Transnational Family Ties, Remittance Motives, and Social Death among Congolese Migrants: A Socio-Anthropological Analysis

Abstract

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.