IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/jculte/v9y2016i4p347-363.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Comparative projects and the limits of choice: ethnography and microfinance in India and Paraguay

Author

Listed:
  • Sohini Kar
  • Caroline Schuster

Abstract

In recent years, microfinance -- the suite of financial products offered to the poor -- has been widely adopted in international development policy. Organizations around the world have replicated this model successfully. This essay takes the comparative case more explicitly to read against the tendency to understand microfinance as the globally institutionalized and realized norm, and local unruly credit economies as the exception. We go beyond comparing credit in India and Paraguay in order to illustrate how comparison is actually central to the banking practices of microfinance. Moreover, it is the collaborative anthropological project that helps to show this, allowing not only for empirical grounds of comparison, but also raising theoretical and methodological questions of comparison itself. In juxtaposing microfinance in our two fieldsites, we find that as credit proliferates globally, so do the comparative projects both of borrowers and lenders in the disparate worlds of Kolkata and Ciudad del Este. At the same time, these were constrained by the global financial comparisons between countries made by investors. Ethnographic methods are vital for understanding how microfinance becomes part of a wider repertoire of financial strategies used by women while simultaneously offering the grounds for women to undertake their own acts of comparison.

Suggested Citation

  • Sohini Kar & Caroline Schuster, 2016. "Comparative projects and the limits of choice: ethnography and microfinance in India and Paraguay," Journal of Cultural Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 9(4), pages 347-363, August.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:jculte:v:9:y:2016:i:4:p:347-363
    DOI: 10.1080/17530350.2016.1180632
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/17530350.2016.1180632
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/17530350.2016.1180632?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Mathilde Maitrot, 2017. "Re-visiting microfinance entrepreneurship in Bangladesh: Can losers be choosers?," Global Development Institute Working Paper Series 192017, GDI, The University of Manchester.
    2. Mathilde Maîtrot, 2022. "The Moral Economy of Microfinance in Rural Bangladesh: Dharma, Gender and Social Change," Development and Change, International Institute of Social Studies, vol. 53(2), pages 335-355, March.
    3. Morton, Gregory Duff, 2019. "The power of lump sums: Using maternity payment schedules to reduce the gender asset gap in households reached by Brazil’s Bolsa Família conditional cash transfer," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 113(C), pages 352-367.
    4. Md Akther Uddin & S. M. Sohrab Uddin, 2021. "Microfinance and Debt Trap: An Ethnographic Evidence From a Village in Bangladesh," International Journal of Asian Business and Information Management (IJABIM), IGI Global, vol. 12(3), pages 1-11, July.
    5. Caroline E. Schuster, 2021. "‘Risky Data’ for Inclusive Microinsurance Infrastructures," Development and Change, International Institute of Social Studies, vol. 52(4), pages 780-804, July.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:jculte:v:9:y:2016:i:4:p:347-363. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/RJCE20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.