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ABSTRACT
In recent years, microfinance – the suite of financial products offered to the poor – has been widely adopted in international development policy. Organizations around the world have replicated this model successfully. This essay takes the comparative case more explicitly to read against the tendency to understand microfinance as the globally institutionalized and realized norm, and local unruly credit economies as the exception. We go beyond comparing credit in India and Paraguay in order to illustrate how comparison is actually central to the banking practices of microfinance. Moreover, it is the collaborative anthropological project that helps to show this, allowing not only for empirical grounds of comparison, but also raising theoretical and methodological questions of comparison itself. In juxtaposing microfinance in our two fieldsites, we find that as credit proliferates globally, so do the comparative projects both of borrowers and lenders in the disparate worlds of Kolkata and Ciudad del Este. At the same time, these were constrained by the global financial comparisons between countries made by investors. Ethnographic methods are vital for understanding how microfinance becomes part of a wider repertoire of financial strategies used by women while simultaneously offering the grounds for women to undertake their own acts of comparison.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 Maurer (Citation2005, Citation2006, Citation2008) has long taken an anthropological approach to the epistemologies of comparison within the money form, in what he calls the processes of ‘adequation’ in money’s processes of signification. We build on this important discussion to document the comparative commitments – as well as the emergent alternatives – within the financial form of global microfinance.
2 This has been dominated by the ‘Bank Linkage Program’, whereby Self-help Groups, often organized by NGOs, are able to access loans from commercial banks.
3 In their volume Anthropology, by Comparison, Gingrich and Fox (Citation2002, p. 2) suggest that ‘prevailing skepticism’ of the comparative method as a ‘quasi-monolithic, coherent, hard-science methodology’ makes it difficult to envision anthropology’s comparative potential in the future. They offer ‘a plurality of comparative methods’ as a corrective to the various universalisms toward which comparison has been put in service. Meanwhile, important conversations in economic anthropology embraced anthropology’s legacy of comparison. David Graeber’s (Citation2011) widely popular Debt: The First 5,000 Years, for instance, makes prolific and plural use of comparative methods but without explicitly thematizing comparison on its own terms.
4 Development practitioners have also begun qualifying the extent to which global microfinance models replace existing credit services (Bastiaensen et al. Citation2013; Wagner Citation2012). However, the discourse around empowerment through financial literacy and moves to seek out and reward ‘best practices’ within the industry combine to create something like a global standard, even if it is aspirational for many organizations (cf. Schwittay Citation2014).
5 In her comparative study of brain death in North America and Japan, Margaret Lock argues ‘technology and expertise are equal in both locations and derive from a common recent history of medical innovation’ (Citation2002, 12). Comparison with Japan creates uncertainty about the seemingly naturalized North American assumptions over brain death.
6 Recent scholarship in anthropology of kinship studies has similarly observed that comparative studies are now surprisingly rare (Robbins Citation2013). We advance a conversation that is underway in several different theoretical traditions, beyond economic anthropology.
7 In August 2014, the new Indian government under Narendra Modi renewed the push for financial inclusion, by ending what he termed ‘financial untouchablity’ through a new scheme to provide bank accounts to 1.3 billion people (Kumar Citation2014).
8 Loans range from Rs. 5000–20,000 (approximately US$100–400), and are paid back in weekly installments over the course of a year, with a 12% flat interest rate (27% declining).
9 All names have been changed.
10 As Han (Citation2012) documents in Chile, consumer credit can serve as a resource for caring for kin, friends, and neighbors.
11 As one tactic, borrowers often kept ‘signs’ of a business at home for the verification process. When asked by an MFI to show proof of a business, women would bring out one or two saris, an old cosmetics catalog, or food containers as evidence. Loan officers often tacitly participated in sustaining these tactics of debt, acknowledging to me that they often did not believe a borrower ran the business for which she had material proof.
12 MFIs in India raise capital largely through commercial debt. Additionally, MFIs have been raising funds through public and private equity, tying them into global financial networks.
13 For De Certeau, strategies are the ‘calculus of force-relationships’ (Citation1984, p. xix) connected to power that ‘sustain them from within the stronghold of its own “proper” place or institution’ (Citation1984, p. xx). Strategies can only emanate from the institutions, such as banks, from established and formalized spaces.
14 Unlike MFIs, the nonprofit organization that offered microcredit loans in Paraguay was registered as a non-banking institution and the revenues from its lending were meant to cover organizational expenses. The group-based loans examined here ranged from 350,000–1,500,000 Guaranis (US$75–315), with a flat interest rate of 10% over the 12–14 week cycle.
15 On the universalizing projects of microfinance at the heart of the industry as well as its most outspoken critics, see (Kar Citation2013, Schuster Citation2014, Citation2015). Both here and elsewhere we argue that studying financial practices as they articulate across the whole microfinance complex – from borrowers, to local organizations, to the wider financial system, can add precision to our analysis of microfinances’ systematic (if not universalizing) effects.