Contesting household debt in Croatia: the double movement of financialization and the fetishism of money in Eastern European peripheries (original) (raw)
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Initially understood as a narrowly economic process of financial expansion, the concept of financialization has expanded to describe the increasing power of financial actors, practices, logics, and narratives in various domains of social life and the resulting transformations. Anthropologists study financialization as a polyvalent social process that works in and through social relations and encompasses financial expansion and penetration as well as particular forms of morality, governmentality, and subjectivity. They employ ethnography and relational analysis to defamiliarize finance, destabilize its dominant representations, reveal its hidden agendas, and expose the gaps between its promises and actual outcomes. In the late 20th century and early 21st century, Eastern Europe has been one of the most dynamic areas of anthropological research on financialization. The process had a distinct flavor in the region inasmuch as it was part of its wider transition from socialism to capital...
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Debt collection is a crucial stage in the life-cycle of debt, but so far it has been largely neglected in the anthropology of credit/debt. Based on publicly available data and interactions with debtors, professionals and activists, the chapter explores Croatia’s unique system of debt collection. Facing demands of European integration and a surge of bad loans after a financialized debt boom, the government authorized a state-owned agency, public notaries and lawyers to collect debts in highly coercive and profitable ways. Foreign-owned debt collection agencies also rapidly expanded their presence. This resulted in public debates and political struggles over debt collection.
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The global financial crisis of 2008 resulted in a foreign-currency (forex) loan crisis in Hungary, leaving several hundred thousand people in the risk of losing their home. Following the crisis a small group of borrowers started to mobilize, and soon founded diverse organizations to address their situation. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork this thesis is about these debtors’ struggles for housing. It is about their claims and their critiques. However, these struggles are also about much more than housing: they are struggles for citizenship, for the right to be decommodified, and for being recognized as legitimate political subjects. This thesis mostly draws on two concepts, that of citizenship and that of civil society. I consider debtors’ struggles as acts of citizenship – as struggles for the right to be decommodified and for the right to have political voice. Nevertheless, my intention is to think about these acts of citizenship as being embedded within a historically bound and relational space: civil society. Through this conceptualization, this thesis aims to go beyond the narratives which describe debtors’ struggles as ‘neonationalist’, and to show how citizenship is also characterized by more than a mere relation to the state. My empirical data demonstrate that apart from contesting the elite-state projects and the emerging welfare regimes, debtors’ struggles are also positioned by and devoted to challenging the hegemonies within civil society and the country’s global capitalist integration.
Indebtedness as a global phenomenon has attracted much attention both in public discourses and in academia in recent years. In Hungary, however, up to date social scientists have not paid considerable interest to studying debt. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in rural northern Hungary, in this article I explore the financial portfolios of the poor in two settlements and their debt relations. I attempt to show how different forms of debt (formal and informal) are used, perceived, and valued; what kinds of different meanings are attached to them; and how they interrelate to each other. I will show the magisterial juggling of the poor with income scarcity, and the wizardry with which they make a living on twenty-two thousand forint (60 )amonth,theHungarianequivalentofthe") a month, the Hungarian equivalent of the " )amonth,theHungarianequivalentofthe"2 a day " global poverty benchmark. I will attempt to shed light on the role of informal moneylending in this puzzling story. I will explore how the cash-poor invent new ways (by appropriating and adjusting established ones; among others, subprime lending) to generate regular income. Whilst comparing the practices of formal and informal financial institutions towards the poor, I argue that informal/'illegal' lenders fill the gap, the economic niche, left empty by formal/legal financial companies, to " bank the unbanked ". Through this process, however, old dependency structures are reconfigured, new patron-client ties are formed and community wealth is redistributed – to further impair the poorest of the poor.
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The paper aims to reconsider Polanyi’s approach to money. His best-known writing on money uses (1968) is deeply original and presents strong insights that dissociate money from the concept of the market. Polanyi also developed an interesting non-dichotomous understanding of money in his Great Transformation (2001 [1944]). However, taken together, these two contributions lead to some unresolved questions: his critique of the orthodox approach to money is ambivalent; his argument to separate payment from account is weak; and, most important, he ultimately makes an incomplete break with the classical real/monetary dichotomy. This paper proposes a distinction between money as a set of instruments and practices and money as a concept, through the integration of John Commons’ concept of debt into Polanyi’s framework. This reformulation allows us to resolve Polanyi’s unresolved questions while preserving his major contributions, and leads to a more complex understanding of money. Keywords: Karl Polanyi, theories of money, debt, money plurality, economic anthropology, John Commons
Selling debt: interrogating the moral claims of the financial elites in Central Asia
Capital and Class, 2020
This article critically examines how banks and microfinance companies morally construed and evaluated their lending practices and income in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Banks occupy a powerful position in a monetary economy, because they do not merely create money ‘out of thin air’, but can charge for it, that is, interest. In doing so, they obtain unearned income and extract wealth. The article examines how banks and microfinance companies used myths, ideals, discourses, norms and emotions to justify and de-politicise their unequal power, unearned income and damaging effects. The study draws on the moral economy perspective and the post-Keynesian theory of money to understand financial institutions’ moral justifications and rationalisations of their position and power. This article contributes to a wider literature on neoliberalism and morality in post- socialist economies.
City Analysis of Urban Change, Theory, Action , 2023
The paper outlines the causes, unfolding and outcomes of the boom and bust of Swiss franc (CHF) loans in Serbia with a focus on their relation to class mobility in the setting of a transition to the market economy that transformed the methods of housing acquisition. This process resulted in an extreme housing precarity and declassing for segments of the post-Yugoslav middle and working classes, which has manifested in their dispossession of secure housing, savings, pensions, and the sense of having social security, working towards one's own house and building a family. We demonstrate how besides contributing to declassing, housing precarity played a significant role in rendering CHF-indexed housing debt an opening that activated individual and collective strategies of resistance. Resistance by debtors, and its articulation in the public sphere, relied on multiple logics and tactics-from appeals for existing laws to be respected, to demands for a legal codification of the right to home, to the physical prevention of evictions. These sometimes contradictory and competing logics reflected varied social and economic positions of debtors with their related moralities as well as corresponding different reasonings on acquiring housing, social mobility, and approaches to the financialization of everyday life. By combining the analysis of debtors' personal narratives, public discourses, and the political economy of dependent financialization in Serbia, we flesh out the connection between financialization, housing, ideas about social mobility, post-socialist transformation and declassing. The article reveals how and why predatory loans in post-socialist conditions lead to declassing through precarity and new forms of collective action.
Households and Financialization in Europe, 2021
The introduction opens by identifying issues in the scholarship on the financialization of households that the collection seeks to rectify: atheoretical and unclear conceptualizations of the household; its treatment as a “black box”; and the one-sided focus on Anglo-Saxon cores of the global economy. The second section presents the authors’ approach to financialization in Eastern and Southern Europe, which combines the concept of peripheral financialization with an awareness of the wider semi-peripheral character of these regions. The third section reviews classical and recent debates about the concept of the household, especially in anthropology and feminist economics. The fourth section formulates the authors’ conceptualization of the household as a micro-level social institution oriented to a characteristic set of activities and as the subject of multiple systems of knowledge, social norms and public discourse. The fifth section presents the state-of-the-art of scholarship on household financialization and, synthesizing the insights of the earlier sections, formulates a set of general arguments about transformations of households under financialization in general and in Eastern and Southern European semi-peripheries in particular. The introduction concludes with an outline of the collection.
The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2018
PLEASE ACCESS HERE: https://rdcu.be/18Sz (or email me) After 2008, the spectacular collapse of financial markets in the United States, Spain, Iceland, Portugal, and Greece has induced researchers to conceptualize financialization as a rapid and unsustainable increase in liquidity. In Macedonia, a small country at the periphery of the European Union, however, the spread of financial instruments and debt coincided with an increased use of in‐kind payments instead of money. Focusing on a type of non‐monetary exchanges that Macedonians call kompenzacija, the article shows how in‐kind payments are integrated to financial flows, and are crucial to the emergence of an authoritarian regime. In the Macedonian context, kompenzacija is part of an oppressive set of relations whereby companies are forced to provide monetary credit to the regime by accepting payment in goods that lose value over time. The article describes the conditions that shape financialization at the periphery of Europe, and identifies in value conversions a crucial variable for understanding the interconnection between politics and finance.
The socio-economy of debt. Revisiting debt bondage in times of financialization
Geoforum, 2020
This paper proposes the concept of the ‘socio-economy of debt’ to explore the ambivalence of debt, its multiple facets and its capacity to exploit, protect or emancipate. This socio-economy of debt conceives of debt as a material transaction (defined in terms of prices, modalities of repayment, and collaterals), as well as a power relationship (inseparable from an overall set of interdependencies, protection and social differentiation) and as a social and moral experience (imbued with subjectivities, felt-obligations and also aspirations). This framework sheds a new light on the issue of “debt bondage”, applied to seasonal migrants from South-India. These workers are tied to their employer through a wage advance while enjoying widened access to market debts. Paradoxically, such widened choice has reinforced their dependence on their employers and other forms of interpersonal debt. These various forms of debt, both market and interpersonal, bring about various forms of exploitation, and the dispossession of time and bodies. But these debts equally allow those workers to break with the past and imagine a new future, partially liberated not from caste hierarchies but from their local forms of expression. They offer a source of hope, confidence and courage to act. It also allows some debtors to make investments and improve their lives. Within this analytical framework, it is not the market or non-market-based quality of a debt that explain its emancipatory or alienating potential, as long argued by economic anthropology, but how a particular debt bond is articulated with other forms of interdependence and protection.