Everware-CBDI

‘Social Remittances’ was an expression first coined by Peggy Levitt in her seminal 1998 article 'Social Remittances: Migration Driven Local-Level Forms of Cultural Diffusion'. The term focuses attention on the non-material changes triggered by migration in migrants’ places of origin. However, although the term as such is Levitt’s creation, as early as the 1970s some demographers were focusing their attention on the non-material elements brought by returning migrants and the non-material changes triggered by migration, in what has been called the ‘ideational shift’ in demographic studies (see for instance the work by Connell et al., 1976 on migration from rural areas in the Third World; Cleland and Wilson, 1987 on the

diffusion of small family norm; or Skeldon, 1990 on the introduction of commercial ideas in rural Peru). Apart from coining and popularizing the term of ‘social remittances’, Levitt, contrary to these early authors, places more importance on migrants, instead of the migratory system itself. Previous authors rather ruled out the possibility of ‘virtual’ transmission.

According to them, social remittances could only be brought by returnees. The concept of social remittances opens the door to some sort of sending without migrants having to return, permanently or temporarily.

On the first page of Levitt’s article she states that ‘[s]ocial remittances are the ideas, behaviours, identities, and social capital that flow from receiving- to sending-country communities’ (Levitt, 1998: 926). Levitt was clearly concerned with issues of cultural diffusion.

Studies about cultural globalization have researched the ways in which economic and political globalization has shaped cultural representations. However, there is another form of cultural diffusion, which is ‘local-level, migration-driven’ (1998: 926). Levitt defined three different kinds of social remittances: normative structures, systems of practice and social capital.

‘Normative structures are ideas, values, and beliefs’ (1998: 933) and ‘systems of practice are the actions shaped by normative structures’ (1998: 934). She does not provide an equally concise definition of social capital and refers the reader to a set of the main authors researching social capital. There might be a conceptual mistake in the way these three categories are defined. Systems of practice and social capital are just two specifications of underlying normative structures. Any action is always driven by a set of, explicit or implicit, ideas, values and beliefs.

‘Social remittances’ has been an extremely successful term that paradoxically has not been theoretically developed further or empirically applied. Most of the articles dealing with the developmental impact of remittances cite at one point or another the presence of social remittances (e.g. Agunias, 2006; Ellerman, 2003; Sørensen, 2004). However, very few go beyond that. Some studies use the term social remittances to signify those remittances that are not sent by individuals, but by social groups. This application is clear in the Home Town Associations literature (Alarcón, 2000; Goldring, 2004; Rivera-Sanchez, 2003). More recently, Levitt and Lamba-Nieves have created the concept of ‘collective social remittances’ to bridge the streams of research on collective remittances and social remittances. According to them, collective social remittances ‘are exchanged by individuals in their role as organisational members and are used in organizational settings such as hometown associations, church groups or political parties’ (2011: 13).

Social remittances have also been researched in the context of technical knowledge transfer.

The skills that migrants bring back when returning to their places of origin have long been considered a potential source of development (Ammasari and Black, 2001; Chevannes and Ricketts, 1997). Another thread of literature keen on the term social remittances, but again narrowing the term to its most technical meaning, is the one dealing with Diaspora development engagement. The Diaspora literature also emphasizes material contributions, above all financial investment in the homeland. There are usually strong motivations to try to engage the Diaspora, as usually their members have education and income levels above the average in their regions of origin (Brinkerhoff, 2006; Hanifi, 2006; Johnson and Sedaca, 2004;

Kapur, 2001; Leichtman, 2002; Tanner, 2005). The reasons for the previous conceptual reductionism lie in the concept of social remittances itself. Theoretically social remittances is a highly attractive term. It is extremely flexible, allowing for a number of materializations. But this malleability can also make it empirically inapplicable. Technical transfers are non-material resources easier to comprehend than other normative structures and values. It would explain the trend to equalize social remittances with knowledge transfers.

Finally I would like to mention the effort of other authors to broaden the term. Juan Flores (2009) has coined the expression 'cultural remittances' to supplement social remittances, focusing on cultural transfers (such as music, or art) within a post-colonial approach. Although a very interesting theoretical development, in my opinion both cultural and social remittances should be included under the same label, and as such I incorporate them into my analysis.

In order to avoid unrealistic notions of culture change, social remittances must not be conceptualized as a one-way flow. Rather, their genesis should be understood as a circular process. The ideas, values and meanings that are eventually introduced (or rejected) in the local imaginary of migrants’ origin contexts have previously been de- and reconstructed several times. First of all, it is useful to keep in mind that migrants, as persons previously brought up in specific socio-cultural contexts, are not blank canvases where the socio-cultural contexts of destination places can be painted on from scratch. When moving, migrants bring with them specific frames of meaning. Once in a destination, they use them to try to make sense of their new situations. As time goes by, that frame evolves, as it would evolve in a non-migrating context. Nonetheless, in the migratory context, aspects of the new residential milieu become an integral part. Migrants, with their frames of meaning, act themselves as powerful filters of what would be eventually sent back to their places of origin. Those frames direct

migrants’ attention towards certain areas, overshadowing others, and making sense of some aspects that could collide with the generally accepted one. It is also important to mention that migration itself, unrelated to migrants’ new places of residence, is a source of change and knowledge for migrants. In her earlier paper, Levitt saw social remittances as ultimately ‘the north-to-south equivalent of the social and cultural resources that migrants bring with them which ease their transition from immigrants to ethnics’ (Levitt, 1998: 927). Against later criticism of destination-value prevalence, Levitt has revisited her work to highlight the influence that migrants’ original frameworks of mind and their different patterns of interaction with the destination society had in the creation of social remittances (Levitt and Lamba-Nieves, 2011).

Secondly, talking about a ‘culture’ in migrants’ new place of residence is also misleading.

Cultures are not monolithic, static constructions; not in the places of origin of migrants, nor in the places of residence. The idea that cultures are always in process, contrary to the traditional perception of culture as something finished, fixed and ready to use, has been brought to the fore by post-modern authors such as Arjun Appadurai with his emphasis on –scapes (1996), Ulf Hannerz and his flows and hybridities (2000), or Peter Jackson and his transnational spaces (Jackson et al., 2004), to mention just some of the most influential. This perception of cultures as fluid entities continually under construction stands as one of the key theoretical foundations for my research. There is, then, a double cultural fluidity of migrants’ origin and new residence socio-cultural contexts. As time goes by, migrants are more likely to achieve a finer knowledge of what it is going on in their new places of residence. They are also more likely to become in contact with and/or be aware of a wider set of internal variations within that social-cultural environment. This means that what migrants can, consciously or unconsciously, transmit as social remittances is highly dynamic and evolves as migrants stay longer in their new residence places.

Finally, the people back in the origin areas do not play a passive role, as most literature on migration and transnationalism implicitly assumes. Some studies on material remittances are starting to incorporate non-migrants into the analysis, highlighting the presence of power imbalances between remittance senders and receivers. By default, the senders (i.e. migrants) were thought to be the ones who decide about remittance usage. However, recent studies, like the one by Pribilsky (2004), have acknowledged the complementary role that both senders and receivers play, not only in the remittance affair but in the whole migratory venture.

Regarding social remittances, this means that those back in origin areas do not passively

accept anything sent to them. Values or ideas thought as positive by migrants do not have to be considered as such by those who stay put. Good and bad are nonetheless relative terms;

something can be good here and now but it can be considered inadequate in a different place or time. Those who receive social remittances, conscious or unconsciously, can regard them differently from migrants. As a last resort, they will be the ones inserting, adapting or rejecting those non-material resources into their social and cultural lives. Hence, social remittances potentially face another transformation. Nevertheless, the cycle is not closed and constantly feeds back. In the ‘social remittances revisited’ 2011 article, Levitt also states that social remittance receivers do not play a passive role (Levitt and Lamba-Nieves, 2011). On the contrary, as I will show, they actively re-work ideational inputs. By doing this, she rightly places non-migrants (or would-be migrants) in the transnational sphere and gives them the relevance that studies about transnationalism usually ignore.

My research discards the over-simplistic image of social remittances as ideas, values or practices flowing smoothly uni-directionally from migrants’ destination to origin places.

Instead, it conceptualizes social remittances as ideational resources being crafted in their (circular) flight. This implies a conscious attempt to incorporate recent conceptualizations of culture as something highly fluid, changing and patchworked in nature.

Social remittances can be methodologically useful because they focus and delimit our attention as researchers on specific domains of social change. By initially isolating these spheres we can start to make sense of the general social change resulting from partial adaptations to the new situation brought about by migration. They are also useful because under this approach migrants are conceived as active agents of change or continuity (within, of course, enabling and constraining structural dynamics) and not as mere pawns in broad migratory systems.