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 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.