Week 7: Global gifts
ANTH 1002: Anthropology for a better world (Semester 2, 2026)
September 15, 2026
Gifts make the global economy. Contemporary global capitalism would collapse without the input of networks among migrants based on reciprocity.
Main reading: Cearns (2019)
Other reading: Abranches (2014); Leinaweaver (2010)
Notes
In 2020 and 2021, many people went into lockdown and lived day after day in their impenentrable household bubble or pod, some people were participating in their families across borders and at long distances.
Jordan, Miriam. 2020. “Even When They Lost Their Jobs, Immigrants Sent Money Home.” The New York Times, September 24, 2020, sec. U.S. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/24/us/coronavirus-immigrants-remittances.html.
While some people waited for their next delivery of home gym equipment, and perhaps shook a raised fist at the delays, exclaiming “supply chain problems!!” There was one global flow that kept on going: remittances, cash gifts sent between family members, usually from wealthy countries to poor countries.
Remittances are a major part of the global capitalist system, accounting for a substantial portion of foreign flows of money in many countries. In these countries, it is right to say that their main global export is people. Their remittances are worth over US$650 billion in 2020, down only slightly from 2019 (World Bank 2024), worth more than the global trade in telephones—US$125 billion, including both cellphones and landlines—and cars—US$645 billion (OEC 2022a, 2022b).
Remittances are also gifts, and more specifically, they are a portion of the wages for commodified labor power appropriated for the purposes of reciprocity. As such they challenge what we know of kinship and of global capitalism.
In previous versions of ANTH 1002, students read the work of Rebecca Prentice (2015). Remittances are another example of what Prentice calls “productive sociality” which she defines as “informal networks of mutual aid” (Prentice 2015, 88). What she finds among workers on the shop floor also takes place across continents. In Prentice’s case, informal social ties also unexpectedly generate value for the bosses of factory workers. Likewise, the productive sociality of remittances also sustains global capitalism itself. The capitalist global economy depends on people’s reciprocity with kin across international borders. We see this not only in remittances but in other kinds of transnational kinship. Like remittances, the practices of kinship in migrant networks weave together caring for family and buying commodities, domains we usually assume are and should be separate.
Possible discussion activities for tutorial
What are your experiences with sending and receiving money?
Look at Eriksen (2015, 220–23) and Cearns (2019). What are the similarities and differences between the Kula ring of Papua New Guinea and the “Mula ring” described by Cearns? Which is more important for understanding the Mula ring as a social phenomenon in your opinion, the similarities or the differences?
Keywords
remittances, informal economy, global capitalism
Learning outcomes
- Be able to formulate an interpretation of remittances as evidence for migration as a social network
- Understand why remittances within transnational households contradict dominant narratives of global capitalism
- Understand the relationship between informal economies and the dynamics of global capitalism
- Be able to identify examples of informal economies in contemporary societies