Financialization, Solidarity, and Conflict

Economic Anthropology, vol. 7, pp. 159–161

Abstract

An important way in which economic anthropology contributes to the understanding of peace and conflict is by understanding how financialization transforms solidarity.Financialization, meaning the integration of financial products and services into everyday life, changes solidarity among neighbors, within communities, and among kin, as well as solidarity that is connected to citizenship.One of the best-known examples of finance affecting solidarity is the Grameen Bank.Established in the 1970s, the bank provided credit to poor rural women in Bangladesh.The bank set up solidarity groups where women became collectively responsible for each other's loans, which had to ensure that the loans were paid back.In 2006, the bank and its founder, Muhammad Yunus, were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for using microcredit and solidarity groups to strengthen peace.Anthropological research, however, revealed that these solidarity mechanisms were not as peaceful as the Nobel Peace Prize suggested.Rahman (1999, 72) found that when a member failed to meet her financial obligations, "peers in the loan center may decide to take the defaulter's saleable household item or personal assets and sell or mortgage them out to collect the instalment."Rahman (1999Rahman ( , 2001)), as well as others (e.g., Schuler, Hashemi, and Badal 1998), had already revealed how men, who were not allowed to participate in the solidarity groups, would-sometimes violently-take the money from female members.Offering finance through solidarity groups led to exclusion from the community, violence against women, deeper gender inequalities, and augmented social injustices.Economic anthropology contributes to a thorough understanding of how financial products and services transform social relations.Ethnographies show why solidarity is not only, or not always, harmonious and peaceful.Solidarity is instead charged with power struggles and conflicts that have far-reaching consequences when financial products and services become part of solidarity, for example, when it starts playing a role in the delivery of credit, insurance, cash transfer programs, or welfare benefits.Following Rorty's (1989) philosophical approach to solidarity, it becomes apparent that solidarity is inherently conflict ridden and that very specific types of conflicts emerge when solidarity becomes financialized (see Bähre 2020).These conflicts are about the boundaries of solidarity, hierarchies within solidarity groups, and part of ideological conformity.Solidarity, also when it is financialized, inevitably marks boundaries between insiders and outsiders.Becoming an insider or outsider has important consequences for entitlement, personhood, and social identities, which in turn can lead to conflicts that contest these boundaries.Shipton's (1989Shipton's ( , 2007Shipton's ( , 2010) ) ethnographies on the Luo in Kenya examine how policymakers assumed that certain forms of solidarity and collective identities would facilitate the

Authors 1

1. Erik Bähre corresponding Aachen

   Leiden University

   Affiliation as printed

   Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology 2311 EZ Leiden the Netherlands

   Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology 2311 EZ Leiden the Netherlands