Ryan Schram
ANTH 1002: Anthropology for a better world
ryan.schram@sydney.edu.au
Social Sciences Building 410
August 26, 2025
Main reading: Leinaweaver (2010); Wright (2020)
Song of the day: “Superlovin,” Mark Funk and Danny Cruz. Single. Cruise Music, 2018.
Take out a piece of paper and write your thoughts on this week’s topic: immigration.
You can ask the people sitting next to you these questions if you have trouble getting started.
In an interview, the Fiji Times journalist Felix Chaudhury [FC] asked the acting minister for labor, Filimoni Vosarogo [FV], about the Australia–Fiji guest-worker program known as Pacific Australia Labor Mobility (PALM) scheme:
FC: Another issue that we noted on social media is that Fijian women especially are good at– as maids [FV: Yes.], as housegirls. Will Government– Or, is there any discussion to consider taking housegirls to go there because, you know, we are . good at it, basically. [FV: Yeah.] (Chaudhury interview with Vosarogo 2023, 7:27–7:43)
Vosorogo agreed, saying, “We’re naturals at this sort of thing.” (Chaudhury interview with Vosarogo 2023, 9:21)
In the same interview, Vosorogo said that there was a preference to recruit from rural (iTaukei) Fijian villages for agricultural work in Australia, because it is
a communal type of work, and they would normally also have a communal setting when they relocate overseas. (Kotoisuva 2023)
He also said
[Rural workers] are able to go together as a group, stay together as a group, come back as a group thus improving the image of Fiji as a genuine Vuvale1 partner. We don’t want to have too many instances of people going overseas and not returning. (Kotoisuva 2023)
What does communal mean for Vosarogo? What does this tell you about his thinking?
Vosorogo also told an interesting ancedote that I think reveals a lot about how PALM actually works:
There was 11 young men from Rotuma, straight from the island of Rotuma, 11 or twelve, with one of the elders who is second time going across.
But because of his experience. He was there he was doing very well with, ah, he had– he built a good rapport with the employer. The employer specifically wanted people that he– from his own community.
So you got a good thing going now where employers are the ones who are saying “I like this guy.” And so he then tells him, “Look, when you come back, can you recommend that you bring people from your own community?”
As I said, you know, it’s not a discriminatory process. It’s still open to everybody. But identifying people that have the right skill set and also have the character to go, and come back. (5:48–4:48)
Reciprocity is part of, and constitutive of, every society. Private property, commodification, and capitalism is part of every society’s contemporary history.
When these two distinct principles interact, many outcomes are possible
and one more
Throughout the world, there are communities who (1) have little to no means or opportunity to participate in market enterprise, but (2) do not benefit from a fully-developed system of total services in which they can depend on reciprocal ties.
People draw on their reciprocal ties to others to generate capital they can exploit to engage in commodity trade and profit earning, and vice versa.
Informal economies were the buried story of the so-called developing world for most of the 20th century. Now everyone wants to recognize it.
The new story is not that the informal economic sector is legitimate and visible. Rather, the world as a whole is getting more informal:
In many countries, people are members of households, but households don’t have one location—they span continents.
Remittances are like an invisible global economy. Even where remittances are not prominent, they are very valuable to many millions of people. They are for many people the main and perhaps only involvment they have in global capitalism. And they are a major part of global capitalism itself.
(For these facts about remittances, see the charts and tables available at the World Bank Open Data web site, especially World Bank 2024b; World Bank 2024a.; see also Ratha et al. 2024)
From 2009 to now, the global economy has been on a rollercoaster ride. But in the background, labor migrants keep sending more and more money home.
Remittances slow a little during global crises, like rapid inflation in 2023, but then rebound. In fact, they have rebounded this year even faster than expected. This chart needs to be updated. The total volume of remittances for 2025 is now projected to be over $900 billion.
What do remittances mean?
In the film An American Tail (Bluth 1986), a family of mice become new citizens in a “nation of immigrants.” Migration is a symbol, something that stands for something else.
Sending money home is often not about material or practical concerns. It is not an act of desparation; it’s a specific way of being a global worker, consumer, and citizen.
A major purpose for remittances sent by Samoans living overseas is faʻalavelave—gifts of money for community projects (Gershon 2012).
Temporary male migrants from India work to earn money, to buy gold, to give as presents, to support their female kin when they get married. Remittances (of gold) make someone a good brother (Wright 2020).
If you assume that kinship relations are completely different from economic relations, then temporary migration and remittance networks seem strange.
But this is just one example in which the reciprocal ties that define kinship merge with economic activity in a capitalist labor market. Global capitalism is for many a global informal economy and a means to enable the efflorescence of a system of reciprocity at home.
Take a look at this Mentimeter poll.
Go to https://menti.com. Type in code
5299 0142.
You can also go to this URL: https://www.menti.com/al7yhvs4byjg.
Select as many as apply to the household you grew up in.
Hypothesis: Our class is very diverse and the “male breadwinner” model only applies to some, but not all of us.
When Stanford University administrators sent out some advice to their staff about the plans for resumption of on-campus teaching in 2020, they suggested that instructors could consider “leveraging teenagers that might not be engaged” in part-time jobs (Flaherty 2020).
The page has since been deleted from the Stanford University web site but has been archived:
Drell, Persis, and Elizabeth Zacharias. 2020. “Supporting Families during the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Cardinal at Work (Stanford University). July 27, 2020. Accessed Septmeber 7, 2022. http://web.archive.org/web/20201012170506/https://cardinalatwork.stanford.edu/engage/news/supporting-families-during-covid-19-pandemic.
Even before the pandemic, I would argue that the informal economy of care was increasingly necessary to more and more of the middle class in wealthy capitalist societies. It’s not just poor, deprived, or marginalized people who exploit reciprocal ties so they can participate in a capitalist economy.
The Vuvale Partnership Agreement is the principal bilateral treaty of cooperation between Fiji and Australia, and includes access to the PALM scheme.↩︎
As some of these news reports suggest, yes, a lot of informal economic activity is technically illegal. When people are excluded from so-called formal, mainstream institutions like banking, property ownership, tax collection, water and sewer systems, electricity, access to courts, police protection, and lack a responsive government, it’s not surprising that they operate on the margins of the law. I mean, where else is left to operate? Protection under the law by state agencies is one of the many things people don’t have; reciprocal ties compensate for this.↩︎