Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Remittances, Morality, and Islamic Reform in Guinea, West Africa

耶鲁大学博士生苏珊娜·菲奥拉塔将在迈克尔·麦戈文博士的指导下，探索为人们提供经济安全的移民汇款也可能成为道德不安全感来源的社会和道德背景。越来越多的关于外来务工人员参与非法或不道德活动的传言，导致村民与他们的亲戚之间的道德争执不断升级，他们被怀疑向家中汇款。然而，面对持续的经济困难和政治不确定性，接受者现在比以往任何时候都更依赖汇款。这位研究人员将调查不同世代和跨大洲的人是如何就汇款经济的意义和道德进行谈判的。这项研究将在几内亚进行，以建设汇款资助的村庄清真寺作为审视跨国货币争端的民族志镜头。这项为期18个月的民族志研究将在几内亚首都科纳克里的Fouta Djallon高地地区的三个村庄和塞内加尔达喀尔的几内亚移民中进行。通过各种方法(半结构化访谈、口述历史、移民叙述、家谱访谈、参与者观察和田野笔记)收集民族志数据，以检验三个主要假设，涉及：(1)汇款的使用，(2)围绕移民汇款的道德和宗教辩论，(3)移民与其家庭之间的关系，因为他们影响和影响汇款的发送和消费。本研究将有助于社会科学理论的非正式经济，宗教变化，和跨国移民。该项目还将产生对经济进程的关键的人种学洞察，这些进程虽然规模巨大，但基本上仍然是非正式的，因此在国际发展和移徙政策制定者通常使用的量化分析中是不透明的。

Yale University doctoral student Susanna Fioratta, under the supervision of Dr. Michael McGovern, will explore the social and moral contexts in which migrant remittances that provide people with economic security may also become a source of moral insecurity. Increasing rumors of migrants' involvement in illegal or immoral activities have led to escalating moral contestations between villagers and their relatives who are suspected of sending "unclean" money home. Yet, facing ongoing economic hardship and political uncertainty, recipients rely on remittances now more than ever. The researcher will investigate how people linked between generations and across continents negotiate the meanings and morality of a remittance economy. The research will be conducted in Guinea, taking the construction of remittance-funded village mosques as an ethnographic lens for examining transnational monetary disputes. This eighteen-month ethnographic study will take place in three villages in the Fouta Djallon highlands region of Guinea, in Conakry, Guinea's capital, and among Guinean migrants in Dakar, Senegal. Ethnographic data will be collected through a variety of methods (semi-structured interviews, oral histories, migration narratives, genealogical interviews, participant observation and fieldnotes) to test three major hypotheses, concerning: (1) the uses of remittance money, (2) moral and religious debates surrounding migrant remittances, and (3) relations between migrants and their families, as they affect and are affected by the sending and spending of remittances.This research will contribute to social scientific theories of informal economies, religious change, and transnational migration. The project will also yield critical ethnographic insight into economic processes that, though vast, remain largely informal, and thus opaque in the quantitative analyses typically used by international development and migration policy makers.