Project Details
Projekt
Peripheral Debt: Money, Risk and Politics in Eastern Europe
Applicant
Marek Mikus, Ph.D.
Subject Area
Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
Term
since 2018
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 409293970
This research group will contribute primary data and innovative theoretical insight to the anthropological literature on credit/debt, financialization, money and risk on the basis of an ethnographic study of household indebtedness in the Eastern European periphery. Since the 1980s, financialization – the increasing dominance of finance – has transformed economies and societies worldwide. One of its key manifestations is growing household debt that makes households increasingly dependent and exposed to finance. Household debt is one of the most common lenses through which anthropologists have studied the large-scale and seemingly abstract process of financialization ethnographically. They have also examined bottom-up contestations of household debt in the West and emphasized their leftist and revolutionary politics. Yet this literature suffers from three major oversights. First, anthropologists did not theorize the role of money in household debt. Second, they did not systematically explore the relationship between household debt and risk. And third, they failed to explain why the politicization of debt after the global financial crisis failed to transform the neoliberal order that has promoted financialization.Eastern Europe has been largely overlooked by anthropologists of finance, despite having recently experienced a dramatic and distinctive boom in household debt. Its defining features are core–periphery relationships and high levels of risk assumed by households, which had severe repercussions for many debtors after the crisis. Economists developed the concept of “peripheral financialization” to account for these specificities. Peripheral Debt will fill the gaps in scholarship through an ethnographic study of social relations and practices connected to household debt in the context of peripheral financialization in Croatia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. First, it will explore monetary practices typical of Eastern European household debt, such as “carry trade” and foreign currency lending. These will reveal how money functions as a commodity embedded in unequal social and geographic relations, thereby challenging the credit theories of money popular in current anthropology. Second, the group will explore how these and other practices enabled the heightened transfer of risk to Eastern European households, and how the crisis made this visible and transformed various actors’ concepts and practices towards risk. Third, it will study the reformist and often nationalist and populist politics of household debt in Eastern Europe. Using a historical anthropological approach, Peripheral Debt will explain why and how such modes of contestation have developed in response to peripheral financialization. By exploring them in relation to state efforts to govern debt through financial education and market-based solutions, the group will also contribute to the anthropological literature on the state, civil society, social movements and nationalist populism.
DFG Programme
Independent Junior Research Groups
International Connection
Croatia, Slovakia, Sweden, United Kingdom
