Commentary on Guérin and Venkatasubramanian ‘Debt and the Politics of Numbers’

This article refers to:

Debt and the Politics of Numbers: Hegemonic Numbers, Political Numbers, Ordinary Numbers

Quantitative reasoning is central to present-day economics: not only does it define the discipline’s method, it undergirds its claims to objective rigour. The credibility and legitimacy of economics, and the power of institutions that base themselves on it, derive from the use of numbers. But numbers, as anyone who works closely with them knows, are imperfect devices for the reality they seek to represent. When wielded by powerful institutions, not only can they take on a life of their own, they can do more harm than good. In their paper on the multivalence of numbers, Isabelle Guérin and G. Venkatasubramanian persuasively demonstrate the value of anthropology in making economists look afresh at the numbers they use.

As a discipline that prides itself on speaking truth to power, anthropology has a rich tradition of criticizing numbers that count, measure, and compare. Anthropologists point out that numbers conceal the complexity of the objects or phenomena that they claim to represent. These abstract simplifications serve the purpose of calculation and action but in ways that do violence to the phenomena themselves. Cultural meanings and relations are left out of the equation, as are other aspects of value that are hard to quantify. Yet, because numbers make aggregation and comparison easier, they are deployed even when the problem of incommensurability looms large. These critiques come easier to contemporary anthropologists because their discipline has largely moved away from looking at questions that require large-scale comparison using universally applicable measures. Even when the phenomenon in question is large—global capitalism, racial discrimination, environmental change—the ethnographic gaze usually focuses on how it is manifested and experienced in a specific locale. While such micro-studies are informed by higher-order theory as well as insights from other places, they contribute to a larger representation by providing nuance, depth and complexity, challenging generalizations rather than helping to build them. How then can anthropology inform economic policy?

Given the difficulties of bridging radically different epistemologies and methodologies, we must applaud Guérin and Venkatasubramanian’s attempt to incorporate anthropological insights into data on debt among poor households in rural Tamil Nadu in south India. An impressive amount of thought and effort has gone into conducting surveys and interviews, and monitoring financial records over an extended period. This has been combined with close observation of the dynamics of interaction between individuals and groups. It is not easy to build the kind of rapport and trust where people are willing to share financial details with researchers. Only when such fieldwork is done in person (and not outsourced to a survey agency, as is the case with most official data collection) can the author develop a sense of what the ‘real’ numbers are and what they mean to the people whose reality they seek to represent.

Guérin and Venkatasubramanian use their carefully collected village-level data on debt to populate two categories: political numbers and ordinary numbers, which are then used to critique the ‘hegemonic numbers’ generated by international agencies such as the World Bank that further the neo-liberal project of ‘financial inclusion’ by giving villagers access to formal credit. The triumphal narrative of inclusion marches along by showing the increasing numbers of people enrolled in micro-credit groups, opening bank accounts, and taking loans. However, poor villagers may find themselves worse off as they get more indebted to agencies with whom they cannot negotiate. While villagers may not experience any improvement in their economic situation, powerful institutions pat themselves on the back since ‘inclusion’ is promoted as a moral good. The paper compellingly deconstructs hegemonic numbers, showing how they draw upon pre-existing frames of meaning and perpetuate the power of their creators to shape economic policy even as they widen the net of big finance. This analysis is a form of ‘statactivism’ that counters hegemonic discourse by marshalling an alternative set: political numbers.

In the paper, political numbers represent debt as a part of social relations, examining flows between people unequally situated in terms of their class, caste and gender identities. However, it wasn’t clear to me why such analysis would be anathema to agencies like the World Bank that routinely produce statistics dealing with poverty and economic discrimination. Is the paper arguing that their numbers are wrong or incomplete? Or is it saying that they are interpreted to serve particular interests? Guérin and Venkatasubramanian’s data shows that debt servicing from formal and informal sources was as high as 68% of income in poor households. This analysis doesn’t necessarily lead to an indictment of hegemonic numbers. As the paper points out, Dalit households have the largest numbers of outstanding loans but they value access to formal credit since it reduces their dependence on upper-caste moneylenders in the village. Thus the hegemonic discourse of financial inclusion shapes villagers’ lives in complex, even contradictory, ways. While it expands the market for debt finance, it also offers avenues for reconstituting older patterns of subjugation and exploitation. In seizing this opportunity, villagers are acting politically within the constraining circumstances they inhabit.

To my mind, the power of political numbers lies in contextualizing a narrowly conceived issue and challenging its frame of reference. A political economy approach would lead us to examine property relations, access to employment and income, and changing modes of production. When discussing the problem of debt in the context of an agrarian crisis that has led tens of thousands of farmers to kill themselves every year in the last two decades, scholars point to the rising costs of inputs; the increasing risks associated with weather, pests and prices; as well as shrinking access to water and land. These are key elements of a crisis of reproduction where debts mount and suicide seems the only way out (Sethi 2021; Vasavi 2012). To critique the hegemonic discourse on debt, one needs to point out that it detaches debt from the larger determinants of economic life and seeks to ‘fix the problem’ without interfering with the more intractable political issues of land reform, access to secure and remunerative work, state welfare and support for agrarian livelihoods. Generating political numbers, then, would require measuring and comparing the assets, incomes, and opportunities available to differently situated households and placing debt within this economic context. To me, as an anthropologist, it was puzzling that the paper did not choose to do this.

The category of ‘ordinary numbers’ is also somewhat confounding. According to Guérin and Venkatasubramanian, these reflect villagers’ ways of counting, where they perceive certain debts as desirable because they affirm or extend valued relationships and where borrowing and lending create interdependence and social solidarity. While this indicates that people don’t necessarily see all debt as a burden, it doesn’t help disentangle ‘good debt’ from ‘bad debt.’ According to the paper, villagers finance up to 50% of the costs of a wedding from ceremonial gifts that are carefully recorded and reciprocated. These are regarded as essential obligations, part of reproducing one’s place in the family and the village, among wider kin, and in the eyes of others. However, being able to provide the gift appropriate for one’s customary role may require going into debt to the local moneylender. Even in the case of farmer suicides, Kumar (2017) points out that the economic crisis is tied to the pressure to maintain one’s social reputation as a man who can provide his daughter with a good dowry and who can honour ancestors through the prescribed funerary feasts. The need to conform to the norms of patriarchal masculinity drives people to borrow money for expensive rituals which they hope their agrarian risk-taking will allow them to pay back. Ordinary numbers, then, may be no less oppressive than hegemonic and political numbers. An anthropological approach may then nudge us to look critically at gender relations, not only in terms of women’s level of indebtedness or burden of labour, but their social construction as objects who need to be ‘married off respectably.’

Finally, the problem with numbers is that they are numbers. They can’t capture the cultural meaning that are embedded in them. In his ethnography of Algerian peasant life, Bourdieu (1972) pointed out that it was in the nature of gifts that they were reciprocated only after a certain time had elapsed. It was the temporal gap between the gift and its reciprocation that created a temporary inequality between the giver and the recipient of the gift. Being in the debt of the gift-giver obliged the recipient to show up and help when labour-intensive tasks had to be done. Gift exchange was thus a strategy for mobilizing labour when hiring workers was not possible. It allowed for the accumulation of symbolic capital. How can these debts that do not take monetary form, and that dynamically ebb and flow between villagers, be enumerated? Every villager can count and measure the extent of such indebtedness, as well as its social and political effects on their life (Hardiman 1996). However, they would struggle to express them in terms of a common metric like money.

The paper points to the power of political numbers to reform hegemonic numbers. Following the lead of anthropologists, feminist economists have brought greater recognition to the unpaid work of reproduction and care performed by women within the domestic sphere. Similarly, economists now pay more attention to the diverse activities and arrangements that are lumped together under the label of the informal sector. However, attempts to capture these through numbers—especially in terms of money—remain unsatisfactory. I would argue that this is not because political numbers aren’t being vigorously championed. Progressive economists are intermittently heard by national and international agencies. The problem is that the phenomena they seek to represent are difficult to capture in numbers. Whether it is the emotional labour of parenting or the work of managing debt repayment which, as the article points out, may for women entail sexual transactions with their creditors, political numbers fail us. So do ordinary numbers, since they too are ordered and made meaningful by cultural categories that are not amenable to numerical representation. Instead of challenging hegemonic numbers with political numbers and ordinary numbers, what we need is a more thoroughgoing critique of all numbers. Guérin and G. Venkatasubramanian’s lucid exposition allows us to critically examine these categories and emerge with a better understanding of their promise and their limits. We are in their debt.

Acknowledgements

I thank the reviewers who helped edit this article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.