South Asia in Motion. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018. xiii, 259 pp. (Tables, figure, B&W photo.) US$27.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-5036-0588-6.
Given the hegemonic role of financialization in shaping the trajectory of contemporary capital accumulation, financial markets and actors shape policy regimes across the world more than ever. Apart from stagnation in the real sectors, and hence employment at the macro-level, financialization also means rising household debt at the micro-level. A few economic anthropologists have “looked up” to illuminate the dynamics of such processes unfolding in spaces of high finance like the Wall Street and stockbroker firms. Several others have critically engaged with the emergent phenomenon of micro-credit in the Global South and dominant assumptions on what it means for the lives of poor borrowers. In this incisive book, Sohini Kar seeks to link processes and events in the world of global and national finance to credit regimes that shape the lives of urban poor on the periphery. Based on rich ethnographic work on microfinance institutions (MFIs) in the slums of Kolkata, she maps how lives of the poor are “enfolded” within global circuits of finance and how financial circuits draw upon such enfolding to sustain themselves. Kar draws our attention to the unrecognized labour of financial intermediaries like loan officers in MFIs and highlights how finance capital relies heavily on the relational life worlds of such actors in suturing the circuits of financial flows. In a context of precarious employment and uncertain incomes, she traces the emergence of techniques of risk assessment and management in not only sustaining the system but critically shaping the lives of the poor.
Her key arguments are as follows. The process of micro-financialization proceeds through commodification of social networks and trust as such networks are crucial in coercing borrowers into sticking to repayment schedules. Relying on such relational sources, microfinance contributes to sustaining patriarchal relations rather than empowering women, as claimed by those who view such lending as a developmental tool. Even as the poor are enfolded within global circuits of finance, microfinance in turn realizes itself through domestic and social relations of power and obligations, reinforcing such relations of power rather than destabilizing them. Questioning simplistic readings of social capital as a stock that can be drawn from, Kar also demonstrates how social capital is produced in the process of the constitution of relations that sustain lending, borrowing, and repaying processes. Often such relations are undermined in the process of peer monitoring that MFIs put in place to ensure repayment.
Second, countering the dematerialized readings of finance capital, the author demonstrates that it is the labour of the loan officer that translates capital into a loan and a product that generates returns. Drawing from literature on the significance of emotional labour in post-industrial labour processes, she maps how loan workers draw upon a shared moral economy to produce ethical borrowers. The fact that loan officers are expected to adhere to standards of conduct strengthens the author’s contention on the criticality of such emotional labour in generating value through finance capital. Through an ethnographic excavation of the emotional relations forged within the world of finance, Kar reiterates what economic anthropologists have repeatedly argued: economic transactions invariably carry traces of affect and symbolic meanings derived from the social worlds in which they are embedded, even as such transactions reinforce certain values and relations. The discursive terrain of policy that privileges efficiencies generated by removing intermediaries through information and communication technologies, seldom acknowledges the emotional and cognitive human labour critical to evaluate uncodified information.
Third, such cognitive maps also critically mediate the rarified field of risk assessment, especially in the context of the urban informal where the future of jobs and ability to labour are highly uncertain. Formal metrics of risk assessment such as income and asset levels therefore do not work. Rather, she demonstrates how an understanding of the moral economy of the borrowers is critical to assessing the “capacity” of the borrowers to stick to the terms under which the loans are being lent and recovered. Such understandings also serve to generate social and spatial exclusions as they are based on hegemonic norms. Religious minorities and migrants are therefore more likely to be deemed ineligible to access MFI loans.
Fourth, arguing against the established narrative on micro-credit’s ability to unleash the entrepreneurial energies of the urban poor, she points out that the poor often borrow to meet reproductive requirements, such as healthcare and education, or to sustain traditional informal enterprises. The agency of the borrower is therefore critically tied to the withdrawal of the state from the provisioning of public services and the privatization of those services. Importantly, she contends that recent critiques of developmentalism and paternalist statism have translated into mobilization of the poor’s agency as entrepreneurs rather than as citizen subjects claiming entitlements such as housing and healthcare. She thus makes a case for rethinking micro-credit as credit for the working class. Such a conception will allow for a redistribution of the risk burden from households to the state. This is important because the current architecture of microfinance implies that any crisis on the global or the national scale translates into the drying up of loans even for “worthy” borrowers.
While her ethnographic insights combine extremely well with literature on the political economy and anthropology of finance, one wishes the author had engaged more with the vast literature on micro-credit in the Global South, as some of her observations reinforce insights made earlier. In drawing links between the poor borrowers in Kolkata and the world of global finance, she also does not adequately embed the links within national and regional political regimes that often seek legitimacy through such programs. Finally, we do not get to see how these newly formed networks of formal finance interact with pre-existing circuits of informal finance. Given that some studies hint at a symbiotic relationship between the two rather than one of replacement as anticipated by proponents of micro-credit, engaging with the link between the formal and informal would have added a further layer to this richly textured book.
M. Vijayabaskar
Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai, India