Paper Short Abstract:

This study examines the role of credit advisors in shaping financial discourses about a specific, state-subsidised credit, the so-called Baby Expecting Loan, in Hungary. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Northern Hungary, by shadowing a credit expert, it shows how these financial intermediaries try to adjust the interpretation of the loan agreement to locally embedded notions of values - in this case, the pronatalist value of children in Roma families.

Paper Abstract:

This paper explores the phenomena and the consequences of the financialisation of social policy in illiberal Hungary through an ethnographic case study of (rural) households’s use of the (relatively) newly introduced financial product of the ’Baby Expecting Loan’. The research setting is the economically underdeveloped North East region of Hungary. The article deploys a multiscalar perspective to recognise how different actors of the studied everyday financialization of households are embedded in multiple networks across localities, regions and nation state. Building on recent anthropological theorization of household financialization by using the method of extended case study and of relational ethnography, I explore the role of different social actors involved in the use of the Baby Expecting loan, paying special attention to the figure of the financial intermediator/broker (the credit advisor). It examines the role of credit advisors in shaping financial discourses about this specific, state-subsidised credit. It shows how these financial intermediaries try to adjust the interpretation of the loan agreement to locally embedded notions of values - in this case, the pronatalist value of children in Roma families.

The paper benefits from ongoing ethnographic research with participant observation and by shadowing a credit advisor/broker in the past 6 months in a North Hungarian region. One of my main arguments is that financial intermediaries, unintentionally, push aspiring middle income Roma families into a very fragile, insecure and precarious state. However, their mass indebtedness has become a marker of social inclusion and of being ‘middle-class’.