Social collateral: Microcredit development and the politics of interdependency in Paraguay.

详细信息   

• 作者：Schuster ; Caroline Elizabeth.
• 学历：Doctor
• 年：2012
• 导师：Cattelino,Jessica R.,eadvisorComaroff,John L.,eadvisorChu,Julie Y.ecommittee memberKolata,Alanecommittee member
• 毕业院校：The University of Chicago
• Department：Anthropology.
• ISBN：9781267610683
• CBH：3526964
• Country：USA
• 语种：English
• FileSize：14490093
• Pages：379

文摘

Microcredit programs have become a cornerstone of global development,reaching 190 million borrowers annually and managing billions of dollars in financial assets. This dissertation considers the stakes of microcredit poverty-alleviation programs built around instrumentalizing womens economic obligations as "social collateral": microcredit group-based loans secured by joint indebtedness. Examining credit,obligation,and development from the vantage of a commercial duty-free zone on Paraguays triple-frontier with Argentina and Brazil,I argue that the forms of joint obligation evident in microcredit "social collateral" go beyond this specialized development lending. The prevalence of credit in Paraguay,particularly in the commercially vibrant border city of Ciudad del Este,provides an exemplary case of the pervasiveness of a broader credit politics in contemporary capitalism. As I argue,the interdependencies and forms of obligation that characterize credit/debt relations--and are especially prominent in microcredit--also form a constitutive part of economy and finance at the heart of liberalized laissez-faire commercial markets. I explore how struggles to define the social unit of credit had a gendered politics in determining group membership,hinged on the shifting obligations of neighbors and family,and upended conventional legal interpretations of liability,and thus had broader implications for the production of value in development policy and everyday economic practice. While microcredit has become widely popular in global anti-poverty programming in the last two decades,I show that Paraguay has a long and vexed history of pairing debt and development. First,I trace the forms of political and social obligation attached to credit and debt from Paraguays national borrowing in the nineteenth century,to the emergence of the anti-regulatory climate in economic development on the border,to local anti-poverty programs Ciudad del Este. Then I examine the politics of interdependency in microcredit practice. As I argue,joint liability formed a regulatory field that marked feminized labor within the NGO itself,featured in materialized forms of liability like credit score reports,and revealed tensions within the organizations broader poverty alleviation mission around individual entrepreneurship. Whether in the management of microcredit solidarity vis-a-vis competing regimes of value,or the administration of the terms of microcredit--especially creditworthiness,liability,and repayment--I trace the terms and conditions under which microcredit includes and excludes different forms of obligation,and thereby tracks social difference and deepens inequalities.