Cyberculture and the Subaltern

2017

This paper discusses the dicursive methods through which ' the poor' in Hyderabad, have been involved in and introduced to the 'global' financial markets through micro-finance projects. By analyzing the disturbing occurences of deaths surrounding Bharat Financial Inclusion LTD's microfinance loan recipients as well as their advertising tactics, Cilman examines how scales of 'global' and 'local' can be used to create the subject of 'the poor' for the consumption of transnational audiences, and how these abstract projects exert power over ordinary people towards real and dire consequences.

Globalizations, 2016

While microcredit has been widely praised as a new, powerful tool for enabling development and empowering the poor, this form of “development from below” does not exist in a vacuum. Rather, microcredit programs are both enabled by and enable various political, cultural, and economic practices and programs operating at scales ranging from the household to the transnational. These contexts, practices and programs are, however, systematically missing from Kiva.org, the largest and most popular peer-to-peer microlending portal. Instead, Kiva.org presents a placeless perspective on development and poverty, where borrowers’ skin color, native dress, and picturesque backgrounds seem to vary, but the “fix” of microcredit remains universal. This “flat” approach is problematic for two reasons. First, rather than empowering meaningfully informed private philanthropy and development decisions, Kiva.org presents a highly problematic financialization of social relations as a positive and unquestionable good. Secondly, by giving development choices to lenders, while hiding the factors that make microcredit potentially destructive, Kiva.org enables the entrenchment of financialization practices at the heart of the transnational development industry.

2008

This document represents part of the author’s study programme while at the Institute of Social Studies. The views stated therein are those of the author and not necessarily those of the Institute. Research papers are not made available for circulation outside of the Institute. Inquiries:

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.

Canadian Journal of Development Studies / Revue canadienne d'études du développement, 2016

This paper is concerned with the recent history of microfinance, both for itself and as a case study of the evolution of development ideas and activities. Doing justice to this history, and to all those involved in it will not be easy. Rather than aiming for a full narrative this paper asks what kinds of histories might be told, and with what evidence. The paper contrasts two dominant but oppositional narratives: a mainstream account rooted in neo-classical economics that has applauded the successes of microfinance in expanding financial market opportunities; and a political economy critique that highlights new opportunities for exploitation. We illustrate the differences with particular reference to recent developments in India, before turning to the potential for a more inductive and plural account. A more plural history of microfinance emphasises geographical variation in the expansion of financial services, the influence of prior social relations among users, the organisational culture of suppliers and the political economy of regulation. It is also consistent with the variability and contestability of available empirical evidence about the impact of microfinance over space and time. We illustrate this by drawing on a selection of doctoral research studies, and conclude by cautioning against universal narratives of either successful financial inclusion or adverse incorporation.