New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2024. US$38.00, paper. ISBN 9781978840409.
In Remittance as Belonging, Hasan Mahmud makes a decisive intervention in the sociology of migration by upending dominant economistic paradigms that have long shaped scholarly understandings of remittance. Drawing on richly textured ethnographic fieldwork among Bangladeshi migrants in Tokyo and Los Angeles, Mahmud reinterprets remittance not as a binary expression of self-interest or familial altruism, but as a complex, morally infused act rooted in migrants’ negotiations of home, identity, and obligation. With conceptual precision and narrative sensitivity, Mahmud advances a theory of remittance as a practice of belonging that is historically contingent, emotionally resonant, and structured by both macro-political constraints and micro-relational logics.
Central to Mahmud’s argument is a critique of the new economics of labour migration (NELM) framework, which has long posited remittances as rational strategies for household-level utility maximization. In contrast, Mahmud insists that such frameworks fail to capture the lived experiences of migrants whose decisions to remit are not reducible to economic calculus or abstract familial solidarity. Instead, remittances are sent within moral economies, which are structured systems of expectation, obligation, and reciprocity in which migrants’ actions are evaluated not simply in terms of material outcomes but in relation to their moral standing as sons, brothers, and kin. As he illustrates through the stories of Rahman in Los Angeles and Mian in Tokyo, remittance is not simply a transfer of funds; it is a performative and often contested articulation of selfhood, duty, and emotional attachment.
Mahmud’s most consequential intervention lies in reconceptualizing remittance as a sociologically saturated expression of migrant belonging, one that is embedded, reflexive, and historically contingent. Rather than treating belonging as static or binary, Mahmud demonstrates that migrants’ affective ties to their homes, both real and imagined, evolve over time and are shaped by the legal, economic, and relational conditions of their lives abroad. Through the juxtaposition of Japanese and American immigration regimes, he demonstrates how structural conditions shape the migrant’s sense of “home,” whether that home is deferred, recreated, or nostalgically remembered. This temporal and spatial reorientation allows Mahmud to locate remittance within a broader arc of migrants’ life courses and their attempts to negotiate status, care, and moral worth across generations and borders. His insistence that remittance cannot be fully understood without attending to the migrant’s own sense of self in relation, as mediated through material, symbolic, and emotional practices, marks a significant departure from frameworks that reduce remitting to rational economic calculus or cultural obligation.
The comparative frame is especially powerful. In Japan, where immigration regimes are restrictive and long-term settlement unlikely, Bangladeshi migrants often maintain high-frequency remittance practices throughout their stay, tethered emotionally and financially to their families in Bangladesh. In contrast, migrants in the United States, where settlement and family reunification are structurally facilitated, exhibit a U-shaped pattern of remitting. Remittances tend to be high in the early years, decline as families reunite, and then resurge later in life as a means of reclaiming lost status or reconstituting ties to disaggregated kin networks. In both contexts, Mahmud is attuned to how state policies, labour market segmentation, and legal precarity interact with migrants’ deeply felt attachments and moral expectations.
Mahmud’s analytic strength lies not only in his critique of dominant paradigms but also in his theoretical reassembly of structure and agency. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s practice theory, Anthony Giddens’s structuration, and Margaret Archer’s morphogenesis, he crafts a composite “structure-agency framework” that situates migrants’ actions within routinized yet reflexively navigated social fields. This theoretical scaffolding is grounded in thick ethnographic description, lending credibility to Mahmud’s interpretive claims. Migrants, he argues, are not cultural dupes nor pure rational actors; they are situated agents whose decisions are shaped by moral expectations, familial scripts, and the changing meanings of home. In this sense, remittance becomes a relational act that serves as a mechanism through which migrants affirm, negotiate, or contest their place within a transnational moral economy.
One of the most compelling aspects of the book is Mahmud’s attention to language. He carefully parses the Bangla concepts of bari (house) and paribar (family) to argue that remittances are directed not merely to individuals or addresses but to imagined collectivities infused with memory, status, and hope. Home, in Mahmud’s account, is simultaneously physical, symbolic, and aspirational. It is a location, a network of relations, and a project of self-formation. Migrants remit not only to sustain others but also to sustain a self in relationship, in order to remain visible, worthy, and connected within a shifting social landscape.
Nevertheless, the book has notable silences. While Mahmud briefly acknowledges the gendered nature of migration and remittance, his focus on male migrants, though methodologically consistent, limits a fuller account of how remittance practices are differently shaped by gender, age, and class. The exclusion of women’s voices, especially in a transnational context where female migration is rising and where caregiving roles are intensely gendered, narrows the analytic scope of belonging. Comparative engagement with the work of scholars like Rhacel Parreñas on transnational mothering or Cecilia Menjívar on gendered legality could have broadened the theoretical resonance of Mahmud’s argument.
Even so, Remittance as Belonging stands as a major contribution to the sociology of migration, economic sociology, and transnational studies. Its methodological rigour, conceptual nuance, and ethnographic depth mark it as essential reading for scholars seeking to move beyond instrumentalist or overly culturalist accounts of remittance. By situating remittance within the moral, emotional, and structural terrain of migrant life, Mahmud transforms what has often been treated as a technical question of flows into a profound meditation on care, obligation, and the making of home. In Mahmud’s hands, remittance is not just money; it becomes a vessel for the stories migrants tell about who they are, where they belong, and how they endure.
Anand Panamthottam Cherian
George Mason University, Fairfax