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There are, for example, many studies that highlight the importance ofcompadrazgo (ritual kinship) relationships, group cooperative efforts(entailing the organization of faenas or collective work parties), fiestasponsorship, and participation in “hometown” associations (what in Peruare called village or regional migrant clubs), religious brotherhoods, andpublic festivities. These continue to be important for understanding thesocial organization of translocality but are nowadays underpinned by newforms of media communication – initiated at both ends of the migrationchain – such as e-mails and other forms of internet communication, satellitebasedphone calls, circulating photographs, and the making and viewing ofvideos. We should add to this exposure to global radio and TV programmes– especially those that explore topics that are close to the situations andexperiences of migrants. That is, we need to know precisely how these helpshape and maintain the various social, political, economic and emotionalconnections between migrants and their relatives and friends at home. Whatmemories, sentiments and ideas about “progress” and “modernity,” forexample, are communicated and reinforced? What cultural commitments,world views and specific social relations are represented and reasserted inthe migrant situation through these new media communications? And howdo the “old” and “new” communicative practices gear into each other? Toanswer these and related questions we need to build more effective waysof constructing multi-sited ethnographies of migration. 16Below, I extend these observations and queries to underline the significanceof remittances in maintaining translocal relationships and their impact onprocesses of local and regional development. Once again, the argumentdraws upon data from central Peru.5. Social Embedding of RemittancesSeveral recent publications have emphasized the importance of extendingthe notion of “remittances” to cover the social and cultural componentsinvolved in migrant transfers of cash, capital or goods to relatives and friendsin their home community (Levitt 1996; Goldring 2004; Sφrensen 2004,2005). A second argument is that remittances should not be conceptualizedsimply as a one-way process since obviously we need also to pay attentionoriginating from one southern Andean Peruvian community, which eventually become part of aglobal Peruvian diaspora to the U.S., Europe, Japan and other Latin American countries. Suchnetworks of persons and places are bound together by individual and “collective” memories andimages of common origins and shared places of migration, as well as by a sense of belonging tosome kind of “third culture,” somehow common to all such intercultural migrants.16Ulla Berg of New York University is currently carrying out ethnographic fieldwork amongPeruvian migrant communities in the U.S. with a view to exploring these kinds of questions. Asanthropologist and documentary filmmaker, she is well placed to capture the performative andcommunicative dimensions involved.51