Gifts and monetary transfers to women in non-marital sex relationships negatively affect the amount of money that Kenyan migrant men send home to their families, Brown sociology professor Nancy Luke said in a talk in Wallace Hall on Tuesday.
Titled “Migrants’ Competing Commitments: Sexual Partners in Urban Africa and Remittances to the Rural Origin,” it was the third lecture in the Office of Population Research’s Notestein seminar series.
Luke discussed her research on the tendencies of migrant men to partake in transactional sex in Kisumu, Kenya’s third-largest city. In transactional sex, men pay non-marital partners for sex with gifts ranging from money to meals.
The men that Luke studies migrate to Kisumu from rural Kenya and often leave their families behind, sending back remittances to help sustain their kin.
The transfers in exchange for sex, Luke said, went to three categories of individuals: casual partners, commercial sex workers and “jadiya,” or long-term, serious partners.
Luke said that for men who send remittances, roughly 23 percent of their income goes back to their families. But of those who send remittances and also engage in transactional sex, 21 percent of their income goes to non-marital partners.
Luke concluded, therefore, that transfers to non-marital sexual partners, specifically “jadiya,” have a significant negative effect on flows of money back to families.
Luke has worked in several countries around the world and currently focuses her research on “how community institutions, such as marriage, caste, and economic exchange, affect individual and couple behavior, including sexual relations and HIV risk in Kenya and intimate partner violence in India,” according to her website.
Luke spoke for just under an hour and then opened the floor to questions. Several graduate students and faculty members asked about potential related studies and Luke’s use of certain economic terms in her discussion.
The research she carried out is more objective than most of the other work done in the field, she said. Most coverage “doesn’t take a historical view” and instead passes judgment on Kenyan men and their habits, she explained.
Elizabeth Armstrong GS ’93, professor of sociology and public affairs, co-organized the seminar series for the second year in a row.
“We try to balance younger, more emerging scholars [like Luke] with the stars,” she said in an interview after the talk. The Notestein seminars generally focus on unpublished topics like Luke’s, Armstrong added, to “keep ourselves up on the cutting edge of the field.”
There are nine more Notestein seminars scheduled for this semester, and Armstrong said that the program’s organizers aim for “balance on several dimensions,” focusing on topics such as migration, health, education, residential segregation and residential mobility.
The next seminar will feature Harvard anthropology professor Peter Ellison speaking on “Evolutionary Approaches to Understanding Human Fecundity” on Oct. 7.
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