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- Convenors:
-
Anja Decker
(Institute of Sociology of The Czech Academy of Sciences)
Silke Meyer (University of Innsbruck)
Lucie Trlifajová (Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences)
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- Discussant:
-
Alexa Färber
(University of Vienna)
- Formats:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Resistance
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 23 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
The panel explores financial precarity and indebtedness as means of governance and everyday experience that shape agency, subjectivity and social hierarchies. It examines how norms and power structures underlying economic practices are reproduced and contested on various scales.
Long Abstract:
Against the backdrop of austerity politics, welfare retrenchment, financialization as well as the rise of social movements calling for social justice and debt relief, anthropologists draw on concepts such as reciprocity (Palomera 2014, Sabaté 2016), self-sufficiency (Gudeman/Hann 2015) and thrift (Färber/Podkalicka 2019) to critically explore the current momentum and variations of neoliberalism. In the light of this broader context, the panel focusses on financial precarity and (over)indebtedness as both means of governance and everyday experience. By bringing together ethnographic inquiries from various contexts and fields, we seek to explore how economic practices, as well as their underlying normative imperatives and power structures are reproduced and contested on different scales. In this respect, we are interested in both less visible, everyday acts of coping and resisting as well as collective forms of protest and counter-discourse. We seek contributions that will address - but are certainly not limited to - the following questions: How do people engage in or resist becoming financialized subjects? How is financial precarity and (over)indebtedness entangled with constructions of citizenship, deservingness, membership and identity politics on the one hand, and agency and subjectivity on the other? Which means of resistance are considered as (il)legitimate and which inherent power asymmetries emerge within these acts of framing? We particularly welcome papers exploring financial precarity and debt from an intersectional perspective, focusing on the entanglement of social categories such as gender, ethnicity, class, age as well as papers examining the dynamic interplay of COVID19 and the moral economy of debt/financial precarity.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 23 June, 2021, -Tianzi Li
Paper short abstract:
The paper focuses on connecting the Chinese political-economic dynamics promoting housing financialisation to Chinese households’ everyday practices of mortgage indebtedness. It then examines how the indebted subjectivity can possibly be subverted through housing/mortgage-based grass-root activism.
Paper long abstract:
The Chinese housing boom has turned millions of Chinese urban residents into ‘mortgage slaves’ - spending more than 70% of their disposable income on repaying mortgage debt. Empirically the paper presents the largely overlooked everyday experience of mortgage indebtedness in the context of the Chinese housing boom, including reasons people contract mortgages, techniques employed to manage repayments, and ways in which mortgages are ‘worn’ into the lives of Chinese individuals and embedded in family dynamics (Seigworth, 2016). Operationalising a biopolitical reading of debt, the paper explores the strategies and relationships through which mortgages acted as a technology of power in the Chinese context and underlines how mortgages operate through a subjective process rooted in the perceived importance of homeownership.
The paper will then offer a detailed account of the lived experience of a ‘housing bust’ - when many apartment construction sites suddenly shut down in China and people’s mortgaged dream homes become indefinitely abandoned half-finished buildings. In particular, it reveals mortgagers’ changing relationships with the bank, the local state and the land developer as they struggle to pay their mortgage monthly instalments amidst unemployment, financial precarity and the unexpected bankruptcy of property companies. Most importantly, the paper aims to analyse the extent to which the pervasive subjectivity of the ‘indebted man’ (Lazzarato, 2012) can be disrupted through grass-root collective property-based activism against the pro-growth coalition among the government, financial entities and real estate companies, and to find out new forms of subjectivity emerged within the process.
András Vigvári (Centre for Economic and Regional Studies)
Paper short abstract:
In Hungary, after the 2008 debt crisis, former allotment gardens became a housing target destination of the financial precariat. In spite of precarious housing conditions, allotments enable affordable housing and self-sufficient/reciprocal practises, which mitigate various social risks.
Paper long abstract:
Three decades after the postsocialist transition, precarious housing is one of the most desperate social problems in Hungary. In Hungary it is not only the poorest social strata, whose access to housing is highly limited, but many segments of the lower middle class as well. The real estate boom of the early 2000s and the credit crunch after the GFC made it even more difficult for dwellers to find affordable housing, because many of them faced difficulties in repaying mortgages.
The trajectory of many members of the declining lower middle-class lead to former socialist allotment gardens around the cities and towns of Hungary, where rampant housing exclusion force people to adjust with sophisticated survival strategies in order to ensure access to some forms of housing. Allotments, which are formally registered as rural areas, but are situated on the outskirts of urban settlements, became an attractive housing destination for those in financial precarity; especially for those who had lost their former dwellings during the foreclosures.
On the one hand, allotment gardens provide extremely precarious housing condition without basic infrastructures and amidst extreme physical exclusion. On the other hand, allotments offer affordable housing, where housing disadvantages are mitigated by self-sufficient and reciprocal practices, and dwellers can restart their housing pathways after the shock of foreclosures. In my presentation I attempt to show this duality demonstrating the perceptions and everyday practices of dwellers based on my field work conducted in a peri-urban area of Budapest.