Broadly speaking, remittances are the money, goods, services, and knowledge that migrants send back to their home communities or families.
Margo Russell writes that defining remitted moneys as gifts rather than payments enhances freedom and flexibility for the giver.
This works in Swaziland because moneys are not sent to a household but to “a range of individuals in urban and rural areas to whom, because of specific relationships, various workers feel a particular obligation.”[11] Here ties are not just of affect; they are of mutual obligation reinforced through the passage of gifts.
Unlike the interests of policy makers and scholars interested in remittances for development, Cliggett emphasizes that: "Zambia migrants do not remit large sums of cash or goods, and that the fundamental concern for migrants in Zambia is investing in people and relationships through remitting, rather than investing in development, improved living conditions or other capital in rural sending communities.
"[14] Trager provides support from a similar phenomenon in Nigeria, where she has observed intentional use of even minimal remittances and services to maintain home-town ties with family, kin, and the community as a whole.
[15] The regular giving of remittances and other services such as joining hometown associations and helping in community fund-raising maintained ties.
[17] Charles Piot’s Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa places the analysis of domestic gift remitting explicitly within a framework of global change, showing how remittances from wage workers and gifts from successful cash croppers are transforming landscape and relations of exchange, personhood, and social solidarity.
[18] In terms of potlatch in North America, this meant that each gift is “part of a system of reciprocity in which the honor of giver and recipient are engaged” and failing to return means losing the competition for honor.” A Maussian approach to giving and reciprocity provides useful insight into the analysis of “gifting remittances” precisely because of the focus on constructing and maintaining ties through the giving and receiving of such funds, goods, and services.
It is based on this that the anthropology of gifting is located on the contextual and historically contingent relationship between giver and receiver turned reciprocator.
[27] Mauss, however, had observed the persistence of gift giving in his contemporary society of early 20th century France in Chapter 4 of The Gift, wherein he raised an important criticism of the concept of utility and its attendant theories of value, which were coming to dominate economic theory of day, even so far as to inform the French policies that created the social welfare system (Fournier 2006, Gane 1992).
[29]) All of the articles grouped here under the loose rubric of “gifting remittances” share this fundamental focus on locating exchange within socio-cultural relationships and using the insight that gifting/remitting grants broader insight into the broader economy and culture, approximating Mauss's treatment of the study of the gift as a window onto a study of the sum total of social life.
By blurring the distinction between commodities and gifts, a distinction that ordinary people routinely make in their everyday lives as they give emphasis to the value they place on specific social relationships, Appadurai undermines the possibility of understanding the movement of goods and money, between life as a commodity embedded in a market to life as a gift embedded in intimate relationships of giving, receiving, and reciprocating.
Focusing on El Salvador, Ester Hernandez and Susan Bibler Coutin, take the discussion of motives – or portrayal of them – to the national level.