Financialized Adulthood in Germany

• Applicant: Hadas Weiss, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
• Term: from 2018 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 414862267

My project tackles the mismatch between the normative organization of the life course as a smooth transition from school through lifelong employment along a career ladder to comfortable retirement, with contemporary lives in Germany and beyond. This mismatch is most conspicuous in the tensions surrounding adulthood. Prolonged adolescence, boomerang kids (the German Nesthocker), concerns about aging among people as young as thirty and anti-aging campaigns that cater to these concerns have caught public attention. Many now question the erstwhile view of adulthood as life’s pinnacle, consider it out of reach or reject the values traditionally associated with it like commitment, responsibility and hard work. I aim to make sense of this through the lens of financialization, or the growing dominance of finance in economy, society and household economics. Drawing on fieldwork in Germany, I will link novel instruments and strategies for financing homes and retirements, education and professional training, childrearing and the protection of income, to common ideas about adulthood. This will allow me to trace guiding notions about one’s role in society as an adult to the saving, investing and insurance practices in which they are anchored, as they are advanced by the finance sector. I will demonstrate how these notions encourage specific ways of placing one’s money in circulation through the mediation of for-profit financial agencies and instruments, serving finance-led accumulation. The fieldwork will include participant-observation in seminars on lifecycle financing and in social clubs (Vereine) where the notions of adulthood they advance play out, as well as interviews with consecutive generations of a range of households. The objectives of this project are to (1) make explicit the expectations about adulthood and challenges to it in Germany as implied in lifecycle financing; (2) examine how these expectations line up with specific practices that are associated with or challenge common understandings of adulthood; (3) show how these understandings, expectations and practices guide the circulation of household capital; and (4) offer – through the lens of adulthood as enacted in Germany – a better understanding of financialization’s deepest and most personal grip on the societies it is reshaping.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants