a detailed questionnaire survey with 350 remittance-recipient households in rural southeast Albania and 45 in-depth interviews with a selection of these respondents and with remitters living in the Greek city of Thessaloniki. We found that gender is interlinked with generation and life-course stages within the context of Albanian patriarchal norms and that remittances are shaped accordingly. Although 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 on their own for work 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, since they struggle to combine caring for children and the elderly with farmwork or day labor. We conclude that a deeper understanding of how remittances are gendered can be gained by placing their analysis within the migratory and sociocultural context into which they are embedded.

Key Words:

• gender
• patriarchy
• remittances
• Albania
• migration

Acknowledgments

The research on which this article was based was financed by the United Nations International Training and Research Institute for the Advancement of Women under its project Gender and Remittances: Building Gender-Responsive Local Development.

Notes

1 Remittances can also be generated by internal migration. Internal remittances are an understudied part of the development literature but are not directly relevant to our analysis in this article.

2 Evidence on this situation for Albania was considered by Azzarri and Carletto (2009), Lerch and Wanner (2005), and Zezza, Carletto, and Davis (2005). Zezza et al. showed that, at least in the early years of emigration from Albania (the 1990s), most poverty-stricken households in the rural north were too poor to emigrate; hence remittances, which went mainly to southern and coastal districts, increased regional inequality. Lerch and Wanner confirmed this regional contrast but pointed out that within high-emigration areas, remittances reduced inequality. After 2000, however, northern households participated more in migration abroad, often combined with a wider family survival strategy of internal migration from this remote and mountainous region toward the outskirts of Tirana, the national capital (Azzarri and Carletto 2009).

3 Among other studies that compared the remittance behavior of men and women, several in Thailand generally supported the notion of women as superior remitters (Curran and Saguy 2001; Osaki 1999; Vanwey 2004); likewise for Tongans in New Zealand (Vete 1995), Nicaraguans in the United States and Costa Rica (Naufal 2007), and Salvadorans in the United States (Abrego 2009). Research that has favored men in this regard has included Cai (2003) on Chinese migrants, Agarwal and Horowitz (2002) on Guyana, and Markova and Reilly (2006) on Bulgarians in Spain.

4 Coincidentally, our research design closely mirrors the approaches recommended by Kunz (2008), but it was put in place before Kunz’s article was published.

5 It needs to be acknowledged that interviewing members of transnational households about remittances has both ethical and response-reliability problems. The personal and private nature of income, wealth, and remittances undoubtedly affects the detail and accuracy of the information we collected. Self-reported remittance sums must be treated with a degree of caution. Amounts may be inflated to “upgrade” the social status that comes with higher remittances sent by “dutiful” sons and “loyal husbands” or may be downplayed when there is a worry that the information may be used for tax or welfare purposes.

6 Some women did undertake such journeys, always, however, in the company of close male relatives; their experiences have been overlooked in the literature.

7 Often this stabilization is achieved only with great difficulty since stay permits need to be continuously renewed, an expensive and time-consuming process, with a high degree of discretion exercised by Greek officials (Psimmenos and Kassimati 2003).

8 This pattern was found to operate among Albanian migrants in London, who came mainly from the remote highlands of northern Albania where traditional practices traceable to the Kanun are more entrenched (King, Dalipaj, and Mai 2006).

9 The overall R² values of Tables 2 and 3 are within the range expected for remittance analyses of this type. We ran a check on several other studies, and whatever the context, sample size, and estimation method adopted, R² values ranged between 0.20 and 0.50. We ran an additional F test (not reported in the tables), which showed that the increase in R² from Model 1 to Model 2 is indeed statistically significant; that is, it is most likely not to be due to chance but to a real effect of the variables on the use of remittances. However, we acknowledge that the results of Model 2 should be interpreted with caution since the additional variables included are not standard in empirical studies of remittance behavior (cf. de la Brière, Sadoulet, de Janvry, and Lambert 2002; Gubert 2002; Liu and Reilly 2004; Lucas and Stark 1985), unlike the variables we used in Model 1.

10 For this reason, daughters-only families were regarded as “unfortunate” since there were no sons to send remittances or support the parents in their old age or, indeed, to continue the family’s blood line.

11 “Holding the purse” is a common phrase that harks back to the time when money—or the key to where it was locked—was kept in a little cloth pouch by the holder in an inside pocket at all times.