Microcredit has become a cornerstone of global development and recently has grown into a multi-billion dollar financial services industry reaching 200 million clients annually. These tiny loans with minimal requirements to borrow have become a global phenomenon in international development circles, as the success of the Grameen Bank culminated in the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, and launched the microcredit model into international debates about poverty, aid, and the inclusion of the poor—and especially women—in financial markets. This talk takes an ethnographic approach to the deeply gendered and gendering forms of social cohesion at the heart of collective forms of debt. Through an anthropology of value on the Paraguayan frontier, I show how an economy of gender shapes lending and borrowing across the microcredit project.
Sponsored by: OSU's Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies
