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Return to Sender: The Moral Economy of Peru's Migrant Remittances

Return to Sender: The Moral Economy of Peru's Migrant Remittances by Karsten Paerregaard

Publisher

Woodrow Wilson Center Press with University of California Press, 2014

ISBN

978-0-5202-8473-9 hardcover; 978-0-5202-8474-6 paperback
Return to Sender: The Moral Economy of Peru's Migrant Remittances by Karsten Paerregaard

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Return to Sender: The Moral Economy of Peru’s Migrant Remittances is an anthropological account of how Peruvian emigrants raise and remit money and what that means for themselves and for their home communities. The book draws on first-hand ethnographic data from North and South America, Europe, and Japan. It tells how Peruvians remit to relatives at home, collectively raise money for development projects in their regions of origin, and invest in businesses and other activities.

The author, Karsten Paerregaard, challenges unqualified approval of remittances as beneficial resources of development for home communities and important income for home countries. He finds a more complex situation in which remittances can also create dependency and deprivation.

Karsten Paerregaard is a professor in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He was a fellow at the Wilson Center in 2009–10.

About the Author

Karsten Paerregaard

Karsten Paerregaard

Fellow Fellow;
Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
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