Paper short abstract:

The paper explores inseparability but not dependence between Calon framing and maintaining of their moneylending practices and the socio-economic milieu to which these practices belong.

Paper long abstract:

Within the past decades, a population of Calon Gypsies living in Bahia, Brazil, has been specializing as moneylenders. Drawing inspiration from etho-ecological perspective (Stengers 2005) and the performativity paradigm (Callon 2007), the paper explores inseparability but not dependence between Calon framing and maintaining of their economic practices and the socio-economic milieu to which these practices belong. It will characterize the emergence of moneylending within the context of financialisation of the daily life in Bahia and felicity conditions determining 'truthfulness' of these practices and statements about the world they enact (such as about what does it mean to 'make the future'). This approach seems useful in suggesting how a change in a milieu might cause transformation of "ethos" of practices, resulting in a situated character of economic activities and the variability of values, meanings and life-worlds that ethnographies of Gypsies have consistently revealed.