Cliggett_Marcus

Cliggett’s paper is highly valuable for understanding how networks of support among kin can be understood beyond an exclusively economic framework, but rather the symbolic currency of aid. The “gift remittances” given by Zambian migrant workers to their natal households lend substance and continuity to ties that lack everyday presence. They also act as an investment in the future, in that those who fail to provide these gift remittances may find their kin unwilling to incorporate them back into natal kin and community groups. Gift remittances are thus exchanges of assurances- from migrant workers, of sustained devotion, and from sender communities, of future belonging. So if material support cannot be understood without accounting for the symbolic and emotional, we can also say that emotional bonds of love and caring can be dependent on the material.

Cliggett open up room for a number of question I think are worth exploring: if the emotional and the material are so closely linked, what happens to bonds of kinship when there simply are no resources for migrants to remit to their kin? Do emotional ties atrophy without material exchange of goods of even low “absolute” value? Would pure communication itself (letters?) be inadequate? Or must there be some element of sacrifice and donation?

Cliggett attests that “gift-remittances” in Zamia represent an anomaly in the wider (particularly African) literature on migration. I would like to know more about why this is so—what is particular about Zambia?

Along these lines, it seems important to consider indigenous concepts of exchange within kinship that predate and inform these rather idiosyncratic “gift-remittances”—where do these practices and ideas come from? Is there something distinctly Gwembe about them?