Focaal

This introduction to the theme section proposes the concept of problem debt, understood as household debt deviating from actors’ and institutionalized norms about its course, and presents a relational and historical realist approach focused on the practices of marking and managing problem debt. We discuss key emic perspectives on problem debt, agencies directly involved in its management (debt apparatuses), and the interaction of varied understandings, interests and normative frameworks in complex social fields of problem debt management in which states play the leading, but neither monopolistic nor monolithic, role. Finally, we present key findings of the theme section's five case studies of problem debt management in sites of advanced and peripheral household financialization in Northwest European cores and Eastern European semi-peripheries, respectively, and the contrasting patterns that emerge from comparisons among them.

This article ethnographically examines how a family in a Serbian industrial town managed household debt, focusing on a young woman navigating the aftermath of her parents’ layoffs following the privatization of a copper-processing company. It explores how gender, age, class, kin relations, and disability shaped her “financial gymnastics.” Challenging anthropological views of the family and household as a refuge in the literature on financialization and post-socialism, the article highlights the ambivalence of familial networks, structured through management of household debt, which acted as both support and burden, while the household emerged as a site of oppression and partial security. By illustrating underexplored transgenerational consequences of post-socialist transformations, the article argues that financialization must be studied alongside deindustrialization and (post-socialist) destruction of industrial production.

This article discusses problem debt in the Netherlands by considering debtors’ social connectedness, focusing especially on the role of kinship. The socioeconomic stratification approach entails problematic assumptions about class in private debt, but we contend that stratification offers only a partial explanation of why some groups acquire problem debt, and others do not. By instead drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's processual class interpretation, we unveil how individuals from particular debt groups actively and purposively mobilize their social relations network, converting social transactions such as favors and support. We connect this to the multidimensional metaphor of the debt maelstrom—a whirling funnel that occurs when social transactions interlock—and we show how, through the active work of mobilizing social resources, debtors can carve a path out of the vortex.

While the political deregulation of credit drives growing levels of household debt, studies show a simultaneous political passivity in reinventing measures able to prevent and remedy increasing struggles with debt in Denmark. This is surprising as Denmark is recognized for its generous welfare state, historically compensating citizens suffering market-related problems. Inspired by articles conceiving consumer bankruptcy procedures as a rite of passage, the article proposes to widen the ritualistic vista to the more common and pervasive state-directed debt remedy of debt counseling. Debt remedial rituals are shown to suffer from a de-emphasis of the principle of universal welfare protection that render them unable to deliver many lower- and working-class people from chronic debt struggles and from the accompanying state of moral crisis.

As part of a process of non-performing loan crisis, Hungary has been experiencing a protracted foreign currency loans crisis since 2008. The crisis and the household management of problem debts were commonly discussed in popular tabloids, which play an important role in framing economic events for lay audiences. For this study, I selected relevant articles from the most popular Hungarian tabloid, Blikk, and used discourse analysis to understand how the crisis was narrated. The tabloid stories portray borrowers through metaphors and personal gossip stories of both celebrities and ordinary people. Debtors are usually portrayed in the media as financially illiterate or undisciplined subjects of lifestyle defaulters; however, the gossip stories in this Hungarian tabloid presented borrowers as financially struggling hardship defaulters and victims of creditors.

The article discusses how forex (foreign exchange) mortgage debtors’ mobilizations interacted with right-wing populist politics and the construction of a new financial regime in Hungary after 2008. With reference to Nicos Poulantzas's 1974 conceptualization of stages of authoritarian statism, we analyze these interactions in terms of the political dynamics of capitalist crisis management, where movement alliances, state power centralization and capital monopolization play different roles in different stages. We trace these dynamics from the populist alliance of the 2010 election campaign to Fidesz's use of the forex debt crisis to legitimate state intervention in favor of state-backed domestic capital, debtors’ increasing dissatisfaction, and their marginalization once the new financial regime was stabilized.

This article examines the endurance of traditional class labels among precarious workers in post-recession Dublin. It argues that tensions remain between creatives and non-creatives due to: (1) divergent class concepts, (2) a lack of social engagement, and (3) unequal access to economic, social, and cultural capital, which creatives mobilize to protect some highly vocational artistic labor. It is thus not a shared experience of the same kind of precarious exploitation that unites the precariat but a trap held in common, whereby self-actualization through labor is construed as a route to freedom. Drawing on Karl Marx's theory of emancipation, I suggest that attempts to redress precarization should focus on undermining this encroachment of work into life, which I argue results in exploitation and alienation for all precarious workers.

Milan is an increasingly safe city. Despite this, the insecurity perceived by citizens is growing. Particularly in social housing districts, squatting is considered by institutions, public opinion, but also by most regular residents, as one of the principle causes of urban insecurity. Based on ethnographic research conducted in Milan between 2015 and 2017, this article proposes an anthropological analysis of policies, norms, practices, and narratives related to the governance of housing illegality, showing how these representations contribute to producing a stigmatized, morally connoted, and criminalized image of squatters. In broader terms, starting with the ethnographic case of squatting, the article explores the anthropopoietic dynamics of social class construction and the centrality of moral categories in the production of urban inequality.

The first massive growth of surplus populations took place in Europe between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, while a second, much more extensive wave developed in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, starting approximately in the 1930s and 1940s. The two waves had very different consequences for cross- border migration and social struggles and help explain why labor movements in the North Atlantic region have developed very differently from labor movements in the Global South. This is illustrated by looking at the British development in its European context compared to the Chinese and Indian developments.

Edelman, Marc. 2024. Peasant politics of the twenty-first century: Transnational social movements and agrarian change. Cornell University Press.

Gill, Navyug. 2024. Labors of division: Global capitalism and the emergence of the peasant in colonial Panjab. Stanford University Press.