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This article highlights the strategic nature of remittances in Zambian migration. Zambian migrants usually give only small gifts to their home‐based relatives, not the large sums of money or goods used for investment that is documented in the literature on remitting elsewhere. In a case like Zambia, where so little surplus cash exists and the diversion of cash or other resources can have great material costs for the giver, why do Zambian migrants continue to remit? I argue that gift remitting develops strategic alliances that translate into insurance policies for the future, enabling Zambian migrants to "hedge their bets" in a volatile and rapidly changing socioeconomic terrain. This article focuses attention on the broad experiences and contexts of remitting and how the unpredictability of modern life may foster a renewed need for building alliances. I draw on fieldwork conducted from 1994‐2001 with the Gwembe Tonga people of Zambia's Southern Province and recent ethnographic literature from Zambia. [Keywords: migration, gift, economy, intergenerational relations, Africa]

The SAGE Handbook of Cultural Anthropology is the first instalment of The SAGE Handbook of the Social Sciences series and encompasses major specialities as well as key interdisciplinary themes relevant to the field. Globally, societies are facing major upheaval and change, and the social sciences are fundamental to the analysis of these issues, as well as the development of strategies for addressing them. This handbook provides a rich overview of the discipline and has a future focus whilst using international theories and examples throughout. The SAGE Handbook of Cultural Anthropology is an essential resource for social scientists globally and contains a rich body of chapters on all major topics relevant to the field, whilst also presenting a possible road map for the future of the field.

Foreign aid to southern Africa has triggered the growth of a nonprofit sector that increasingly provides welfare and social support for needy populations. However, largely absent from research on this sector are substantive analyses of the contribution of voluntarism and interpersonal exchange to broader welfare development and social cohesion. This paper employs theories of gift exchange to analyze volunteer practices and localized interpretations of volunteering within the welfare structure of post-colonial Pretoria, South Africa, and Lusaka, Zambia. The analysis of ethnographic data pertaining to within- and between-group volunteering reveals particular patterns of "gifting," which enable many southern Africans to overcome social divides, to strengthen existing bonds, and to fill gaps in the provision of basic public services. We conclude that volunteering succeeds as a form of welfare distribution precisely because of how actors frame their efforts as a gift—ensuring enduring social-relational dynamics and continued social service delivery.