Economic Domestication and Monetarization of Social Life
This article sheds light on the social practices of Latin Americans immigrants in Montreal who send money and gifts home. We hope to portray their actions within a space of reproduction and transformation of family relations. For more than four decades, disciplines such as anthropology and sociology, on the one hand, and economy on the other, have looked at this phenomenon on behalf of their respective fields in such a way as to segment and dichotomize the problem by opposing social actions found in the public sphere to those within the family. With this research we hope to show the limitations of such an oppositional model. We conceive money transfers in the transnational social sphere as being both domestic and intimate and as well as part of the marketplace (represented by multinational transfer agencies and banks, but also by small entrepreneurs). By looking at this process of mutual interweaving, we focus our attention on the junctions and separations of the intimate and the public spheres as described and conceived by the social actors engaged in this process.