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.

Keywords:

• debt
• inequality
• morality
• temporality
• joking
• value

Acknowledgements

This paper benefited from the feedback of anthropology seminar participants at Cambridge and the LSE. The author is especially grateful to interlocutors in Woldham for their openness.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Ryan Davey http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4965-5924

Notes

1 Capital One is a UK credit card provider.

2 Normally with an ‘unsecured’ consumer debt, the creditor has no security in case of a default. Yet, with a Charging Order, the courts can determine that an asset should be sold or passed over to an unsecured lender, effectively giving the debt a security.

3 Gendered inequalities of power in financial credit-debt are explored by Allon (2014), Adkins (2017) and Schuster (2014).

4 BrightHouse is a British high-street hire purchase company, dealing in home entertainment technology, household appliances and furniture.

5 For a detailed study of UK payday lending, see Langley et al. (2019).

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the William Wyse Fund, the Cambridge Political Economy Society Trust, and the Economic and Social Research Council of the United Kingdom [grant number ES/M003825/1].

Notes on contributors

Ryan Davey

Ryan Davey was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Anthropology at the LSE researching debt, class inequality and subjectivity at the time of writing. The author is currently Vice-Chancellor's Fellow at the University of Bristol.