Synopses & Reviews
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Life in Debt will become, I predict, one of the classic ethnographies in the anthropological study of state violence, community responses, and the moral life of the global poor. Relating economic and political debt, financial and psychological depression, and caregiving by ordinary people and by social institutions, Clara Han maps our brave new world just about as illuminatingly as it has been done. A remarkable achievement.and#8221; -Arthur Kleinman, Harvard University
and#147;In this highly sophisticated take on the ironies of neoliberal social reforms, the corporate sector, consumer culture, and chronic underemployment, nothing can be read literally. Han transforms underclass urban ethnography in Latin America by bringing readers directly into the intimate flow of relationships, experiences, and emotions in family life on the margins of Santiago, Chile." -Kay Warren, Director, Pembroke Center, Brown University.
"People-centered, movingly written, and analytically probing, Life in Debt deals with both the human costs and the changing structures of power driven by contemporary dynamics of neoliberalism. Combining a deep and nuanced understanding of Chile's history with a longitudinal and heart-wrenching field-based knowledge of the everyday travails of the urban poor, Clara Han has crafted an exceptional analysis of human transformations in the face of political violence and economic insecurity." -Joand#227;o Biehl, author of Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment
"During ten years, Clara Han has gathered fragments of biographies and moments of lives to recreate the experience of Chileans after Pinochetand#8217;s dictatorship. Her vivid ethnography plunges into the moral economy of a society entangled between memory and pardon, revealing the ethical work undertaken by those who accept the present without disclaiming the past." -Didier Fassin, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, author of Humanitarian Reason
Review
and#8220;Thought-provoking, engaging, insightful, thoroughly researched and theoretically nuanced.and#8221;
Review
and#8220;Brimming with insights and textures. . . . Han brilliantly, often quite beautifully, fleshes out the intersections between the existential and the economic.and#8221;
Review
“Thought-provoking, engaging, insightful, thoroughly researched and theoretically nuanced.” Deborah R. Altamirano
Synopsis
Chile is widely known as the first experiment in neoliberalism in Latin America, carried out and made possible through state violence. Since the beginning of the transition in 1990, the state has pursued a national project of reconciliation construed as debts owed to the population. The state owed a and#147;social debtand#8221; to the poor accrued through inequalities generated by economic liberalization, while society owed a and#147;moral debtand#8221; to the victims of human rights violations. Life in Debt invites us into lives and world of a poor urban neighborhood in Santiago. Tracing relations and lives between 1999 and 2010, Clara Han explores how the moral and political subjects imagined and asserted by poverty and mental health policies and reparations for human rights violations are refracted through relational modes and their boundaries. Attending to intimate scenes and neighborhood life, Han reveals the force of relations in the making of selves in a world in which unstable work patterns, illness, and pervasive economic indebtedness are aspects of everyday life. Lucidly written, Life in Debt provides a unique meditation on both the past inhabiting actual life conditions but also on the difficulties of obligation and achievements of responsiveness.
Synopsis
Microcredit is part of a global trend of financial inclusion that brings banking services, and especially small loans, to the worldand#8217;s poor. While credit for the poor has increasingly come under the rubric of commercial banking, Paraguayan solidarity lending offers a window into the tensions between social development and global finance.
Social Collateral tracks collective debt across the commercial society and smuggling economies at the Paraguayan border through examining group loans made to women by nonprofit development programs. These highly regulated loans are secured through mutual support and peer pressureand#151;social collateraland#151;rather than through physical collateral.
The story of social collateral cannot be told without an interwoven story about the feminization of solidarity lending. At its core is an economy of genderand#151;from pink-collar financial work, to menand#8217;s committees, to hard women smugglers. At stake are interdependencies that bind borrowers and lenders, financial technologies, and Paraguayan development in ways that structure both global inequality and opportunity.
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Synopsis
and#147;Social Collateral is not only a fine-grained ethnography redolent with the detail of everyday practice but a cogent, carefully woven portrait of microcredit. Schusterand#8217;s lively work makes an important addition to the burgeoning literature on finance and global development.and#8221;and#151;Kregg Hetherington, author of Guerrilla Auditors: The Politics of Transparency in Neoliberal Paraguay
Synopsis
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Social Collateral is not only a fine-grained ethnography redolent with the detail of everyday practice but a cogent, carefully woven portrait of microcredit. Schusterandrsquo;s lively work makes an important addition to the burgeoning literature on finance and global development.andrdquo;andmdash;Kregg Hetherington, author of
Guerrilla Auditors: The Politics of Transparency in Neoliberal Paraguay andquot;A methodologically innovative approach to the socio-economic and the multi-directional processes of financialization! The punchline is not simply that finance is, in fact, social. This crucial work demonstrates how microcredit programs depend on social density, as well as help to produce the very social collateral upon which they depend. Instead of presuming that social relations are the pregiven context upon which finance acts (which furthers a problematic binary approach to andldquo;financeandrdquo; vs. andldquo;the socialandrdquo;), Schuster expertly illustrates the human interdependencies, claims, and perspectives that produce financial forms, instruments, and practices as always already socio-economic phenomena.andquot;andmdash;Karen Ho, author ofand#160;Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street
andquot;Meticulously exploring the connections and disjunctions of microcredit NGOs, credit counselors, financial technologies, and ordinary peopleandrsquo;s webs of relations,and#160;Social Collateraland#160;is a fascinating and innovative study of the microcredit complex in Paraguay.and#160;Schusterand#160;recasts long-standing questions on gender and the politics of interdependency, thus opening a significant new direction in the anthropological study of poverty and debt - a remarkable achievement.andquot;andmdash;Clara Han, author of Life in Debt: Times of Care and Violence in Neoliberal Chileand#160;
About the Author
Caroline E. Schuster is Lecturer in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at Australian National University.and#160;
Table of Contents
List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsand#160;Introductionand#160;Part One: Regulatory Forms1. Entrepreneurship2. Liabilityand#160;Part Two: Life Cycles of loans3. Creditworthinessand#160;4. Repayment5. Renewaland#160;ConclusionNotesand#160;Works CitedIndex