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Paper short abstract

This paper will present analysis of gold-based life-story interviews in order to understand debt-credit relationships, in a silk-reeling cluster in south India. Insight from ethnographic fieldwork in the study site adds to learnings from interviews that use oral history and material culture lenses.

Paper long abstract

This paper will present analysis of gold-based life-story interviews in order to understand debt-credit relationships, in a silk-reeling cluster in south India. Extensive fieldwork made it clear that debt-credit exchanges need to be viewed both as financial transactions and social bonds in order to study this home-based industry where production and reproduction are explicitly connected. A significant part of wealth of all individuals in the town have been stored in the form of gold - surpluses go towards its purchase and it is liquidised regularly for working capital. In addition to being an important store of value in India, gold has a range of social, spiritual, and political functions. Social obligations create pressure to buy gold - and even to borrow to do so. The life-story interviews tracing gold ownership, served as a way to access memories regarding other financial transactions and to understand how debt-credit relationships associated with the domestic sphere relate to production in these family-firms. Studying markets for labour, raw materials, and finished products, through participant observation and surveys of histories of firms revealed the role of advance payments - from employers to employees but also from agents, brokers, and creditors to all parties - in mediating production. The diversity in the terms and nature of debt-credit relationships of firms and households points to the range of socio-economic factors controlling the ability of both employees and employers to earn a living wage. Hence, the terms of borrowing and repayment determine whether labour and capital invested in the industry generates a surplus.