Ivan Small, Postdoctoral Scholar
Department of Anthropology and the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion
UC Irvine
Friday, April 26, 2013
2:10 PM
INTERDISCIPLINARY BLDG SOUTH
(INTS) 1128 Screening Room
This talk explores sociocultural, material, historical, and geographic dynamics of international migration and remittance flows in Vietnam, examining in particular the changing nature of transnational gifting in mediating kinship networks disrupted by war and exile. I argue that long distance international gifting exchanges in the global political economy increasingly juxtapose the mobility of financial remittance flows against the confines of state bound bodies. In this contradiction is revealed a creative space for emergent imaginaries and agencies that disrupt structures and contingencies of aspiration and expectation. Furthermore, the characteristics of the gift medium itself come to affectively frame the relations between remittance economy participants and the things they exchange.
Ivan Small is a postdoctoral research scholar in the Department of Anthropology and the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion at UC Irvine. He received his Ph.D. in anthropology and Southeast Asian Studies at Cornell University in addition to a masters in international affairs from Columbia University.
