The Moral Performativity of Credit and Debt in the Slums of Buenos Aires

Abstract

Classic works in anthropology and sociology have essentialized formal capitalist credit and their alternative forms, be they community-based or informal. The financiarization of everyday life has produced the return to this one-sided narratives. My aim in this article is to show how the moral dimension of financial practices does not represent the flip side of capitalist institutions. The economization of morality is a transaction that takes place not only along the margins but also at the heart of financial practices. A moral sociology of money becomes increasingly necessary as the financialization of the everyday life develops. I use ethnographic data that I collected between 2006 and 2011 during my fieldwork in the slums of Buenos Aires. I attempted to understand the growing role and the multiple forms of credit and debt in the economy of the poor. My ethnographic reconstruction is guided by a conceptual foundation that allows for an anti-essentialist interpretation of the moral dimension of credit and debt. In this article I propose considering the concept of moral capital as a kind of guarantee together with other kinds of capital such as economic or legal capital.My argument seeks to de-essentialize the opposition between informal and community-based systems and the so-called capitalist systems, revealing their continuity through the rules that must be complied with in order to accumulate moral capital as a way to access credit and pay off debts. The hypothesis that moral capital multiplies economic capital suggests that there are differentiations and inequalities that not only regulate borrowers but also allow them to be distinguished individually.The financialization of the economy is translated into a space for moral distinction that provides an outline for a new topography of the moral antagonism in the economic life.

Consumer Credit in Comparative Perspective

“…In post-communist Eastern Europe, in contrast to the Western part of Europe, social ties are positively correlated with financial inclusion into the formal lending tier (Corrado and Corrado 2015). In poorer urban communities in Latin America, informal ties broker the use of formal credit: Ossandon (2012) and Wilkis (2015) report frequent lending of credit cards by those who qualified for them to those that cannot access formal credit on their own. In the West, "ubercapitalism" relies on big data valuation of individual consumers, including their social network data, classifying them for the purposes of targeted selling and lending (Fourcade and Healy 2017).…”

Digital interface design and power: Friction, threshold, transition

“…According to Aitken (2006: 482), fringe finance is especially problematic because so many of its negative effects are 'felt disproportionately among poor and minority populations', as they attempt to manage monetary issues through forms of both 'self-governmentality' and 'coercion' by the systems themselves (on social issues around debt more broadly, see Deville and Seigworth, 2015;Iafrati, 2014;Marron, 2012;Wilkis, 2015). As Deville (2015) has demonstrated, credit objects such as credit cards are central to the both practices of self-governmentality and coercion, operating as 'lures for feeling' that tempt people into borrowing, with digital interfaces in HCSTC proving particularly effective (Deville and Velden, 2016).…”

Finance beyond function: Three causal explanations for financialization

“…For example, in their analysis of mortgages in Hungary, Pellandini‐Simányi, Hammer, and Vargha () show that couples use mortgages as media to understand their marriages and their relationships with one another, even as the debt contracts' financial obligations may impose new strains on the relationships (see also Halawa ; Palomera ). Similarly, Wilkis () reports that in the slums of Buenos Aires, formal credit relations become crucial media in social, affective, and family relations. Individual credit cards are lent to friends and family, and individual debt becomes an item of discussion and strategy for the entire family (see also Müller [] for the case of Brazil and Guérin [] for the case of India).…”