Comparative projects and the limits of choice: ethnography and microfinance in India and Paraguay

Kar, Sohini; Schuster, Caroline E.

doi:10.1080/17530350.2016.1180632

Cited by 19 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 48 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…In reality, such unbacked lending would be too risky; rather than being collateral‐free, material capital is substituted in microfinance with social capital. The global poor have been brought into global financial networks through microfinance in different ways and through different historical trajectories (Kar & Schuster ). In the well‐known Grameen Bank model, microfinance lenders require women to form groups of between ten and thirty borrowers in order to access loans, relying on social rather than material collateral (see Schuster ).…”

Section: Financial Speculation and Systemic Riskmentioning

confidence: 99%

Relative indemnity: risk, insurance, and kinship in Indian microfinance

Kar

2017

Royal Anthropological Inst

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

With the growth of commercial microfinance in India, the poor have been increasingly enfolded into circuits of global finance. In making these collateral‐free loans, however, microfinance institutions (MFIs) engage in new forms of risk management. While loans are made to women with the goal of economic and social empowerment, MFIs require male kin to serve as guarantors. Drawing on fieldwork in the city of Kolkata, I argue that through the requirement of male guarantors, MFIs hedge on kinship, even as they speculate on the bottom of the pyramid as a new market of accumulation.

show abstract

Section: Financial Speculation and Systemic Riskmentioning

confidence: 99%

Relative indemnity: risk, insurance, and kinship in Indian microfinance

Kar

2017

Royal Anthropological Inst

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Comparative analysis draws on Le Espiritu's (2014) methodology of "critical juxtaposition," the "bringing together of seemingly different or disconnected events, communities, histories and spaces" (21) to better understand the multiple ways in which migrant destitution is made valuable to others. Recognizing the tendency of some comparative projects to homogenize difference, we argue that the political possibilities of making connections and highlighting relationships are many (Kar and Schuster 2016). Our analysis allows us to identify topologies of migrant destitution, common patterns of destitution, dependence, and dispossession materialized through localized practices.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Destitution Economies: Circuits of Value in Asylum, Refugee, and Migration Control

Coddington

Conlon

Martin

2020

Annals of the American Association of Geographers

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In this article, we argue that destitution economies of migration control are specific circuits of exchange and value constituted by migration control practices that produce migrant and refugee destitution. Comparative analysis of three case studies, including border encampment in Thailand, deprivation in U.S. immigration detention centers, and deterrence through destitution in the United Kingdom, demonstrate that circuits of value depend on the detachment of workers from citizenship and simultaneously produce both migrant destitution and new forms of value production. Within destitution economies, migration and asylum's particular juridico-political position as domestic, foreign, and securitized allows legal regimes to produce migrants and asylum seekers as distinct economic subjects: forsaken recipients of aid. Although they might also work for pay, we argue that destitute migrants and asylum seekers have value for others through the grinding labor of living in poverty. That is, in their categorization as migrants and asylum seekers, they occupy a particular position in relation to economic circuits. These economic circuits of migration control, in turn, rely on the destitution of mobile people. Our approach advances political geographies of migration, bordering, and exclusion as well as economic geographies of marketization and value, arguing that the predominance of political analysis and critique of immigration and asylum regimes obscures how those regimes produce circuits of value in and through law, state practices, and exclusion. Furthermore, law, state power, and forced mobility constitute circuits of value and marketization. Conceptualizing these migration control practices as destitution economies illuminates novel transformations of the political and economic geographies of migration, borders, and inequality.

show abstract

“…1 The extensive ethnographic cases in this themed section bring together key theoretical concerns on the material and cultural practices of intermediation with comparative insights from the global south, from currency traders in Pakistan to households in rural Southern India to insurance companies and funeral parlors in South Africa to smallholder farmers and gold sellers in Myanmar to fishing communities in a coastal state of India. At the same time, the analyses presented here are not limited to so-called developing economies but indeed trouble the distinction between 'developing' and 'developed' by attending to the entanglement of transnational and local forms of infrastructural supports, constraints, and aspirations (Kar and Schuster 2016). The contributors respond to recent calls in the social studies of money and finance to stitch together how the everyday life of financial practices 'connects up to high finance' (Tooker and Maurer 2016) and pursue methods of 'provisional framework building' (Hardin 2017) in arriving at the ethnographic grounds and grounding of the politics of finance (Zaloom 2019).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 96%

Mapping the intermediate: lived technologies of money and value

Tankha

Dalinghaus

2020

Journal of Cultural Economy

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

As financial transactions are increasingly digitized, old and new kinds of intermediaries are only expanding in importance. Intermediaries, mediators and brokers sit at critical junctures and operate between diverse financial arenas and pathways. We argue that mapping the intermediate entails identifying how different kinds of actors-human and non-human, objects and interfaces, institutions and practices-delimit or reify but also stitch together and overcome spatial and temporal differences in people's financial lives, while taking on varying burdens of risk. Mapping the intermediate is both an empirical and methodological exercise. Empirically, it requires following the agents and traders, brokers and material objects that facilitate transactions and add, extract, or rework different kinds of value. Methodologically, intermediaries and the intermediate are not only the objects of analysis but act as analytical tools in their own right, making the process and politics of transactions visible and tangible. Attending to the intermediate in our inquiries around money, currency and new digital financial technologies, thereby, offers new directions for grounding finance in politics and history and better connecting micro and macro and local and global economic processes.

show abstract

Comparative projects and the limits of choice: ethnography and microfinance in India and Paraguay

Cited by 19 publications

References 48 publications

Relative indemnity: risk, insurance, and kinship in Indian microfinance

Relative indemnity: risk, insurance, and kinship in Indian microfinance

Destitution Economies: Circuits of Value in Asylum, Refugee, and Migration Control

Mapping the intermediate: lived technologies of money and value

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About