Food,Morality and Identity: mobility,remittances and the translocal community in Paama,Vanuatu

Migration and remittances characterise many small Pacific islands, where local livelihoods are limited, and the need for money has increased. A majority of Paamese have left the island of Paama, in the central island chain of Vanuatu, and more now live in the capital city, Port Vila, than on Paama. Remittances are bidirectional, between the island and Vila, a duality that has rarely been discussed in Melanesia. Almost every household on Paama and in Vila is involved in sending and receiving remittances. Remittances usually involve food: ‘modern’ foods (such as rice) flowing from Vila, and island foods (yams and laplap) travelling to Vila. While such transfers make little formal economic sense, they emphasise a constant process of negotiating and manipulating social relationships. Food, as an expression of identity and locality, is a powerful and repetitive reminder of moral obligations and rural–urban kinship connections. The material significance of exchange is thus less than its affective significance, within the field of reciprocity that structures kin relationships. Food and remittances have become metaphors for defining the experience of migration, as their meaning and function are more than to merely provide a source of nutrition. They have also become the means of structuring a translocal moral economy.     

Returning home: migrant connections and visions for local development in rural Nepal

Migration to domestic and international destinations has become an emblematic feature of Nepal’s societal changes. Part of this development is education migration from rural to urban areas within the borders of Nepal, an often overlooked but increasingly important aspect of contemporary migration flows. By focusing on these educational migrants, this paper explores how they connect to their rural homes. Guided by a critical reading of the migration-development scholarship, the paper examines how migrants and their relatives make sense of educational migrants’ remitting and returning practices, and by comparing three groups of educational migrants, the migrants’ reasons for staying connected and sending remittances are scrutinized. The paper finds that although educational migrants do not generate extensive economic remittances for local development in Nepal, they stay connected to their rural homes and partake in important social remittance practices that represent a vision for impacting local development.     

The remittance forest: Turning mobile labor into agrarian capital

How does labor migration affect Indonesian forests? In the mountains of Java, where political forests and plantations date back to colonial state land acquisitions in the nineteenth century, forests are being reconstituted and reconfigured by unusual subjects: the wives and daughters of contracted forest workers and other forest farmers. Working as maids and other domestic laborers in Hong Kong and other prosperous Asian cities, these landless women are sending home remittances to invest in rural resources and changing the understory of the political forest where their husbands and fathers are required to remain available for formal forest labor. Slowly, without really intending to, these women have regendered the forest, not completely ousting the men or the masculine associations with logging and resin collection, but making inroads into the control of the forest lands via the under‐used understory. This article tells how poor, landless women, marginalized as forest residents and as free household labor, reforestation farmers, and poor agricultural laborers, signed up to work as maids in Hong Kong and ended up remaking the forest.     

Land, ethnic, and gender change: Transnational migration and its effects on Guatemalan lives and landscapes

Migration to the United States of America from Guatemala effects many aspects of Guatemalan life. We document, through extensive ethnographic fieldwork, how migrants and their remittances effect gender relations, ethnicity, land use, and land distribution. Our evidence is drawn from research in four communities. San Pedro Pinula and Gualán represent communities of eastern Guatemala. San Cristóbal Totonicapán is an Indigenous town in Guatemala’s western highlands, and San Lucas is a lowland frontier community in the Guatemalan department of Ixcán, which borders Chiapas, Mexico. Our results reveal that migrants and their remittances, both social and tangible, result in significant changes in land use and land distribution in Ixcán. Migrant money permits the conversion of rainforest into cattle pasture and also results in the accumulation of land in the hands of migrants. In terms of land use, we see in San Pedro Pinula that migrant money also allows the Pokoman Maya to make small entries into the Ladino (non-indigenous) dominated cattle business. In San Pedro Pinula, the migration and return of Maya residents also permits them to slowly challenge ethnic roles that have developed over the last five centuries. When we look at how migration effects gender roles in Gualán and San Cristóbal we also note that migration and social remittances permit a gradual challenge and erosion of traditional gender roles in Guatemala. We point out, however, that migration-related changes to traditional gender and ethnic roles is gradual because migrants, despite their increased earnings and awareness, run into a social structure that resists rapid change. This is not the case when we examine land transformations in Ixcán. Here, migrants encounter few barriers when they attempt to put their new money and ideas to work. Despite the advantages that migration brings to many families, especially in the face of a faltering national economy and state inactivity regarding national development, we conclude that migration and remittances do not result in community or nation-wide development. At this stage migrant remittances are used for personal advancement and very little money and effort is invested in works that benefit communities or neighborhoods. We call for continued studies of the effects of international migration on Guatemalan hometowns that build on our initial studies to better understand the longer-term ramifications of migration in a country where no community is without migrants.     

REKREATION I DET DANSKE VADEHAV

Jacobsen, N. Kingo, 1977: Recreation on the Danish Wadden Sea Coasts. Geografisk Tidsskrift 76: 52–58. København, June 1, 1977.

A comparison is made between the quite different positions of the Danish Wadden Sea coasts as to recreational pattern. This is mostly due to the ever varying accessiblility. The Blåvand-Skallingen area can be reached by land. The islands partly by ebbroads (Mandø, Lungli), partly by ferry (Fanø), and partly by a road-dam (Rømø).     

Development without Intervention: A Successful Self‐Reliance Initiative of Rural Development and Urban Growth in The Sudan

We investigate the complex relationship between small‐scale farming, urban‐rural remittances and rural development. We highlight a successful, innovative self‐reliance approach in which traditional farmers changed their mode of production, improved their income, and enhanced rural development, including urbanization, in Shubbola village of western Sudan. The major initial driver was investment from remittances by family members who had migrated to urban centers, thus overcoming the problem of access to credit/capital. Consequently, the increased use of tractor technology helped farmers overcome agricultural labor shortages, and increase their farm size and productivity. Increased income from remittances and farming broadened economic and social improvements, including lifestyle and the built environment. In the process, Shubbola has grown into a viable and vibrant town, providing its residents with diverse socioeconomic services and modern infrastructure. This case illustrates the potential of development from within with minimal direct input from the government, nongovernmental organizations, and international donors.     

Return migration and the reiteration of gender norms in water management politics: Insights from a Chinese village

Recent work on return migration in China suggests return migrants bring with them new knowledge, skills, and potentially beneficial relationships accumulated during their sojourns, enabling them to introduce new forms of leadership and community action. Social remittances of this kind could be read as carrying the potential to enhance collective action in support of sustainable local natural resource-based livelihoods. This study of the links between return migration, leadership and collective action in water management sounds a more cautionary note, demonstrating that home communities may respond to return migrants in ways that repeatedly mark and reiterate gender and kinship norms, reiterating gender, generational and clan-based social hierarchies. The paper draws on and contributes to recent feminist political ecology approaches to show how migrant returnees’ ’social remittances’ translate into leadership in collective action in a rural Chinese village in ways that reinforce existing gender hierarchies and social positions within the community, thus questioning the extent to which any influx of new ideas, relationships and practices acquired from migrant experiences necessarily destabilizes power and authority in the village in any meaningful way.     

The Dynamic Pathways of Agrarian Transformation in the Northeastern Thai–Lao Borderlands

ABSTRACT

Rural livelihoods in the northeastern Thai borderlands have moved away from being predominantly agrarian, yet farming remains a desirable alternative for many people. The empirical findings from fieldwork in a village in the northeastern Thai–Lao borderlands indicate how dependence on agriculture is determined by family contexts, such as land ownership, education level of household members, their gender and age. Cheap Lao labour and government price-support policies have enabled farmers to remain in production and diversify. Some educated rural people have successfully found employment opportunities outside the village as migratory wage labour, and are able to attain higher social status back in the village. Successful migrants have invested their earnings on cash-crop production and become rural entrepreneurs. Conversely, less educated migrants were unsuccessful in finding good jobs in the city and viewed agriculture as a more favourable alternative and valuable security. Geographical, cultural and economic specificities conditioned rural transformation and contributed to increasingly diverse and geographically extended livelihoods.