Accessing cash(lessness): Cash dependency, debt, and digital finance in a marginalized Roma neighborhood

Abstract

This article contributes to contemporary ethnographies concerning poverty and digital financial inclusion in Europe. More specifically, it explores how poor Roma families engage with digital banking cards at home in Romania and when they travel to work in the informal economy in Denmark. The analysis conceptually unfolds “access” as a framework for financial inclusion and applies it to an empirical case of three brothers in a Roma family. On this basis, the article argues that cashless initiatives can, perhaps unintentionally, be a driving element in new practices of social exclusion. Without a comprehensive approach toward ensuring “de facto access” for the marginalized communities, which takes all dimensions of access into account, digital financial initiatives can potentially push them further to the periphery of the global economy.

Introduction

“…As just noted, transnational street business can include elements of "hustling" and being "street smart, " perhaps even "trickstering. " However, it also includes activities that do not necessarily make the "best of a given moment" or ensure a profi t, but which, combined with other mundane economic practices, constitute an everyday "patchwork economy" (Ravnbøl 2019) for marginalized migrant women and men to sustain a livelihood in the city. Focusing on transnational street business serves to cast light on the broader structures that migrants move within and sheds light on how they enter into already established informal and formal street economies, as well as constructing new business niches for themselves.…”

“…It serves to illuminate business niches that emerge in direct response to migrants' need for mobility and their attempts to generate livelihoods in new locations. Finally, it is a terminology that resonates with local descriptions of informal economic activities, including the use of bizness among Malian men in Maghreb (Richter 2019) or afacere (business in Romanian) by Romanian Roma who work the streets of Copenhagen (Ravnbøl 2019).…”

“…Anthropologists have contributed ethnographically to this fi eld, with empirical studies that shed light on the social hierarchies that emerge in contemporary neoliberal regimes (Wacquant 2012; see also Bourgeois 1995). For many poor and marginalized communities worldwide, money and economic management become a matter of managing fi nancial debt and debt relations, since the survival of many poor household relies on expensive loans with local usurers in the informal fi nancial economy (Gregory 2012;James 2014a and2014b;Peebles 2010;Ravnbøl 2019 and. Th e economic activities in focus in this special issue play out in this broader global context of markets and social hierarchies of labor.…”

“…In many ways, these business niches would not have emerged or would have looked entirely diff erent had it not been for the transnational migrants. We approach these emerging markets as "pop-up business niches, " since they emerge and disappear rapidly depending on the availability and demand of the market (Ravnbøl 2019;Yu et al 2018). Pop-up business niches all begin as a reaction to something, whether that be legislative change, new policies, new social opportunities, or the arrival of new actors in the economic context.…”

“…However, in other locations they result in business niches for buying and selling information about the bodies that never made it across the unsafe waters, and ways to continue moving, both socially and physically. Th e phrase "pop-up" frames the temporality of such markets, since they mushroom and disappear only if there is fertile ground for doing so (Ravnbøl 2019;Yu et al 2018). Th is complex intertwining of the local and transnational, the formal and informal, the regular and irregular in response to migrants' needs to make a livelihood is integral to how we frame and approach the concept of transnational street business that we introduce in this special issue.…”