Anthropology of Credit and Debt Research Papers (original) (raw)

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- Ethnography, Anthropology of Credit and Debt, Anthropology of Dwelling

Since their arrival in Papua New Guinea (PNG) in 2007, mobile phones have become objects of broad moral concern, particularly around issues of female social and physical mobility. I explore these concerns through a discussion of stories about ‘phone friends’ – frequently unknown callers who initiate long-term correspondence and exchange relationships via mobile. I argue that these stories, which resemble the long-established genre of giaman (trickster) folktales, condense and make explicit one of the central problems generated by mobile phone use in PNG: that of how to maintain morally appropriate forms of exchange in a context where spatiotemporal relations have been radically distorted and in which the identity of participants can be easily hidden. The appeal of phone friend stories, I suggest, lies not so much in their critique of social climbing or female mobility, but in their consideration of the problem of mediation.

- by Barbara Andersen
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- Folklore, Mobile Technology, Gender and Sexuality, Gift Exchange

“[W]e are more interested in capitalism as such, in the big story,” proclaims Don Kalb in the introduction to “Financialization. Relational Approaches”, “even while many of our case studies engage both with households and localities” (4). The chapters gathered in the volume achieve this aspiration: they describe dynamics through which social life is being reordered by finance, debt, and credit, without requiring recourse to any totalising causal logic. Rather, this volume invites readers to consider financialisation as a process of uneven accretion. The focus on interstitial and multiscalar processes constitutes the core of the relational approach announced in the book’s subtitle, making it a unique contribution to the anthropology of finance.

Dash in pidgin English means an ancillary gift to an exchange. What happened when the dash became attached to the indentured labour contracts that the Spanish Empire brought from Cuba to their last colony, Spanish Guinea? On the island of Fernando Pó, which came to be almost wholly populated by Nigerian labour migrants, the conditional gift in the form of a large wage advance produced a particularly intense contradiction. In the historiography of unfree labour, the excess wage advance is thought to create conditions for the perpetuation of bondage through debt. However, in imperial contexts, the wage advance did not generate compliance and immobility; exactly the opposite – it produced unprecedented waves of further escalation and dispersed flight. The dash was pushed up by workers themselves and relayed by informal recruiters. Together they turned this lynchpin of indentured labour and debt peonage into a counter-practice that almost led to the collapse of the plantations in the 1950s. The trajectories of the dash led to a more pointed version of the foundational thesis of global labour history: namely, that it was actually free labour, not unfree labour, that was incompatible with labour scarcity-ridden imperial capitalism.

- by Enrique Martino
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- Nigeria, Igbo studies, Anthropology of Credit and Debt, Equatorial Guinea

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.

- by Marek Mikuš
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- Social Movements, Anthropology, Political Economy, Social and Cultural Anthropology

The modern-slavery paradigm promotes analogies between contemporary trafficking and the transatlantic , white, and indigenous slave trade. The analogy some scholars use to address debt bondage in past and present Southeast Asia prompted me to consider the hypothesis that the debts incurred by Vietnamese sex workers with moneylenders, procurers, and migration brokers are a remnant of indigenous slavery. However, the ethnographic and legalistic study of debt in the Vietnamese sex sector across Southeast Asia in relation to debt-bondage traditions provides limited support to the transhistorical thesis. Nonetheless, it throws light on the creditor–debtor relationship and shows that sex workers need credit to finance production and social reproduction in a region undergoing rapid capitalist development, and that because of their exclusion from financial, labor, and labor migration markets, they access it through personalized arrangements that generate strong obligations and dependencies with the potential for restrictions of freedom, in a social structure that promotes patronage, vertical bonding, and dependency. [debt,

Gustav Peebles takes an anthropological look at two seemingly separate developments in Europe at the turn of the millennium: the rollout of the euro and the building of new transnational regions such as the Oresund Region, envisioned as a melding of Copenhagen, Denmark, with Malmö, Sweden. Peebles argues that the drive to create such transnational spaces is inseparable from the drive to create a pan-national currency. He studies the practices and rhetoric surrounding the national currencies of Denmark and Sweden, the euro, and several new “local currencies” struggling to come into being. The Euro and Its Rivals provides a deep historical study of the welfare state and the monetary policies and utopian visions that helped to ground it, at the same time shedding new light on the contemporary movement of goods, people, credit, and debt.

This article focuses on what I will call the “indebted wage”: the pro-
cess through which wage labor is transformed into financial assets and new forms of accumulation. I begin with the observation that many Paraguayan families work in order to channel money into debt-based investments. This invites a conceptual shift: can we extend the wage relationships outward from a language of exploitation and into a language of indebtedness as well? I track the effort invested in “keeping on payment,” investments in the infamous free trade zone on Paraguay’s triple frontier with Argentina and Brazil, how money moves into economies of debt, and processes whereby the wage is restructured as an investment. I argue that while both the poor and elites of Paraguay see promise in Ciudad del Este’s de-regulated market, it is the low income and precarious labor of the working poor that bears the risks without accumulating the wealth of these transfers. [Keywords: Labor, financialization, credit/ debt, kinship, gender, family businesses, Latin America]

- by Carly Schuster
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- Economic Anthropology, Microfinance, Paraguay, Gender and Development

My curiosity with believing emerges directly from my interest in credere, the Latin root for both the concepts we currently understand as “credit” and “belief”. Where my research leads is to the relationship between processes of financialization and these social activities that are to be understood as “believing,” for, as O’Neill reminds us, Bell affirmed that believing is about “contradictions maintained, not truths affirmed,” (O’Neill 2012: 308). It is in this practice of believing, maintaining contradictions rather than truths affirmed, that the importance of the social practice of belief in relation to financialized capitalism comes to the fore, and where the pressing reality of a growing indebted citizenry threatens the very precarious nature of emergence itself. As David Harvey has insisted, echoing Karl Marx, it is the contradictions in the capitalist system that preclude crisis (Harvey 2014). If we can analyze these contradictions, and the forms in which the social action of believing puts into motion the dialectical movement of finance in an emerging economy, perhaps we can better understand i) what it is that makes an economy emerge (a topic still wanting significant attention from the school of economic anthropology, as well as social economics more general); ii) the embodied practices of belief that manifest themselves in the generation of prosperity; iii) better understand economic crisis; and iv) further understanding of the ways in which the “religious” and the “economic” are co-constitutional (Coleman 2011). Ultimately, and for the purposes of this workshop, I will present ethnographic evidence for the continuing conversation around the practices of believing and the making of financialized capitalism from one of my sites of research, a multi-level marketing company in Bogota. Based on over a year of fieldwork, and over a decade of work and study in Colombia, my research brings me to the productive question: how does believing mediate debt? Is the concept of debt necessary for belief? Lastly, is the practice of believing in prosperity just another “pathology dressed as progress” (Klassen 2011:viii)?

Since Timor-Leste regained independence in 2002, there has been a revival of customary practices across the country. In the village of Funar, this has taken the shape of intensive investment in death ceremonies. This article takes death as a lens through which to examine changing social and political relations in Funar during the post independence period. It analyses how exchanges that occur upon death serve to sever relations between house groups that are indebted to one another through marriage exchange, and how funerary practices enable people to renegotiate status differences that have become more contested since independence. While death confronts people with tragedies from the past, it also provides occasions for dealing with the aftermath of the Indonesian occupation. Moreover, reburial allows local residents to reinscribe themselves in nationalist discourses, from which
they have been largely excluded due to the region’s ambiguous role during the Indonesian occupation.

- by Judith Bovensiepen
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- Anthropology, Social Anthropology, National Identity, Timor-Leste Studies

Peripheral Affects represents one of the first ethnographic attempts to explore borders, peripheries or edges of the post‐Soviet state as an affective form of experience. The thesis thus demonstrates an iconic example of this on the western extremity of Georgia in Ajara, located on the Black Sea along the border with Turkey. Drawing on richly detailed ethnographic research in the Ajaran borderlands, the thesis focuses on Muslim and Christianized Ajarans and the ambivalences of their never quite resolved feelings of shame. For some Ajarans in this border area, one of the reasons for this shame is connected to the place and history of Ajara, which are saturated by a distinct Muslim‐Ottoman heritage, as well as the emerging cross‐ border flow of ideas, debts, goods, and prostitution in these Ajaran‐Turkish borderlands. Peripheral Affect therefore refers both to the physical geography of Ajara and to the bodies and minds of the people who inhabit this place. It captures how, in contrast to conventional understanding, marginality is not a matter of social, political, economic, or temporal differentiation only, but a circulation of spectres of affects, such as shame as well as cynicism, optimism, fear and sympathy, which represent distinctly peripheral affects. I thus argue that, far from representing borders through pre‐conceived notions of nation, ethnicity or the state, peripheral affects make such notions deeply problematic. Political violence, modernizing cityscapes and the nationalizing techniques so closely associated with Ajara since Russian colonialism can in this way be seen as part of a continual process of creating clarity out of ambivalence of Ajara within Georgia. Yet, while these efforts have failed constantly, the place proliferates and intensifies recurring feelings of shame.

- by Tamta Khalvashi
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- Border Studies, Postsocialism, Affect (Cultural Theory), Cities

This article explores the links between informal moneylending and aspects of sociality and morality. It documents the moral reasoning and strategizing of two female moneylenders who operate in the radically destabilized context of post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan. By analyzing these women's lending practices and the way they talk about their experiences, we are able to document in some detail the constitutive intertwinement of morality, sociality, and formality in the workings of credit and debt, and demonstrate how questionable behavior is transformed into moral practice. This in turn highlights important features of the post-Soviet capitalist frontier.

- by Mathijs Pelkmans and +1
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- Ethnography, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Economic Anthropology, Postsocialism

This article analyzes nonprofessional trading in derivatives during the Great Spanish Recession. It depicts playful engagements with speculative forms of credit and debt on the part of everyday people facing mass unemployment. The article calls into question contemporary theories of debt that characterize it as inherently destructive or inherently productive. My main argument suggests that credit‐debt dyads are constant sites of manipulation, negotiation, and improvisation informed by multiple registers of affect, knowledge, and value. In showing how play and playfulness arise in the field of finance, my research sheds light on extractive business models that exploit socioeconomic uncertainties as well as labor reforms advanced in times of recession. My ethnography traverses a variety of social terrains ranging from social media to brokerage firms, trading courses, stock exchanges, and self‐help workshops in order to complicate further the anthropological work on financialization. Without denying the negative and damaging effects of financialization, I focus on the contradictory ways in which ordinary citizens become financial subjects.

This article engages with contemporary debates about debt and money from the vantage point of an ethnographic study of unregulated, small-scale moneylending business who continues to operate in the township of Soweto's poorer neighbourhoods. Following Peebles' argument that reading poor people's unwillingness to bank with formal institutions as a sign of ignorance is unwarranted, this article describes persistent dynamics of underground credit markets and personalized credit relationships, demonstrating how the practice of ukumashonisa (extending cash money as credit) by neighbourhood lenders are embedded in social fields shared by lenders and borrowers. This article further demonstrates how the vilification of the figure of the township moneylender (mashonisa) by a broad coalition of civil society groups, trade unions, the state and commercial financial institutions, assisted in the financialization of poor people's monies. This public consensus about the depravity of the neighbourhood moneylender is not shared by all Sowetans, especially poor and unemployed Sowetans who have been pushed into a greater dependency on both money and intense personalized social relationships as they try to survive. Seeking out personalized credit relationships, and turning debt transactions, contracts and relationships with local moneylenders into exchanges that take on the appearance of gifts rather than commodity exchanges, continues to remain a strategy for people who are no longer able to count on stable wage work as their primary source of income.

- by Detlev Krige
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- Economic Anthropology, Informal Economy, Financialization, Anthropology of Money

The resilience of the communal life of Calon Gypsies of Bahia, whose primary occupation is moneylending, lies in their treatment of money that individual men have in circulation as composing ‘inalienable personal hoards’. Calon ‘money on the street’ is viewed as a set of all the money a Calon man can hope to receive at various points from his existing loans. As a singularized totality, this whole is considered by other Calon as potentially knowable, encompassed by Calon morality and thus subject to people’s claims and evaluations. The dynamic relation between these two specific sums—the temporary whole that constitutes a man’s reputation and any expenditure indexically related to it—turns expenditures into events through which Calon manhood is forged and sovereignty from calculatory reason is declared.

- by Gustav Peebles
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- Anthropology, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Utopian Studies, European Union
- by Irene Sabaté
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- Social Justice, Financial Crisis, Moral Economy, Mortgage Foreclosure

In the past ten years, Chinese people of different social strata have swarmed into the peer-to-peer (P2P) lending industry as lenders and borrowers. Meanwhile, stories have circulated across the media about desperate investors who lost their life savings on these lending platforms, many of which turned out to be Ponzi schemes. Based on fifteen months of fieldwork, this article presents a failed yet influential social experiment of digital finance in the world's largest developing economy. This article examines the morality of the P2P market by observing how the aspirational public script of financial inclusion is maintained and experienced through a hidden technological script that alienates the notion of "peer." This article argues that the morality of the market is not only about "seeing" and judging from a distance but also about "feeling" and managing the moral boundaries and intersubjective distances between actors. These altered distances restructure interpersonal responsibilities and sustain the dreams and imagination that shape financial subjects on an unconscious level. The article expands the concept of market relationality beyond direct interactions between actors and uncovers the inherent tensions within the dream of financial inclusion. It examines the fantasy of beneficial technology in shaping market morality and the unintended consequences it produces.

- by Yichen Rao
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- Finance, Economic Anthropology, China, Financial Inclusion

A book review of Cathy Davidson's _The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux_ (2017) and Malcolm Harris's _Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials_ (2017), that queries how pedagogy might be better oriented toward the conditions under which today's students learn & labor (focused on US higher education).

- by Sarah D'Adamo
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- Teaching and Learning, Higher Education, Critical Pedagogy, Pedagogy

Examining the ambiguous concept of usury, this article retraces political battles over the epistemic framings of the everyday economy in the nineteenth century. It takes a comparative approach to the legal and economic debates on usury in the Habsburg and the German empires in the wake of the economic crisis of the late 1870s, when new laws against usury were introduced. The new legislation on usury centred on the notion of a usurer’s victim who supposedly was incapable of rational economic action and thus in need of civilisation. In the respective debates, diverging political interests and class attitudes pitted different conceptualisations of economic exchange against each other. At stake were the diverse forms of commensuration and valuation scales in received credit practices. By way of conclusion, this article relates the story of nineteenth-century usury legislation to current debates among historians on capitalism and the emergence of the economy as a bounded entity. It argues for more analytical attention to historical conflicts over exchange relations and discusses the implications of this perspective for the history of economic liberalism.

- by Mischa Suter
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- European History, Cultural History, Economic History, German Studies

Few observers of the sovereign debt crisis in Europe have noted that the power relations it laid bare between debtor countries and their creditors stemmed from the very nature of money itself. This chapter considers money’s status as a social institution from the point of view of the democratic values of liberty and equality. Building on Karl Marx’s and Georg Simmel’s critiques of money’s alleged neutrality as a simple appendage of market exchange, the chapter establishes that money constitutes a fundamentally ambivalent phenomenon. Money’s myth of origin in barter, and its actual relation to debt, warrant a comparison with the gift, this primitive form of exchange whose potential toxicity was pointedly noted by Marcel Mauss and Jacques Derrida. Following the latter’s analysis of the “pharmakon,” the chapter concludes by sketching out how monetary reform could foster collective autonomy.

Nous proposons d’entendre ici la rationalité politique d’Occupy Wall Street comme une protestation contre une situation d’endettement qui se présente aujourd’hui telle une « condition existentielle » pour la majorité des Américains, et comme une tentative de construire un lien de solidarité entre les endettés par la mise en relief de la dimension structurelle et collective de cette condition partagée. Nous analyserons ainsi les discours et les stratégies d’un groupe militant né de la mouvance OWS : Strike Debt. En agissant au niveau des affects et des représentations qui soutiennent la prétention à la légitimité des dettes, son action vise à faire du défaut de paiement un acte politique capable de renverser le pouvoir de l’industrie financière.

Easy credit, sparse financial education, abundantly accessible credit cards, a stable investment-grade credit rating, and relative political stability have been the secret to Colombia’s recent successes on the international stage. But at the level of the everyday, the practices of prosperity that many Colombians are embodying animate the crushing debt that accompanies credit. And the belief that subsidizes financialization. Believing underwrites financialized capitalism. Believing is entangled with credit because it creates the same possibility of future prosperity that credit promises. Coming from the same latin root, credere, both believing and credit promise endless potential and the practices for not only social upward mobility, but spiritual upward mobility as well. To say that another way, credit facilitates consumption and investment; it allows for tuition to be paid, houses to be bought, and groceries to be purchased. Credit for many Colombians is seen as the key to entrepreneurial success and emancipation from seemingly perpetual poverty. Credit is the key to prosperity. And Prosperity is a symbol of God’s blessing. Following Catherine Bell's preliminary work on believing, this paper proposes that by thinking with the etymological root of the concept believing, credere, we find also the root of the concept of credit. Through understanding both believing and credit as social practice and productive of holding contradicting realities in tension, credere opens a new prism through which to understand financialization as well as new constellations of religious practice. In the end, credere pushes us closer to understanding the entanglements between Christianity and political economy in emerging Colombia.

- by Rebecca C Bartel
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- Colombia, Economic Anthropology, Anthropology of Christianity, Credit