Synopses & Reviews
and#147;
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;
Synopsis
Microcredit is part of a global trend of financial inclusion that brings banking services, especially small loans, to the world's poor. In this book, Caroline Schuster explores Paraguayan solidarity lending as 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 by examining group loans made to women by nonprofit development programs. These highly regulated loans are secured through mutual support and peer pressure--social collateral--rather than through physical collateral. This story of social collateral necessarily includes an interwoven account about the feminization of solidarity lending. At its core is an economy of gender--from pink-collar financial work, to men's committees, to women smugglers. At stake are interdependencies that bind borrowers and lenders, financial technologies, and Paraguayan development in ways that structure both global inequality and global opportunity.
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.
and#160;
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
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
Assisted reproduction, with its test tubes, injections, and gamete donors, raises concerns about the nature of life and kinship. Yet these concerns do not take the same shape around the world. In this innovative ethnography of in vitro fertilization in Ecuador, Elizabeth F.S. Roberts explores how reproduction by way of biotechnological assistance is not only accepted but embraced despite widespread poverty and condemnation from the Catholic Church. Robertsand#8217; intimate portrait of IVF practitioners and their patients reveals how technological intervention is folded into an Andean understanding of reproduction as always assisted, whether through kin or God. She argues that the Ecuadorian incarnation of reproductive technology is less about a national desire for modernity than it is a product of colonial racial history, Catholic practice, and kinship configurations. Godand#8217;s Laboratory offers a grounded introduction to critical debates in medical anthropology and science studies, as well as a nuanced ethnography of the interplay between science, religion, race and history in the formation of Andean families.
Synopsis
and#147;Bold and gripping,
Godand#8217;s Laboratory is ethnography at its best. The bookand#8217;s unforgettable characters and their desperate travails to reproduce via global medicine are the very fabric of a highly-original and much-needed social theory for our twenty-first century technological societies.and#8221; - Joand#227;o Biehl, author of
Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment"Godand#8217;s Laboratory is the perfect anthropological antidote to the fetishization of reproductive materials as 'life itself.' Roberts shows in meticulous detail and in luminous prose how Catholic scientists and technicians in Ecuador invite God into private IVF labs to and#145;bless the workand#8217; of producing embryos. Kinship, care, and cultivation -- not embryonic life -- define reproduction in this uncertain world." - Nancy Scheper-Hughes, author of Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil
and#147;Written with clarity, compassion, and self-reflection, God's Laboratory is a beautiful book which puts the ethnographic method to excellent use. Roberts's painstaking fieldwork unearthed the many layers through which the aspirations for fertility and use of infertility technologies instantiate not only gender and kinship in Ecuador, but ethnicity, race and region in the national project of modernity. The book is a stunning instance of the benefits which accrue when the study of reproduction is used as an optic for understanding social life.and#8221; - Rayna Rapp, author of Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America
and#147;Godand#8217;s Laboratory is a strong, intriguing and careful look at the daily connections between faith and science that underpin the process of human assisted reproduction in urban Ecuador." -Marisol de la Cadena, author of Indigenous Mestizos: The Politics of Race and Culture in Cuzco, Peru, 1910-1991
Synopsis
andldquo;
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 Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Cast of Characters
Preface
Introduction: Reproductive Assistance
Corporeal Punishment: Sandra
1. Private Medicine and the Law of Life
Crazy for Bingo: Consuelo
2. Assisted Whiteness
Yo Soy Teresa la Fea/Ugly Teresa
3. White Beauty: Gamete Donation in a Mestizo Nation
When Blood Calls: Frida and Anabela
4. Egg Economies and the Traffic between Women
Abandonment: Vanessa
5. On Ice: Embryo Destinies
Conclusion: Care-Worthy
Notes
References
Index