Suspensory indebtedness: time, morality and power asymmetry in experiences of consumer debt

Abstract

The power asymmetries operating through debt include not only the domination of conduct and the extraction of wealth but also unequal struggles to define value. Long-term ethnographic fieldwork on a low-income housing estate in southern England revealed a 'suspensory' approach to debt, in which those who cannot afford to comply with their creditors' debt repayment demands suspend both the temporal point at which debts will end through repayment or enforcement and the dominant morality of repayment through amoral humour about being a bad debtor. This shows that the form of power asymmetry that debtors experience, if any, hinges on their relation to both the morality and temporality of repayment.

The Simple Bare Necessities: Scales and Paradoxes of Thrift on a London Public Housing Estate

“…This segues into a discussion of how households managed time, labor, money, and materials to achieve, if not a condition of blessedness, then norms of kincare. In line with the literature on provisioning in Britain (e.g., Mollona 2009: 63-78;Smith 2012;Davey 2019a; see also Narotzky 2012) the ethnography here suggests a more expansive, elastic idea of households than do official definitions, but it also extends this literature by including material repair, sharing, and remaking. The final ethnographic section juxtaposes such care in conserving material resources-expressed as care for kin-with a common characterization of estate residents as bad recyclers or environmentally unaware, despite the infrastructural limitations they face in complying with official demands.…”

“…Moreover, what counts as financial responsibility and for whom has sharply altered. Older estate residents described childhoods punctuated by weekly knocks on the door by the collectors of rent, insurance, contributions for savings clubs, friendly societies, and sometimes the tallyman's collections for hire-purchase instalments, known colloquially as "buying on the never never" (Davey 2019a). In twenty-first-century Britain, a new financial tempo and discipline is marked by "the responsible meeting, management, and manipulation of ever-greater [payment] obligations" (Langley 2009: 18, see also Montgomerie's (2007) discussion of macroeconomic models of growth based on high levels of consumer borrowing where debts are never fully redeemed), a tempo that is out of synch with irregular, precarious work.…”

“Let Me Be Bill-free”: Consumer Debt in the Shadow of Incarceration

“…Despite the multiple pressures of poverty, racism, an unjust carceral system, mental illness, and a thoroughly inadequate benefits system, some of the stories show deep resilience. The support offered through social networks despite stretched resources, the insistence on living a life of dignity and self-respect, be that through employment or disability benefits, the proud reliance on those disability benefits despite society’s stigmatizing of those who receive them (Hansen, Bourgois, and Drucker 2014), the “not caring” about credit, despite the real, practical barriers it poses; these are the “weapons of the weak” (Davey 2019; Scott 1987) that formerly incarcerated individuals and the people around them deploy against a system that puts literal and figurative walls up against them at every turn.…”

Debt and Emotional Labour in Present Day Serbia

“…Recent anthropologies of debt have dealt with affective and gendered dimensions of debt (Davey 2019;Han 2012;Stout 2015;Weiss 2022). Clara Han (2012) writes about the articulations between financial debt and care in the household, as well as the relationships between financial and other forms of debts; she does not talk about gender debt specifically, or she does not formulate it that way, but her insights into heteronormative family dynamic are definitely important.…”