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Contribution short abstract

Drawing on ethnographic research in Indigenous villages of central India, this paper examines how climate uncertainty and microfinance reshape women’s care labour. Framed through fatigue and debility, it shows how debt becomes an embodied strategy of survival rather than empowerment.

Contribution long abstract

This paper examines how fatigue and care become embodied terrains of survival at the intersection of climate variability and financialization in Indigenous communities of central India. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in villages located near the Pench Tiger Reserve, it explores how erratic rainfall, crop failure, and declining soil fertility intersect with the expansion of microfinance to reshape women’s everyday lives.

While microcredit is widely promoted as a tool of women’s empowerment and climate resilience, the paper argues that it instead produces feminised burdens of debt. For women whose livelihoods are already destabilised by ecological uncertainty, microfinance functions less as a pathway to autonomy and more as a precarious strategy of endurance. Women become responsible not only for accessing and repaying loans but also for sustaining household care economies amid chronic scarcity. Credit thus binds together climate adaptation, reproductive labour, and moral obligation.

Situated within feminist political economy, the paper mobilises fatigue and debility as analytic lenses to trace how the costs of climate adaptation are transferred onto women’s bodies. Anxiety around repayment, affective labour within self-help groups, and the intensification of unpaid care work reveal how exhaustion accumulates as a slow, embodied form of violence rather than an episodic crisis.

By foregrounding Indigenous women’s everyday negotiations of care, debt, and uncertainty, the paper contributes to anthropological debates on fatigue, polarisation, and survival in contexts of uneven development. It shows that credit intensifies exhaustion as women absorb the ecological and economic risks of climate variability within their bodies and relationships.