Financialization and the Household

Abstract

Finance and the household are a pair that has not received sufficient attention. As a system, finance joins citizens, states, and global markets through the connections of kinship and residence. Householders use loans, investments, and assets to craft, reproduce, attenuate, and sever social connections and to elevate or maintain their class position. Householders’ social creativity fuels borrowing, making them the target of banks and other lenders. In pursuit of their own agendas, however, householders strategically deploy financial tools and techniques, sometimes mimicking and sometimes challenging their requirements. Writing against the financialization of daily life framework, which implies a one-way, top-down intrusion of the market into intimate relations, we explore how householders use finance within systems of social obligations. Financial and household value are not opposed, we argue. Acts of conversion between them produce care for the self and others and refashion inherited duties. Social aspiration for connection and freedom is an essential force in both financial lives and institutions.

Beyond social policy? ‘patchwork’ livelihoods

“…Feminist anthropologists similarly argued that domestic labour, framed as taking place within the boundaries of home-based groups and separate from the wider world of paid work, was in fact essential to the functioning of that world. Non-commodified activities – often seen as precapitalist – were subsumed by commodified, capitalist formations, household labour seen by such analysts as intrinsic to capitalism and exploited by it (Zaloom and James, 2023). Once that reproduction started to be provided through more formal redistributive mechanisms, such as state-provided welfare payments or welfare provision, one might argue, it became ‘social policy’.…”

“…As state-provided redistribution and security become an ever-remoter prospect, disappearing rapidly into the rear-view mirror of history, should we still think of them (and their opposite, wage work) in the same terms? Or should we instead adopt the perspective of people who have no alternative but to build an independent livelihood out of various fragments, creating what Nguyen (2020) calls ‘portfolios of social protection’ or what Zaloom and James (2023) term ‘patchworks’? The papers in this volume, however, give many examples in which at least some of the constituent ‘patches’ do consist of fragments of wage labour, however precarious: they show that life in many cases is only partly rather than wholly wageless.…”

“…. advances arguments about the social reconfigurations financial encounters produce’ (Zaloom and James, 2023).…”