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 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.