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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how intimate obligations and desire for “independence” forge positive attachments to cyclical indebtedness among the agriculturalist-turned-miner community in Soma and attends to the emergent affective structures through a re-definition of the moral notion of “self-sufficiency”.

Paper long abstract:

Almost all young coal-miners in Soma are indebted with a specific type of loan titled “credit for need,” introduced in the late 2000s as a part of the national financial-inclusion project. As a result of low-interest rates and easy procedures, this local type of consumer credit has been the main tool for expanding this policy to working-class-masses in Turkey. “Credit for need” was institutionalized with an unusual emphasis on familial values and the nuclear family as a node of economic self-sustenance, which exclusively target the “male breadwinners”. These discourses of self-help often take the shape of a developmental story among this miner community, and that is how indebtedness engenders new modalities of “masculine care”.

This paper will highlight the affective propositions embodied in popular national discourses that accompanied the financial-inclusion journey of Turkey and how they have further contributed to the process of making of a miner town full of indebted families, which was a prominent agricultural town only two decades ago, located in the fertile West-Aegean region of Turkey. I explore how ‘nuclear family ideal’ as a normative rescaling of the proper forms of collectivity and responsibility, particularly the intimacy and the limits of economic solidarity, forges ambivalent and often positive affective attachments to wagework in underground mines and dependency on bank loans among Soma’s miners. Therefore, I attend to the ways in which such gender norms provide new interfaces for mobilizing affects as a productive force through moral reinterpretations of “need” and “self-sustenance”, and masculine attachments to "independence".