Precarious Debt: Microfinance Subjects and Intergenerational Dependency in Cambodia

Abstract

This paper tells a story of debt within a rural Cambodian family in order to understand how microfinance produces more‐than‐individual financial subjects that are entangled in changing social relations of dependency. We draw upon 20 months of joint ethnographic research in Cambodia, where the microfinance industry is one of the largest per capita in the world. Informed by Judith Butler's notions of precariousness and precarity, we argue that even in the context of deepening financialisation, people's lives remain dependent upon others, especially within families. We analyse how these family relations of dependency are reworked along generational lines and spatially stretched due to precarious economic conditions of indebtedness, household migration, and distant labour markets. We conclude that reframing financial subjectivity in terms of precariousness helps us to analyse the relationship between households and financial markets, as well as inform a critical politics of finance.

From rice fields to financial assets: Valuing land for microfinance in Cambodia

“…Moreover, when people mortgage their land for microfinance loans, they are increasingly doing it to finance the costs of social reproduction (Green & Estes, ). For example, Tiang's neighbours Sothy and Borin are husband and wife, both in their mid‐60s, and currently live at home where they raise their four grandchildren.…”

Regulating Over‐indebtedness: Local State Power in Cambodia's Microfinance Market

“…It has broken down spatial and social barriers between financial capital and daily activities from which finance was previously excluded (Guérin et al., 2014). Many individuals and communities now finance their household social reproduction by taking on microfinance loans (Green and Estes, 2019). Microfinance has also fundamentally reworked the relationship between capital and labour as the risks of value creation have shifted onto borrowers themselves (Mader, 2014).…”

“…As families have diversified their incomes in the past two decades, assessing a household's net income is important for determining a client's creditworthiness. Families that have steady incomes, usually because at least one member engages in wage labour, are considered to be much safer borrowers than families that rely upon agricultural incomes alone (Green and Estes, 2019). As such, ACLEDA credit officers will double‐check with a local authority to confirm the information that a new borrower provides about their stated household income.…”

“…I encourage them to find work in the city, so that they can repay their debts and keep their land’. Given that loans are family affairs in Cambodia (Green and Estes, 2019), village chiefs are likely to encourage family members to find employment to help repay parents’ debts. Mediation can thus encourage rural out‐migration, which has become a common coping mechanism among over‐indebted families (Bylander, 2014; Natarajan et al., 2019).…”

Microcredit and repayment in Colombia

“…On one hand, people could have been equipped and trained with the financial calculative technologies (formulas, devices, algorithms), but their actual uses of them did not match with the expected idea or goal. On the other hand, the fact that people find creative and adaptive uses of financial products, services, and techniques in their social lives also tells us that the financialization of everyday life (Martin, 2002;Lazarus, 2017) is not necessarily a process through which finance erodes social bonds of communities or exploits their social capital as assumed by feminist and Marxist critical approaches (see Rankin, 2011;Roberts, 2014;Federici, 2014;Green and Estes, 2019). In fact, those effects of financial governmentality that I illustrated through cases studies and conceptualized as overflows, excess or productive engagements Bank W is one of the most important microfinancial institutions in Colombia with more than 30 years in business, the third highest profit rate among microcredit institutions (Asobancaria, 2017), and the second bigger share at national level among private MFIs (nearly 5% of total market share).…”