Suchergebnisse

This article investigates how transnational familial links and socio-cultural dynamics shape migrants' remitting behavior and inform their relationships. It shows that most research on remittances fails to capture migrants' personal and social significance of remittances embedded not only in their transnational social relations, but also in cultural contexts. Drawing on new empirical qualitative research amongst Congolese migrants in South Africa, the article argues that migrants remit primarily in a bid to escape social death by fostering familial belonging and sustaining social status. It finds that socio-cultural influences and internalized social stereotypes about economic effects of emigration shape migrants' awareness of their role expectations in communities of origin. These role expectations exercise on them such a social pressure that migrants often feel a compelling need to be perceived as financially "successful" as well as "valid" and "good" family members not only in their communities of origin but also among other migrants. As such, remittances become fundamentally the measures and criteria shaping migrants' sense of belonging and social and familial inclusion or exclusion. In this sense, for individual migrants, remittances play an essential instrumental role portraying such images and at the same time are seen as a means to avoid social stigmatization and exclusion.

This book draws renewed attention to migration into and within Africa, and to the socio-political consequences of these movements. In doing so, it complements vibrant scholarly and political discussions of migrant integration globally with innovative, interdisciplinary perspectives focused on migration within Africa. It sheds new light on how human mobility redefines the meaning of home, community, citizenship and belonging. The authors ask how people's movements within the continent are forging novel forms of membership while catalysing social change within the communities and countries to which they move and which they have left behind. Original case studies from across Africa question the concepts, actors, and social trajectories dominant in the contemporary literature. Moreover, it speaks to and challenges sociological debates over the nature of migrant integration, debates largely shaped by research in the world's wealthy regions