Abstract
Julie Vullnetari and Russell King are two of the most eminent scholars of Albanian migration, and their book fills an important gap. Migration has been at the heart of Albania’s social and economic transformation during the 1990s and 2000s, in ways unparalleled in any other post-communist society. From the early 1990s, some one million Albanians are estimated to have settled or to work seasonally abroad, representing about one-third of the country’s total population of about three million. As Vullnetari and King point out, “probably no other country in the world has seen such a dramatic loss of population [to migration] as took place in Albania during the 1990s” (p. 1). By the mid-2000s, when the authors carried out their field work for this book, migration or reliance on family members abroad for financial support was an established means of social and economic survival and mobility for many Albanian households, while the remittances of Albanian migrants became an important driver of economic recovery and growth. The ways in which migration and practices surrounding it have reshaped household and gender relations in a once isolated and patriarchal society are therefore questions of great importance.
Vullnetari and King situate migration in Albania in the context of a rapidly changing domestic social and economic order, with the onset of a difficult and often tumultuous transition to market capitalism and multiparty democracy, and processes of globalization which depend heavily upon the continued flow of cheap, un- and semi-skilled labor from the South to the North. In particular, they are interested in the continued flows between migrant households and families in the sending and receiving country, focusing especially on the role of remittances. Having as their unit of analysis the transnational household, which they define as a household unit whose members are geographically dispersed across borders but retain active social bonds, Vullnetari and King focus on remittance practices and their impact on gender and development. Drawing from Guarnizo (2003), they see remittances not as simple economic exchanges but as part of the “economics of transnational living,” embedded within (gendered) social practices and cultural schemas.
While the book is in a theoretical and conceptual dialogue with existing works in migration and transnationalization, introducing within its framework an important global perspective, the main strength of the book is the empirical research on remittances and the organization of inter-familial relations of care and support in transnational households in the Albanian context. Vullnetari and King focus particularly on Albanian migrants in neighboring Greece, one of the largest recipient countries of Albanian immigration. They carried out both survey and field research in three villages in southwest Albania, an important source of migrants to Greece, as well as in Thessaloniki, one of the top destinations of Albanian immigration. This allows the authors to examine, in a rather systematic fashion, how remittances are sent and what use remittances are put to by receiving households. While the emphasis is on financial remittances, the authors also examine other transfers, including goods, technology, skills, and social values. Of particular interest, as the title of the book suggests, and as the authors emphasize throughout the book, is the examination of how gender comes into play in both the remittance-sending and remittance-receiving end of the transaction. Their survey data is enriched by interviews with Albanian immigrants in Greece as well as family members remaining in Albania, providing insight into the rationales which migrants use to make decisions about how and when to send remittances, and how on the other end remittances are used by the recipients.
This makes the book particularly strong in providing an extensive and systematic overview of how remittance flows are organized between members of transnational households. For example, Vullnetari and King shed light on the multiplicity of ways in which moneys are sent from Greece to Albania, and how the expansion of wire transfer companies and commercial banks in the lucrative remittance-transfer business has gradually taken over the earlier reliance on informal channels such as circulating taxi and bus drivers to carry money and packages to Albania. The authors’ survey also unveils the typical patterns of remittance senders, finding that sons and husbands dominate as remittance senders, typically to spouses left behind or (when unmarried or accompanied in Greece with their spouse) to elderly parents—typically to the father when he is alive.
While gender is its dominant theme, the book falls short on presenting a critical analysis of gender of the kind promised at the start. In Chapter Two, the authors provide an in-depth review of theoretical literatures that see migration as a gendered phenomenon, laying out a framework for their own analysis which, following Mahler and Pessar (2001), they term a “gendered geography of power.” They argue that “a gendered analysis involves much more than counting numbers of male and female migrants or even comparing and contrasting the migration behaviors and experiences of men and women” (pp. 33–34). It is difficult to say, however, that the analysis ultimately delivers on this ambitious promise, since the analysis of gendered practices is ultimately limited both by method and empirical site. In the first case, the survey and interview methods limit observations of household dynamics since they rely heavily on self-reporting. While we assume traditional gender roles of the patriarchal household are reproduced when men report to be the ones deciding when to send remittances, how to send them, and how much to send, we do not really know how those norms are negotiated within the household, nor how power dynamics play out when male and female migrants confront conflicting familial obligations, or when, for example, working and married female migrants wish to support kin with their earnings in ways that might not be approved by their husbands.
Second, a gendered analysis of migration requires going beyond the study of the transnational household and developing a political economy of labor migration which would involve extending the analysis beyond the household to the effects of the gendered labor markets, national social policies, and the global economic linkages in which transnational households are embedded. For the particular case of Greece, an additional factor may be internal political struggles over immigration policy, and how these might affect social and cultural hostility toward immigrants, given that Greek society has only recently had to make the adjustment from a migrant-sending to a migrant-receiving country. While the authors acknowledge the importance of these, their analysis of these extraneous factors is limited and their causal narrative does not develop clear linkages. The authors suggest that gendered patterns of household organization reflect the continuing strength of patriarchal culture in rural Albania, whereas it seems like the culture is reinforced by Greece’s segmented and sectorally-specific immigrant labor market (mainly in agriculture and construction), which provides more and relatively better paid employment to migrant men than to migrant women. It would have also been interesting had the research provided more in-depth case studies of the few “anomalies” in their sample in which women took the lead in migrating, and investigating the ways in which the migrant, her family, and the local community negotiated patriarchal household norms while relying on their female kin abroad for financial support—and if there are distinct social networks of support available to female migrants in the receiving society.
But these shortfalls are more than compensated by the extent and richness of the book’s empirical research and extensive discussion of the Albanian context of migration. The book is an excellent resource for scholars of migration and transnationalism, and its chapter with policy recommendations makes it a useful guide for practitioners as well.