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

Yale University, New Haven CT

Investigators

Abstract

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.