Paper short abstract:

The paper analyzes the effects at a micro level of the Bosnia and Herzegovina post-war inclusion in the global financial system, ethnographically exploring the experience of Sarajevo households with consumer credits supplied by private, mainly foreign, commercial banks corporations.

Paper long abstract:

The paper analyzes the effects at a micro level of the Bosnia and Herzegovina post-war inclusion in the global financial system, ethnographically exploring the experience of Sarajevo households with consumer credits (nenamjenski krediti, gotovinski krediti) supplied by private, mainly foreign, commercial banks corporations.

Nonetheless, as data suggest, consumer credit demand can be traced back to market socialism and debt practices cannot be simply related to the post-socialist and post-war impoverishment that caught the Sarajevan households in a downward socio-economic mobility. This contribution will consider present and past (geo)political and socio-cultural transformations that made of "financialized debt" an inevitable prerequisite for consumption and a distinctive feature of Sarajevo post war everyday life. The paper will thus mainly explore households dealings with debt in a national market of money located at the margin of EU monetary space and marked by Central Bank little control over the local market of money.

In the conjuncture set by the last financial crisis (from 2007 onwards), this contribution will hihgligt shared practices of cyclic indebtedness and social relations generated by warranties and prerequisites asked by banks to access credit in a context very sensitive to the the fluctuation of financial global markets.

It will also highlight moral evaluations of the credit system banks in realtions to banks willingness to lend, fluctuations of interests rates and debt recollection procedures.

Ultimately thie paper will document Sarajevans' attempt to humanize the credit system from within.