Paper short abstract:

The remittances of East European migrants working in the Western EU finance construction booms in the marginalised countryside locations in Eastern Europe. The ‘’Western style’’ houses are important actors by means of which the identity of their owners undergoes a transformation which is characteristic of numerous contradictions.

Paper long abstract:

In Eastern Europe we can see not only individually scattered remittance houses but also entire remittance landscapes (Lopez 2010, 2015). Since 2009 I have been conducting field work and research on remittance houses in typical source locations for migration into the EU in the marginalized areas of the the former Yugoslavia, Albania, the Ukraine, Moldova, and Romania.

Reflected in the remittance houses is not just the flow of capital, new construction technologies, materials and furnishings but also transnational flows of new cultural patterns, lifestyle as well as social and class aspirations (Cairns, 2004). Owning an opulent house shapes the owner’s sense of self-worth, their position in local community, and sometimes also affects how they are perceived by their western friends and employers. Visual representations of the house have a long social life on Facebook or Youtube.

In this paper, I attempt to show that ‘’a house as those in Germany’’, ‘’a Swiss-style house’’ is a reflection as well as means of both the owner’s social aspirations and changes to their identity. The thesis I am advocating here is that the remittance house is not just a representation and a proclamation of the owners’ class aspirations but it also implicitly conveys values of modernity, Westernality and Europeanness as well as values of individuation and freedom. But as house owners try to combine the newly acquired values with the values of local tradition, family, community and national heritage in an often syncretic and highly contrasting way, otherwise invisible tensions and contradictions in this trend get revealed.