Conceptualizing Remittance Affordances: Transformations of a Knife Across Borders

Abstract

AbstractResearch on remittances mainly focuses on the nexus of migration and development, economic effects on the places of origin, and motives for remitting. However, little is known about the materiality of remittances. Drawing on a multi-sited ethnography in Stubai Valley (Austria) and Usṃak (Turkey), this chapter introduces the concept of remittance affordances by following the spatial and temporal trajectories of a crucial type of material remittances in the encountered research field, namely knives and tools manufactured by the Stubai cooperative. It examines the transformative effects of migration on the involved actors and the built landscape. I argue that in order to be appropriated in the intended way, the remitted objects depend on certain criteria, such as impact of the transactors’ relations, which are historically accumulated and hierarchically constituted, on the material and biography of the object and the bodily incorporated practices of usage.