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Paper short abstract:

While the language of crisis may close down some avenues of analysis or action, it can also provide a way to introduce anthropological insights into public debate. An ethnography of debt problems in Britain and its finding of 'expropriability' as a contemporary mode of power are a case in point.

Paper long abstract:

This paper takes public discourse on crisis as both a point of departure for anthropological research and an entry-way into public engagement – respectively, the global financial crisis of 2008/9 and the UK’s cost of living crisis since 2021. With surging household debt in the 2010s, I undertook an ethnography of debt problems on a housing estate in England over seven years. The research found a modality of power that, while historically contingent, was both longer-standing and wider-ranging than public discourse on the financial crisis would imply. For housing estate residents in Britain, the use of bailiffs to enforce debts sits alongside rising evictions and a punitive shift in child protection social work to form a generalised exposure to legally mediated expropriations (of possessions, homes and children). I conceptualise it as ‘expropriability’. Doing so re-frames the widespread practice by over-indebted people of ignoring their debts: from wishful thinking (as commonly claimed) to a struggle against potential expropriation that often succeeds. The recent cost of living crisis has revived journalists and politicians’ attention to the financial difficulties of low-income households, providing a potential entry for discussions of expropriability. While some anthropologists have found that a pervasive language of crisis closes down certain avenues of analysis and action (Roitman 2013), it can also provide a hook for a publicly engaged anthropology to challenge assumptions in the dominant discourse and to introduce new insights and considerations into public debate, although this activity is not without its own contradictions and dilemmas (Hale 2006).