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This book analyses how Calon Gypsies in Brazil have responded to global financial transformations and shifted their economic practices from itinerant trade to moneylending. It also explores their role as ethnic credit providers, offering rare insight into the financial lives of poor and lower-middle-class Brazilians.
More broadly, this volume examines how ethnic difference is created in a context where fixed and collective structures supporting ethnic identity are missing. It is important reading for economic anthropologists, cultural economists and all those interested in processes of financialisation from a local perspective, as well as those fascinated by informal economies, how exchange and debt relate to social and political marginality, and how financial credit becomes 'domesticated' by communities.
List of contents
Chapter 1: Introduction: Consolidation of the Cigano Moneylending Niche in the Early Twenty-first Century.- Part I: Settlements, Personhood and the Centrality of Households.- Chapter 2: 'There are Ciganos in the Town'.- Chapter 3: Household Fixity as a Process.- Chapter 4: Makers of their Futures.- Part II: Assimilation of the Local Economic Environment into Calon Sociality.- Chapter 5: Deferred Payments and the Expanding Moment of Caloninity.- Chapter 6: Lending Money to Jurons.- Chapter 7: Moneylending Niche as Householding.- Chapter 8: Epilogue: The Crisis, The Stranger, and The State.
About the author
Martin Fotta is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany. His key areas of research are economy and value, ethnic economies, Nomadic strategies, masculinity and gender, money, credit and debt, cash transfers, and constructions of ethnicity.
Summary
This book analyses how Calon Gypsies in Brazil have responded to global financial transformations and shifted their economic practices from itinerant trade to moneylending. It also explores their role as ethnic credit providers, offering rare insight into the financial lives of poor and lower-middle-class Brazilians.
More broadly, this volume examines how ethnic difference is created in a context where fixed and collective structures supporting ethnic identity are missing. It is important reading for economic anthropologists, cultural economists and all those interested in processes of financialisation from a local perspective, as well as those fascinated by informal economies, how exchange and debt relate to social and political marginality, and how financial credit becomes 'domesticated' by communities.
