Doctoral Dissertation Research: Kinship, Remittances and Redistribution

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Remittances are the money and other goods transferred between migrants and their communities of origin. Doctoral student Benjamin Hanowell, supervised by Dr. Eric Alden Smith of the University of Washington, will undertake research to investigate two previously unstudied aspects of remittance economies. First, how do kinship, gender and age together shape remitters' decisions about how much and to whom they remit? Second, how do kinship, gender and age interact with recipient household redistribution patterns to further shape remitters' decisions? These questions emerge from a fusion of anthropology with evolutionary theory about kin-based sharing and economic theory about labor migration. To address the research questions, Mr. Hanowell will conduct year long fieldwork in three villages of Saint David Parish, a rural locale of Dominica, a small Caribbean island nation, where remittance income is an important part of the local economy. Fieldwork will combine structured and in-depth interviews with detailed field notes and archival research. Interviews and field notes will provide information about individual remittance relationships, household and individual wealth, household composition, household conflicts, and village genealogy. Church vital records and village censuses will be used to estimate age patterns of birth and death over time. Statistical analysis will include: social network analysis to model remittance relationships as a function of kinship and control variables; and linear regression to compare observed remittances with predictions from competing quantitative models of kin-based sharing. In-depth interviews and ethnographic field notes will be coded for key themes and compared to statistical results for an enriched understanding of remittance patterns in Saint David Parish.This research will advance scientific understanding of remittances, a major source of income for poor, rural people in developing regions. It will also address several long-standing theoretical issues about kin-based sharing. So doing, it will test the extent to which long held notions of kinship and sharing in small-scale societies scale up to the global context of remittances. Finally, it will help Dominica's government to assess its long-term progress toward four United Nations Millennium Development Goals: reducing child mortality, reducing maternal mortality, reducing teen pregnancy, and understanding the special needs of small developing island nations.