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Rescaling ‘Brotherly Care’: Indebtedness and Familial Dilemmas in Soma, Turkey
Abstract
Since the second half of the 2000s, the Turkish state has actively participated to a nation-scale policy of financial development and financial inclusion. The introduction of “credit for need” in 2006 was the most critical threshold; as a result of extremely low interest rates and the easy procedures, this local type of consumer credit has been the main tool for expanding financial inclusion policy to working class-masses in Turkey. Beyond its fiscal impacts in terms of the overgrowing household indebtedness, this new credit regime hinges on the dissemination of new regimes of solidarity and care through the provision of expanded access to the credit markets in the condition of being a regular wageworker. This financial inclusion process is also guided and morally supported by the Directorate of Religious Affairs in reference to Islamic concepts of “zaruret” (necessity) and “ihtiyac” (need). The moral re-elaboration of finance by DRA has mostly taken the shape of reinterpreting and undermining the Islamic ban on interest in exchange for a new conservative morality that hinges on the prosperity of nuclear families and the responsibility of male breadwinners to provide familial self-sustenance. My presentation will trace the ramifications of this new moral-economic analytic among the coal-miner community in Soma, a former agricultural town in the West Aegean region of Turkey that turned to a miner town just in two decades and which has become one of the most successful regions in terms of ongoing financial inclusion policy. I will discuss how new popular masculinity norms, which are informed by the conservative reinterpretation of need in today’s Turkey, indispensably interlock shifting moral and economic concerns and aspirations of Soma’s miners, as well as providing an interface to discredit former informal debt relationships in the region. I will particularly focus on how access to “credit for need” suggests a new analytic of “proximity” to evaluate the limits of intimate family and whom to rely on, and to whom to show solidarity and care. In this sense, this paper discusses the shifts within “moral regimes of care” in Soma by focusing on how they are re-delineated at the intersection of the wage-labor regime, debt, masculinity and familial intimacy.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Turkey
Sub Area
None