Social Remittances: Migration Driven Local-Level Forms of Cultural Diffusion

Abstract

"Many studies highlight the macro-level dissemination of global culture and institutions. This article focuses on social remittances--a local-level, migration-driven form of cultural diffusion. Social remittances are the ideas, behaviors, identities, and social capital that flow from receiving- to sending-country communities. The role that these resources play in promoting immigrant entrepreneurship, community and family formation, and political integration is widely acknowledged. This article specifies how these same ideas and practices are remolded in receiving countries, the mechanisms by which they are sent back to sending communities, and the role they play in transforming sending-country social and political life." The data concern migrants from the Dominican Republic to the Boston area of the United States.

International Migration and Home Country Politics

“…Relying on previous work by sociologists and anthropologists and on improved data on migrant flows and remittances, political scientists are beginning to explore how patterns of migrant transnationalism affect the political attitudes and behaviors in home countries. Extensive case-study research has shown that emigrants actively engage in the politics of their home countries (see e.g., Levitt 1998;Calderón-Chelius 2003;Lyons and Mandaville 2012). But what are the different channels through which outmigration and the expectation of outmigration influence political behavior?…”

“…Building on the sporadic but increasing number of published contributions to the topic in political science, the collection encourages a dialog between two well-established but largely separate literatures: (1) work by sociologists and anthropologists on outmigration and transnationalism (see for instance Levitt 1998Levitt , 2001Portes et al 1999;Goldring 2002;Guarnizo et al 2003;Østergaard-Nielsen 2003b;Smith 2003;Fox 2005;Waldinger 2008;Waldinger et al 2008); and (2) work by political scientists on the quality of democracy and governance in new democracies (see for instance Schedler 1998;Agüero and Stark 1998;Przeworski et al 1999;Mainwaring and Welna 2003;O'Donnell 2004;Diamond and Morlino 2005;Hagopian and Mainwaring 2005;Kitschelt and Wilkinson 2007). In the process, it contributes to a broader effort to build a coherent corpus of theoretical knowledge about the relationships between migration, remittances, and key aspects of democracy such as electoral and nonelectoral participation, political accountability, and representation.…”

The mixed effects of migration: Community-level migration and birthweight in Mexico

“…We argue that return migration captures a third mechanism proposed in the literaturedsocial remittances, or the ideas and practices that migrants transmit from destination to origin (Levitt, 1998). Community return migration is associated with lower rates of LBW but higher rates of macrosomia, possibly because of ideas and practices related to the nutrition transition, as has been argued in studies of overweight in sending communities (Riosmena et al, 2013).…”

“…Social remittances are the ideas, practices, and identities that emerge through migration, which can include health behaviors (Levitt, 1998). Research on migration and overweight in Mexican migrant-sending communities has argued that social (and monetary) remittances from migrants have ushered along the nutrition transition in Mexico (Creighton et al, 2011;Riosmena et al, 2013).…”

Development of a broadened cognitive mapping approach for analysing systems of practices in social–ecological systems

“…Cristofini et al (1978) were the first to use the term 'system of practices', referring to 'a consistent combination of practices' (Gras et al, 1989). In an organizational context, a 'system of practices' was later defined as the actions shaped by normative structures (Levitt, 1998) or as the complex network of structures, tasks and traditions that create and facilitate practice (Halverson, 2003). In our study, the definition of 'systems of practices' provided by Cristofini et al (1978) was broadened thus: a farmers' system of practices is (i) a particular combination of elementary practices, (ii) factors influencing practices, (iii) elements affected by these practices and (iv) the way in which all of them are linked to each other.…”