Paper short abstract:

While hegemonic social norms individualize responsibility for mortgage debts, Eastern European mortgage subsidy schemes socialize them at the national community level. Lived experiences and social histories of housing debt in Slovakia are explored to understand the policies’ premises and promises.

Paper long abstract:

Since the Global Financial Crisis, governments across Eastern Europe introduced distinctive schemes of mortgage loan subsidies that tend to target younger families and include incentives for childbearing. Recently, soaring interest rates due to the global inflation surge gave additional impetus to such policies, which their opponents criticize as populist, unfair, wasteful and counterproductive. Building on fieldwork in Bratislava, Slovakia in 2011–2022 and archival data, this paper explores lived experiences and social histories of housing-related debt to understand the premises and promises of these schemes. Middle-class mortgage debt rarely develops into outright personal crises, but many debtors still experience it as a heavy material and existential burden, intensified by Slovakia’s housing regime and economic setting. While hegemonic social norms individualize and privatize the responsibility for mortgage debts, the policies push in the opposite direction and aim at its selective socialization at the level of the national community, in addition to its widespread embedding in familial relationships. This principle and specific elements of these schemes draw on local socialist and postsocialist legacies of integrating household lending with welfare and demographic policies, as embodied especially by the hugely popular “marriage loans” of late Czechoslovak socialism. However, compared to such socialist policies, the logic of the current schemes is fundamentally altered by the relations of private finance and housing that they depend on and reproduce, and their potential to achieve community building is also limited by the constellation of mortgage debt, party politics and class relations in contemporary Slovakia in which they emerge.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores credit/debt relations in rural development projects funded through social and impact investing, showing how they represent confrontational spaces where groups of actors join forces or oppose each other, and sites where existing global inequalities are reproduced and contested.

Paper long abstract:

This paper aims to explore processes of credit/debt signification, negotiation and contestation in rural development projects funded through 'social' and 'impact' investing. In particular, it will focus on the role that discourses and practices around credit/debt play in the enactment of the relationship between service providers and intended beneficiaries. It will do so by presenting the case of a development project implemented in Ghana by SustAgric-Africa (SAA), a social enterprise aiming to lift smallholder farmers in rural Africa out of poverty through the promotion of sustainable agriculture. The paper contends that the variable understandings and manifestations of credit/debt in SAA’s arrangement are based on differing and sometimes conflicting ethical horizons and worldviews. In this sense, credit/debt comes to represent a liminal space where different groups of actors join forces or contest each other, in processes where reciprocal representations and modes of agency are constantly redefined. The paper concludes that tensions around credit/debt in ‘impact’ and ‘social’ investments’ arrangements reveal processes that tend to reproduce existing hegemonies and unequal patterns of wealth accumulation, but also open spaces for their contestation by actors often perceived as sitting at their margins.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the role of readily available credit in shaping new masculine ideals among underground mineworkers in Soma, a lignite-coal basin in Turkey's North Aegean region. It particularly focuses on the moral transactional capacity of monetary indebtedness in intimate relations.

Paper long abstract:

A prominent agricultural town in the fertile West-Aegean region of Turkey previously known for its profitable tobacco cultivation, Soma transformed into a town predominantly organized around mining in just two decades. Given that becoming a regular mineworker provides ready-made access to small bank loans, almost all miners in the Soma basin are indebted with a nationally devised consumer credit called ihtiyac kredisi, "credit for need." Credit for need was institutionalized in the 2000s with an unusual emphasis on the nuclear family as a node of economic self-sustenance, which exclusively targeted "male breadwinners" and was widely promoted as an instrument of "empowerment" and “self-help.” Similarly, Soma's miners often explain their attachment to the credit economy as a practical way to “take control of life” and make and unmake various gender expectations originating in different scales of intimacy. The availability of easy credit, thus, forges a new approach to self and intimate others in this coal basin, allowing miners to navigate intimate relationships through predatory consumer loans and financial obligations. By concomitantly examining the inter-generational aspiration of "taking control of life" that long accompanied insecure coal mining in the Soma basin and the evolving of national credit access, this paper attends to the emergence of a new masculine imperative via cyclical indebtedness, “moral immunity.” By tracing the life trajectories of easy bank loans across various settings, I show how the desire for moral immunity enables extracting financial value primarily from emphatic moral dispositions among miners.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on recent fieldwork in Italy, this paper looks at different configurations of the citizenship-debt nexus which have emerged through struggles to redefine welfare politics; specifically, I will be examining efforts to foreground the reproductive debt owed to unwaged and informal workers.

Paper long abstract:

Reflecting on recent fieldwork in late-industrial Italy, this paper tracks competing ideologies of social citizenship as debt/credit, and their articulation with redistributive struggles in the context of ongoing welfare reforms brought in by Giorgia Meloni’s far-right government. Drawing on Angela Mitropoulos’ feminist critique of the post-war welfare state as premised on “the often violent projection of genealogies and infrastructures of obligation” now recast in simultaneously moral and economic terms as indebtedness (Mitropoulos 2012), I examine three discrete configurations of the citizenship-debt nexus which are currently being mobilised within political conflicts around the uses and distribution of public income.

Firstly, I consider the construction of social citizenship as mutual obligation between generations of gendered and racialised National subjects underpinning the pronatalist policies of the new Social Right (Destra Sociale). Secondly, I look at the construction of social citizenship as mutual obligation between generations of gendered workers within “an equal society of producers” (Vercellone 1996) threatened by the excessive claims of the unproductive. The latter discourse is used to re-impose necessity in bipartisan calls for structural reform. I argue that both constructions rely on the same mechanisms of naturalisation and rationalisation, i.e. the extension of domestic logics of value, hierarchy and necessity to the social. I contrast these to a politics of collective indebtedness that centres the contributions of unwaged and informal labourers to social reproduction and to the social surplus, articulated within current feminist struggles in defence of the Citizenship Income (Reddito di Cittadinanza).

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the shifting moral economies of the cocaine trade in Bolivia, with a focus on what happens when deals go wrong. We learn how debt is used to structure the entire supply chain creating both stability and threat.

Paper long abstract:

In Bolivia’s lowland Chapare region, much of the population grows, dries, and sells coca leaf, and some directly work processing refined cocaine for export. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork this paper examines the shifting moral economies of the drug trade, with a focus on what happens when deals go wrong. We follow the story of Charles, a peasant coca farmer who, over the past ten years, has become increasingly involved in the illicit drug trade, first as a manual labourer processing cocaine and later as a confidant and enforcer for a local drug boss and his Colombian paymasters. Through Charles’s story we learn how debt is used to structure the entire supply chain creating both stability and threat. First, we hear how Charles was forced to become indebted as a supplier of the raw material for the refinery and then how he in turn now works for the drug boss to reclaim unpaid debts from others. The paper explores how threats of violence are used to intimidate parties into signing contracts to repay debts incurred in the drug industry which are then reimagined as loans – that are legally enforceable. In telling this story the chapter highlights the deep entanglement between agricultural unions, local politicians, and the police in supporting the mercurial drug trade and sheds new light on debt and extortion practices that exist at the very boundary between legality and illegality.

Paper short abstract:

The paper focuses on the financial practices of Mexican Catholic festivals and the specific role of money as an object that, through specific ritual manipulations, builds, renews and, in the case of conversions, disrupts the bonds of material and symbolic debt between the faithful as a social group.

Paper long abstract:

The paper focuses on the financial practices of Mexican Catholic festivals and the specific role of money as an object that, through specific ritual manipulations, builds and renews the bonds of material and symbolic debt between the faithful as a social group and between them and the patron saints of the locality.

By comparatively analyzing the ethnographic material collected in the last twenty years in two contexts of contemporary Mexico inhabited by the Mestizo population (Southern Jalisco) and by the Amerindian Ikojts (Oaxaca), I will discuss some classic dichotomies on the nexus between religion and economy, in Mesoamerica and beyond.

First of all, the one that considers money playing a fundamental role in the predilection for conversions oriented towards individualistic religious options, characterized by economic and entrepreneurial success. The use of money in the Catholic rituals of the first context (mestizo) shows the fundamental role of monetary indebtedness in the social (and historical) continuity of the community of the faithful and at the same time the aspiration to subjective realization.

It also shows, in the second context (of the Amerindian Ikojts), how the conversions from indigenous Catholicism to the Christian-Evangelical churches provoke the consequent rupture of the link between economic debt and festive-religious commitment, sparking crises in kinship relations and social cohesion, as well as political conflict within the wider community.

The analysis of economic practices makes it possible to discuss, at a theoretically broader level, the continuities and discontinuities between ethnic identification and adherence to a specific religious system.

Paper short abstract:

Going beyond a vision of ecopolitics as uneven class exchange, this paper explores conflicting narrations of debt - obligations towards the capital, the ancestors, and the future generations - that are mobilising Serbian environmental protests against hydropower and lithium extraction.

Paper long abstract:

As Andrea Muehlebach shows, water insurgencies often cite a debt to life to confront financialization as a form of life in debt. But such declarations of debt to life are never about nature in the abstract, nor are they only about the descendants. In the Balkan eco-riots, they are always textured by debts to ancestors, all remembered in particular struggles for liberation, with obligations to children to be born inasmuch as to those who died for the land. Like premodern gifts, the debt of life comes haunted by the ghosts of those who gave their lives, and who can now be framed as the real owners of the environmental commons – transforming the present generations as mere stewards of longer cycles of transmission. Thus, where states cite their debt to green capital – and where green capital itself acts in the name of the future generations – the eco-rebels cite their debts to the past relatives: a grandfather who died starving, or a mother who, lying at a deathbed, wants to take one more swim in a local stream. This means that there is no straightforward way to abstract the environment into one planetary good, or easily demarcate the nationalist from the antinationalist, the particularist from the universalist, the right- from the left-wing. Instead, we witness myriad forms of commons – all embedded in particular transgenerational struggles – which can be put into equivalence with one another, but never entirely removed from the land(s) they grew upon.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how debts emerge in Amed's queer/trans sex work economy as an affective reality through which Kurdish sex workers constitute social boundaries for their personal and communal security while constituting collective care and community belonging.

Paper long abstract:

The affective landscapes of Kurdish Turkey are intimately shaped by a culture of collective sentiments, care, and desires shared and lived through the context of warfare and the emergent securitization logic in the region. This paper shows how entangled sentiments like debt, loss, and obligations remake the self and communities across identities and political causes through the restructuring of desire, difference, and belonging. In the often mundane and intimate socialities of the sex work economy, the paper traces the presence of collective feelings and sentiments, vocabularies, and attachments to the cause on three grounds: dava as a queer Kurdish cause, bedel as an affective debt, and the pink Kalashnikov as becoming a queer guerrilla. It examines how Kurdish lubunyas (queer/trans in LGBTI lingo) understand racialized and sexual desires and violence, use and shift terminologies, affective intensities, and ethics of care among Kurds, ultimately writing the scripts of their own “bedel,” the feelings of indebtedness cultivated through loss and obligation among Kurdish families who lost their loved ones in their fights against the Turkish state. Kurdish lubunya sex workers deploy and shift the meanings and affects of bedel to constitute social boundaries for their personal and communal security: those who can and can’t be members of bedel’s intimate and affective economy; link histories of state-sponsored violence against Kurds and everyday homophobia by embodying, enduring, and embracing it to transform society towards embracing LGBTI identities; and constitute moral value, respectability, belonging, and honor in Kurdish society.

Paper short abstract:

Based on recent ethnographic research in coastal Jakarta, this paper explores the development of debt relations between patrons and fishers in the context of urban economic precarity calling attention to the concept of distrust in the study of indebtedness.

Paper long abstract:

Along Jakarta’s northern coast, small-scale fisheries are widely organised around informal credit systems which bond locally powerful entrepreneurs with vulnerable labourers in a reciprocal agreement. In exchange for credit, fishers have to sell their fish catch exclusively to their patrons who set the price and keep record of debts. These ties often develop alongside political and racial alliances and are strongly spatialised as the people involved are part of the same community. While the economy becomes increasingly precarious, dishonesty and corruption begin to define these relationships and both actors are respectively involved in their own illicit activities. On the one hand, patrons raise interests and manipulate prices while seeking alternative sources of income. On the other, fishers trade their products with sea middle-men, often through credit, before returning to the shore. As mobile entrepreneurs (Turaeva 2014), sea middle-men operate between geographically distant markets complicating further existing debt relations while simultaneously creating new ones. In this unstable landscape, I argue, distrust and opportunism become key moving forces. Rather than jeopardising debt relations, they imbue them with new meanings and values rearranging the bond between patrons and fishers.