Financialization and the household

Zaloom, Caitlin and James, Deborah ORCID: 0000-0002-4274-197X (2023) Financialization and the household. Annual Review of Anthropology. ISSN 0084-6570

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Abstract

Finance and the household are a pair that has not received sufficient attention. As a system, finance joins citizens, states, and global markets through the connections of kinship and residence. Householders use loans, investments, and assets to craft, reproduce, attenuate, and sever social connections and to elevate or maintain their class position. Householders’ social creativity fuels borrowing, making them the target of banks and other lenders. In pursuit of their own agendas, however, householders strategically deploy financial tools and techniques, sometimes mimicking and sometimes challenging their requirements. Writing against the financialization of daily life framework, which implies a one-way, top-down intrusion of the market into intimate relations, we explore how householders use finance within systems of obligation that structure lives. Financial and household value are not opposed, we argue. Acts of conversion between them produce care for the self and others and refashion inherited duties. Social aspiration for connection and freedom is an essential force in both financial lives and institutions.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2023 The Author(s)
Divisions:	Anthropology
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HQ The family. Marriage. Woman H Social Sciences H Social Sciences > HV Social pathology. Social and public welfare. Criminology
Date Deposited:	14 Mar 2024 10:27
Last Modified:	14 Mar 2024 10:33
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/122370

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