Sohini Kar | London School of Economics and Political Science (original) (raw)
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Papers by Sohini Kar
Current Anthropology
In the decade since the 2008 global financial crisis, much of the debate has been over whom to bl... more In the decade since the 2008 global financial crisis, much of the debate has been over whom to blame: reckless speculative finance or irresponsible (often low-income) borrowers. This essay takes up this set of moral arguments about what the poor can and should be able to afford by examining subprime logics at a global scale: subprime empire. Predatory lending in heartland America and development-oriented microcredit in places such as India and Paraguay appear not just to be geographically disparate but also to have different moral valences. After closer inspection, however, we argue that subprime lending and microfinance are two sides of the same coin. Our analysis of microfinance allows us to understand what is happening in the "in-between" as capital flows between financial investors and poor borrowers. By comparing financialization in India and Paraguay, we document and theorize the making of subprime empires that rely on actors within marginal financial sites to stabilize the evaluative frameworks and social interdependencies that make profits flow. We argue that the forms of financial capture and conversion in the "financial inbetween" reproduce imperial dynamics by naturalizing the limited expectations of economic subjects of the global south and erasing the violence inherent in these forms of economic redistribution that maintain those expectations as such.
Contributions to Indian Sociology
Microfinance is the business of giving small, collateral-free loans to poor borrowers that are pa... more Microfinance is the business of giving small, collateral-free loans to poor borrowers that are paid back in frequent intervals with interest. While these for-profit microfinance institutions (MFIs) promise social and economic empowerment, they have mainly succeeded at enfolding the poor—especially women—into the vast circuits of global finance. Financializing Poverty ethnographically examines how the emergence of MFIs has allowed financial institutions in the city of Kolkata, India, to capitalize on the poverty of its residents. This book reveals how MFIs have restructured debt relationships in new ways. On the one hand, they have opened access to new streams of credit. However, as the network of finance increasingly incorporates the poor, the "inclusive" dimensions of microfinance are continuously met with rigid forms of credit risk management that reproduce the very inequality the loans are meant to alleviate. Moreover, despite being collateral-free loans, the use of lif...
Financialization: Relational Approaches, 2020
In 2014, the Government of India launched a new program of financial inclusion, seeking to cover ... more In 2014, the Government of India launched a new program of financial inclusion, seeking to cover all households in India with at least one bank account. This chapter is about what happens once people are financially included. To be profitable, banks need these new accounts not only to be funded by transaction flows through welfare payments to the poor, but also to generate credit, or a process of “accumulation by saturation,” whereby capital is constantly circulated—increasingly in cashless transactions—while benefits accrue to financial investors.
Financializing Poverty: Labor and Risk in Indian Microfinance (Stanford University Press), 2018
The popularization of the "bottom of the pyramid," which turns the poor into a viable market oppo... more The popularization of the "bottom of the pyramid," which turns the poor into a viable market opportunity, has produced new forms of profit seeking. This chapter traces the way in which social businesses claim a more ethical form of capitalism and the emergent ideologies that sustain them. From this perspective of the culture of entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurs, such as the founders of MFIs, are celebrated as the future of development by meeting the double bottom line of financial profit and social welfare. Meanwhile, the urban poor who already work in the precarious informal economy are further encouraged to become entrepreneurs themselves. The culture of entrepreneurship presses the poor to become more self-sufficient while ignoring the desire of many to attain more secure forms of livelihood and access to social services.
Financializing Poverty: Labor and Risk in Indian Microfinance (Stanford University Press), 2018
Microfinance is the business of giving small, collateral-free loans to poor borrowers that are pa... more Microfinance is the business of giving small, collateral-free loans to poor borrowers that are paid back in frequent intervals with interest. While these for-profit microfinance institutions (MFIs) promise social and economic empowerment, they have mainly succeeded at enfolding the poor—especially women—into the vast circuits of global finance. Financializing Poverty ethnographically examines how the emergence of MFIs has allowed financial institutions in the city of Kolkata, India, to capitalize on the poverty of its residents.
This book reveals how MFIs have restructured debt relationships in new ways. On the one hand, they have opened access to new streams of credit. However, as the network of finance increasingly incorporates the poor, the "inclusive" dimensions of microfinance are continuously met with rigid forms of credit risk management that reproduce the very inequality the loans are meant to alleviate. Moreover, despite being collateral-free loans, the use of life insurance to manage the high mortality rates of poor borrowers has led to the collateralization of life itself. Thus the newfound ability of the poor to use MFI loans has entrapped them in a system dependent not only on their circulation of capital, but on the poverty that threatens their lives.
In 2013, the government of India announced the creation of the Bharatiya Mahila Bank (BMB), or th... more In 2013, the government of India announced the creation of the Bharatiya Mahila Bank (BMB), or the Indian Women’s Bank, offering financial services largely to women. The bank was a financialized response to the 2012 New Delhi rape case that mobilized mass protests against sexual violence and harassment in public spaces. Curtailing economic instability in the wake of the protests, the BMB became a means of securitizing women’s bodies through financial means. While the BMB was premised on an idea of precautious empowerment through financial inclusion, India offers a challenge to the almost global dominance of men in the upper echelons of finance. With around 40 percent of financial assets controlled by women-headed banks, Indian women have challenged the naturalization of men in finance. Their rise has been supported by a history of social banking and unionization of bank workers. Examining these two cases laterally, this article argues that both narratives of women in finance in India hinge on the notion of precaution. I argue that banking for women and women bankers stabilize the economic order under financialization rather than challenging the conservatism of patriarchal capitalism and the gendered production of public space.
With the launch of the new financial inclusion programme in 2015, the government of India claimed... more With the launch of the new financial inclusion programme in 2015, the government of India claimed that more than 90 per cent of households now have access to bank accounts. The programme sought not only to link the poor in India to financial services such as credit and savings, but also to insurance-based welfare payments. This article examines how the expansion of welfare programmes – a seeming alternative to austerity – in India has simultaneously hinged on arguments of fiscal conservatism. In other words, financial inclusion has also served to curtail government expenditure through payment systems and financial infrastructures. However, as the poor are drawn into new financial products, it raises the question of ‘who benefits’ when welfare systems are streamlined through the banking system.
With the growth of commercial microfinance in India, the poor have been increasingly enfolded int... more With the growth of commercial microfinance in India, the poor have been increasingly enfolded into circuits of global finance. In making these collateral-free loans, however, microfinance institutions (MFIs) engage in new forms of risk management. While loans are made to women with the goal of economic and social empowerment, MFIs require male kin to serve as guarantors. Drawing on fieldwork in the city of Kolkata, I argue that through the requirement of male guarantors, MFIs hedge on kinship, even as they speculate on the bottom of the pyramid as a new market of accumulation.
In recent years, microfinance – the suite of financial products offered to the poor – has been wi... more In recent years, microfinance – the suite of financial products offered to the poor – has been widely adopted in international development policy. Organizations around the world have replicated this model successfully. This essay takes the comparative case more explicitly to read against the tendency to understand microfinance as the globally institutionalized and realized norm, and local unruly credit economies as the exception. We go beyond comparing credit in India and Paraguay in order to illustrate how comparison is actually central to the banking practices of microfinance. Moreover, it is the collaborative anthropological project that helps to show this, allowing not only for empirical grounds of comparison, but also raising theoretical and methodological questions of comparison itself. In juxtaposing microfinance in our two fieldsites, we find that as credit proliferates globally, so do the comparative projects both of borrowers and lenders in the disparate worlds of Kolkata and Ciudad del Este. At the same time, these were constrained by the global financial comparisons between countries made by investors. Ethnographic methods are vital for understanding how microfinance becomes part of a wider repertoire of financial strategies used by women while simultaneously offering the grounds for women to undertake their own acts of comparison.
American Ethnologist, Aug 2013
Microfinance loan officers play a critical, if underexamined, role in incorporating the poor into... more Microfinance loan officers play a critical, if underexamined, role in incorporating the poor into financial networks at the global peripheries. As “proxy-creditors,” loan officers in Kolkata, India, must produce and alienate debt relationships to create loan products. I argue that the process of financialization is articulated through local idioms of moneylending, care, and respect. Moreover, at the heart of this labor is the unresolved tension between capitalist expansion and ethical concerns for the everyday relationships that are used to extend credit to the financially excluded.
Blog Posts by Sohini Kar
Even while offering the poor the prospect of aspiring to a middle class lifestyle, microfinance l... more Even while offering the poor the prospect of aspiring to a middle class lifestyle, microfinance lending practices constrain these very desires by having loan officers determine what is a need, and what constitutes wants. The agency of each borrower—as with poor recipients in welfare or aid—to consume more or less as an attempt to prove one’s deservingness is ultimately limited by how these signs are read by mediators such as loan officers.
Current Anthropology
In the decade since the 2008 global financial crisis, much of the debate has been over whom to bl... more In the decade since the 2008 global financial crisis, much of the debate has been over whom to blame: reckless speculative finance or irresponsible (often low-income) borrowers. This essay takes up this set of moral arguments about what the poor can and should be able to afford by examining subprime logics at a global scale: subprime empire. Predatory lending in heartland America and development-oriented microcredit in places such as India and Paraguay appear not just to be geographically disparate but also to have different moral valences. After closer inspection, however, we argue that subprime lending and microfinance are two sides of the same coin. Our analysis of microfinance allows us to understand what is happening in the "in-between" as capital flows between financial investors and poor borrowers. By comparing financialization in India and Paraguay, we document and theorize the making of subprime empires that rely on actors within marginal financial sites to stabilize the evaluative frameworks and social interdependencies that make profits flow. We argue that the forms of financial capture and conversion in the "financial inbetween" reproduce imperial dynamics by naturalizing the limited expectations of economic subjects of the global south and erasing the violence inherent in these forms of economic redistribution that maintain those expectations as such.
Contributions to Indian Sociology
Microfinance is the business of giving small, collateral-free loans to poor borrowers that are pa... more Microfinance is the business of giving small, collateral-free loans to poor borrowers that are paid back in frequent intervals with interest. While these for-profit microfinance institutions (MFIs) promise social and economic empowerment, they have mainly succeeded at enfolding the poor—especially women—into the vast circuits of global finance. Financializing Poverty ethnographically examines how the emergence of MFIs has allowed financial institutions in the city of Kolkata, India, to capitalize on the poverty of its residents. This book reveals how MFIs have restructured debt relationships in new ways. On the one hand, they have opened access to new streams of credit. However, as the network of finance increasingly incorporates the poor, the "inclusive" dimensions of microfinance are continuously met with rigid forms of credit risk management that reproduce the very inequality the loans are meant to alleviate. Moreover, despite being collateral-free loans, the use of lif...
Financialization: Relational Approaches, 2020
In 2014, the Government of India launched a new program of financial inclusion, seeking to cover ... more In 2014, the Government of India launched a new program of financial inclusion, seeking to cover all households in India with at least one bank account. This chapter is about what happens once people are financially included. To be profitable, banks need these new accounts not only to be funded by transaction flows through welfare payments to the poor, but also to generate credit, or a process of “accumulation by saturation,” whereby capital is constantly circulated—increasingly in cashless transactions—while benefits accrue to financial investors.
Financializing Poverty: Labor and Risk in Indian Microfinance (Stanford University Press), 2018
The popularization of the "bottom of the pyramid," which turns the poor into a viable market oppo... more The popularization of the "bottom of the pyramid," which turns the poor into a viable market opportunity, has produced new forms of profit seeking. This chapter traces the way in which social businesses claim a more ethical form of capitalism and the emergent ideologies that sustain them. From this perspective of the culture of entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurs, such as the founders of MFIs, are celebrated as the future of development by meeting the double bottom line of financial profit and social welfare. Meanwhile, the urban poor who already work in the precarious informal economy are further encouraged to become entrepreneurs themselves. The culture of entrepreneurship presses the poor to become more self-sufficient while ignoring the desire of many to attain more secure forms of livelihood and access to social services.
Financializing Poverty: Labor and Risk in Indian Microfinance (Stanford University Press), 2018
Microfinance is the business of giving small, collateral-free loans to poor borrowers that are pa... more Microfinance is the business of giving small, collateral-free loans to poor borrowers that are paid back in frequent intervals with interest. While these for-profit microfinance institutions (MFIs) promise social and economic empowerment, they have mainly succeeded at enfolding the poor—especially women—into the vast circuits of global finance. Financializing Poverty ethnographically examines how the emergence of MFIs has allowed financial institutions in the city of Kolkata, India, to capitalize on the poverty of its residents.
This book reveals how MFIs have restructured debt relationships in new ways. On the one hand, they have opened access to new streams of credit. However, as the network of finance increasingly incorporates the poor, the "inclusive" dimensions of microfinance are continuously met with rigid forms of credit risk management that reproduce the very inequality the loans are meant to alleviate. Moreover, despite being collateral-free loans, the use of life insurance to manage the high mortality rates of poor borrowers has led to the collateralization of life itself. Thus the newfound ability of the poor to use MFI loans has entrapped them in a system dependent not only on their circulation of capital, but on the poverty that threatens their lives.
In 2013, the government of India announced the creation of the Bharatiya Mahila Bank (BMB), or th... more In 2013, the government of India announced the creation of the Bharatiya Mahila Bank (BMB), or the Indian Women’s Bank, offering financial services largely to women. The bank was a financialized response to the 2012 New Delhi rape case that mobilized mass protests against sexual violence and harassment in public spaces. Curtailing economic instability in the wake of the protests, the BMB became a means of securitizing women’s bodies through financial means. While the BMB was premised on an idea of precautious empowerment through financial inclusion, India offers a challenge to the almost global dominance of men in the upper echelons of finance. With around 40 percent of financial assets controlled by women-headed banks, Indian women have challenged the naturalization of men in finance. Their rise has been supported by a history of social banking and unionization of bank workers. Examining these two cases laterally, this article argues that both narratives of women in finance in India hinge on the notion of precaution. I argue that banking for women and women bankers stabilize the economic order under financialization rather than challenging the conservatism of patriarchal capitalism and the gendered production of public space.
With the launch of the new financial inclusion programme in 2015, the government of India claimed... more With the launch of the new financial inclusion programme in 2015, the government of India claimed that more than 90 per cent of households now have access to bank accounts. The programme sought not only to link the poor in India to financial services such as credit and savings, but also to insurance-based welfare payments. This article examines how the expansion of welfare programmes – a seeming alternative to austerity – in India has simultaneously hinged on arguments of fiscal conservatism. In other words, financial inclusion has also served to curtail government expenditure through payment systems and financial infrastructures. However, as the poor are drawn into new financial products, it raises the question of ‘who benefits’ when welfare systems are streamlined through the banking system.
With the growth of commercial microfinance in India, the poor have been increasingly enfolded int... more With the growth of commercial microfinance in India, the poor have been increasingly enfolded into circuits of global finance. In making these collateral-free loans, however, microfinance institutions (MFIs) engage in new forms of risk management. While loans are made to women with the goal of economic and social empowerment, MFIs require male kin to serve as guarantors. Drawing on fieldwork in the city of Kolkata, I argue that through the requirement of male guarantors, MFIs hedge on kinship, even as they speculate on the bottom of the pyramid as a new market of accumulation.
In recent years, microfinance – the suite of financial products offered to the poor – has been wi... more In recent years, microfinance – the suite of financial products offered to the poor – has been widely adopted in international development policy. Organizations around the world have replicated this model successfully. This essay takes the comparative case more explicitly to read against the tendency to understand microfinance as the globally institutionalized and realized norm, and local unruly credit economies as the exception. We go beyond comparing credit in India and Paraguay in order to illustrate how comparison is actually central to the banking practices of microfinance. Moreover, it is the collaborative anthropological project that helps to show this, allowing not only for empirical grounds of comparison, but also raising theoretical and methodological questions of comparison itself. In juxtaposing microfinance in our two fieldsites, we find that as credit proliferates globally, so do the comparative projects both of borrowers and lenders in the disparate worlds of Kolkata and Ciudad del Este. At the same time, these were constrained by the global financial comparisons between countries made by investors. Ethnographic methods are vital for understanding how microfinance becomes part of a wider repertoire of financial strategies used by women while simultaneously offering the grounds for women to undertake their own acts of comparison.
American Ethnologist, Aug 2013
Microfinance loan officers play a critical, if underexamined, role in incorporating the poor into... more Microfinance loan officers play a critical, if underexamined, role in incorporating the poor into financial networks at the global peripheries. As “proxy-creditors,” loan officers in Kolkata, India, must produce and alienate debt relationships to create loan products. I argue that the process of financialization is articulated through local idioms of moneylending, care, and respect. Moreover, at the heart of this labor is the unresolved tension between capitalist expansion and ethical concerns for the everyday relationships that are used to extend credit to the financially excluded.
Even while offering the poor the prospect of aspiring to a middle class lifestyle, microfinance l... more Even while offering the poor the prospect of aspiring to a middle class lifestyle, microfinance lending practices constrain these very desires by having loan officers determine what is a need, and what constitutes wants. The agency of each borrower—as with poor recipients in welfare or aid—to consume more or less as an attempt to prove one’s deservingness is ultimately limited by how these signs are read by mediators such as loan officers.