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Paper short abstract

This paper, is based on one-year ethnographic research conducted in Armenia and examines the role of credit system in the fostering of solidarity groups.

Paper long abstract

My paper address credits as a way of promoting gender group solidarity. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, an agricultural bank started to provide credits exclusively to women. Nowadays, some Armenian banks do the same with men. As nearly everyone in the village has a bank credit, women and men separately uniting in special communities take responsibility for each other. How are this groups constituted?what kind of connections do these people have? why is it forbidden to mix gender in the credit group circles? based on participant observation and interviews with the locals, I will provide an approach to this question based on the concepts of trust and distrust. Broadly speaking, I will scrutinize how these concepts influence the economic situation in the village.