Caroline E Schuster
Biographic Data
| ID | 85152 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Caroline E Schuster |
| GIVEN NAMES | Caroline E |
| FAMILY NAME | Schuster |
| SIGNATURE | SCHUSTER C E |
| AFFILIATIONS | Australian National University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4229-2921 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 116 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Confidence in Uncertainty: Anthropology Education and the Rise of Artificial Intelligence
The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs)—AI systems trained on vast amounts of text data that can understand and generate human language—is unsettling conventions in anthropology and archaeology education, adding to this Special Issue’s call for building post-conventional practice. Attending to the effects of emerging technologies on education, we note opportunities for LLMs to support learning without dulling scholarly effort or reducing AI enga…
Politics of Pools: Wealth and Insurance under the Doctrine of Actuarial Fairness
Anthropology has long considered the social institutions that pool and redistribute wealth through various forms of reciprocity. In Paraguay, state-sponsored life insurance for poor communities on the receiving end of conditional cash-transfer entitlements reveals the battles over managing pools (both risks and resources) and the contested morality of fairness attached to them. This article argues that studying the politics of pools allows us to …
The Fences: A webcomic on collective debt and ruination in Paraguay
The Fences: A webcomic on collective debt and ruination in Paraguay is a production of the Australian‐Paraguayan comics studio CómicsClub comprised of anthropologist and writer Caroline E. Schuster and artists Enrique Bernardou and David Bueno. This webcomic began as an anthropological fieldwork study of climate financing ‐ that is, novel financial arrangements that address the emerging weather‐related risks to human communities of global warming…
Commentary on Kvangraven and Styve, ‘The Hierarchies of Global Finance’
written a wonderful paper.It was written in the spirit of cross-field dialogue.One achievement of its anti-disciplinary agenda is spotlighting existing points of scholarly engagement that could be given further scope to flourish.'Hierarchies of Global Finance' can be read productively alongside Kvangraven and her co-authors' recent intervention that introduced the concept of 'international financial subordination' (Alami et al. 2023) and consolid…
The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Gender and Sexuality
The tense but enduring engagement between anthropology and gender and sexuality studies has had profound effects upon anthropological theory and practice. Bringing together contributions from an international team of authors, this Handbook shows that anthropological work has taken inspiration from feminist and LGBTQI movements to create a transformative body of research. It provides an accessible, state-of-the-art overview of the anthropology of …
In depth analysis of health insurance data for the planning of integrated service networks - a territorial analysis
The International Journal of Integrated Care (IJIC) is an online, open-access, peer-reviewed scientific journal that publishes original articles in the field of integrated care on a continuous basis.IJIC has an Impact Factor of 5.120 (2020 JCR, received in June 2021)The IJIC 20th Anniversary Issue was published in 2021
Effects of a Sports on Prescription Project on Patient Health and Wellbeing
The International Journal of Integrated Care (IJIC) is an online, open-access, peer-reviewed scientific journal that publishes original articles in the field of integrated care on a continuous basis.IJIC has an Impact Factor of 2.913 (2021 JCR, received in June 2022)The IJIC 20th Anniversary Issue was published in 2021
Gender and Covid‐19
Feminist insights have already played an important role in our rapidly developing understanding of COVID‐19. Intersectional research has drawn attention to the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on women of color—particularly in the care industry and essential services—as well as the amplified discrimination faced by LGBTQI+ people. Understanding the pandemic as a gendered catastrophe builds outward from feminist anthropological research, th…
Risky Data' for Inclusive Microinsurance Infrastructures
The recent enthusiasm for 'big data' (Data for Development, D4D) highlights the increasing interpenetration of public social policy and data from private technology firms. This article examines the process in reverse, whereby public information systems become the basis for increasing financial intermediation. Drawing on ethnographic research on Paraguayan microinsurance programmes, this article describes the broader mandate of 'financial inclusio…
Weedy Finance: Weather Insurance and Parametric Life on Unstable Grounds
Based in the agrarian worlds of commercial sesame farming in northern Paraguay, where insurance companies are now selling weather derivatives to poor farmers, this article tracks financial practices that depend less on the healthy crops and more on the weeds that thrive among the profitable plants. Parametric insurance operates like a derivative and is triggered by certain weather conditions, which raises questions about the limits of survivabili…
Subprime Empire: On the In-Betweenness of Finance
In the decade since the 2008 global financial crisis, much of the debate has been over whom to blame: reckless speculative finance or irresponsible (often low-income) borrowers. This essay takes up this set of moral arguments about what the poor can and should be able to afford by examining subprime logics at a global scale: subprime empire. Predatory lending in heartland America and development-oriented microcredit in places such as India and Pa…
Social Collateral: Women and Microfinance in Paraguay’s Smuggling Economy
Microcredit is part of a global trend of financial inclusion that brings banking services, especially small loans, to the world’s poor. In this book, Caroline Schuster explores Paraguayan solidarity lending as a window into the tensions between social development and global finance. Social Collateral tracks collective debt across the commercial society and smuggling economies at the Paraguayan border by examining group loans made to women by nonp…
The Indebted Wage: Putting Financial Products to Work in Paraguay's Tri-Border Area
This article focuses on what I will call the "indebted wage": the process through which wage labor is transformed into financial assets and new forms of accumulation. I begin with the observation that many Paraguayan families work in order to channel money into debt-based investments. This invites a conceptual shift: can we extend the wage relationships outward from a language of exploitation and into a language of indebtedness as well? I track t…
The Bottlenecks of Free Trade: Paraguay's Mau Cars and Contraband Markets in the Triple Frontier
En la Triple Frontera entre Argentina, Brasil y Paraguay, la ciudad paraguaya de Ciudad del Este es famosa por los autos robados. Dado que Ciudad del Este es un embotellamiento para las rutas de contrabando en el hemisferio, el mercado del contrabando-o actividades mau-arroja una serie de preguntas sobre la legitimidad y el capitalismo comercial. Muestro cómo los autos mau se articulan en una serie de embotellamientos, desde 'hacer fila' en el pu…
Spies like us
The discipline of anthropology recoils instinctively at the idea that its researchers' labor might contribute to the national security state; other disciplines celebrate the same contributions as evidence of policy impact. In this article, we examine the seductions of espionage for professionally vulnerable (untenured) researchers that employ ethnographic methods but are operating in the shadow of market incentives and the Global War on Terror. W…
Repaying the Debts of the Dead: Kinship, Microfinance, and Mortuary Practice on the Paraguayan Frontier
Microcredit loans-most famously systems of group-based borrowing-are a key tool in global economic development frameworks. Building outward from microcredit programs in Paraguay, I explore the discontinuous materialities of both kin- and debt-based obligations, especially at their intersection. I argue that borrowers feel the life span of debts most acutely when mortuary practices anchored in kinship ties are bound up with the task of taking on t…
Introduction: (De)materializing Kinship-Holding Together Mutuality and Difference
Although kinship studies have traditionally focused on 'solidarity' and 'mutuality', dis-alignment, exclusion, and difference are equally crucial foci for analysis. In this introduction, we explore articulations of mutuality and difference through the lens of materiality, particularly the matter of politics and value and the semiotics of material life. We suggest that non-mutuality and exclusion are especially apparent in contexts where kinship i…
Comparative projects and the limits of choice: Ethnography and microfinance in India and Paraguay
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 com…
The social unit of debt: Gender and creditworthiness in Paraguayan microfinance
Paraguayan microcredit poverty-alleviation programs are built around instrumentalizing women's economic ties through group-based loans guaranteed by no more than the promise of women's solidarity and joint liability for their collective loan repayment. I track the production and regulation of the social unit of borrowing in different aspects of microcredit, drawing on examples of individual loans, loans to "committees of women entrepreneurs," cre…
Reconciling Debt: Microcredit and the Politics of Indigeneity in Argentina's Altiplano
The social unit of debt: Gender and creditworthiness in Paraguayan microfinance
Paraguayan microcredit poverty-alleviation programs are built around instrumentalizing women's economic ties through group-based loans guaranteed by no more than the promise of women's solidarity and joint liability for their collective loan repayment. I track the production and regulation of the social unit of borrowing in different aspects of microcredit, drawing on examples of individual loans, loans to "committees of women entrepreneurs," cre…
Spies like us
The discipline of anthropology recoils instinctively at the idea that its researchers' labor might contribute to the national security state; other disciplines celebrate the same contributions as evidence of policy impact. In this article, we examine the seductions of espionage for professionally vulnerable (untenured) researchers that employ ethnographic methods but are operating in the shadow of market incentives and the Global War on Terror. W…
Subprime Empire: On the In-Betweenness of Finance
In the decade since the 2008 global financial crisis, much of the debate has been over whom to blame: reckless speculative finance or irresponsible (often low-income) borrowers. This essay takes up this set of moral arguments about what the poor can and should be able to afford by examining subprime logics at a global scale: subprime empire. Predatory lending in heartland America and development-oriented microcredit in places such as India and Pa…
Weedy Finance: Weather Insurance and Parametric Life on Unstable Grounds
Based in the agrarian worlds of commercial sesame farming in northern Paraguay, where insurance companies are now selling weather derivatives to poor farmers, this article tracks financial practices that depend less on the healthy crops and more on the weeds that thrive among the profitable plants. Parametric insurance operates like a derivative and is triggered by certain weather conditions, which raises questions about the limits of survivabili…
Comparative projects and the limits of choice: Ethnography and microfinance in India and Paraguay
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 com…
Introduction: (De)materializing Kinship-Holding Together Mutuality and Difference
Although kinship studies have traditionally focused on 'solidarity' and 'mutuality', dis-alignment, exclusion, and difference are equally crucial foci for analysis. In this introduction, we explore articulations of mutuality and difference through the lens of materiality, particularly the matter of politics and value and the semiotics of material life. We suggest that non-mutuality and exclusion are especially apparent in contexts where kinship i…
Reconciling Debt: Microcredit and the Politics of Indigeneity in Argentina's Altiplano
The Bottlenecks of Free Trade: Paraguay's Mau Cars and Contraband Markets in the Triple Frontier
En la Triple Frontera entre Argentina, Brasil y Paraguay, la ciudad paraguaya de Ciudad del Este es famosa por los autos robados. Dado que Ciudad del Este es un embotellamiento para las rutas de contrabando en el hemisferio, el mercado del contrabando-o actividades mau-arroja una serie de preguntas sobre la legitimidad y el capitalismo comercial. Muestro cómo los autos mau se articulan en una serie de embotellamientos, desde 'hacer fila' en el pu…
Repaying the Debts of the Dead: Kinship, Microfinance, and Mortuary Practice on the Paraguayan Frontier
Microcredit loans-most famously systems of group-based borrowing-are a key tool in global economic development frameworks. Building outward from microcredit programs in Paraguay, I explore the discontinuous materialities of both kin- and debt-based obligations, especially at their intersection. I argue that borrowers feel the life span of debts most acutely when mortuary practices anchored in kinship ties are bound up with the task of taking on t…
Risky Data' for Inclusive Microinsurance Infrastructures
The recent enthusiasm for 'big data' (Data for Development, D4D) highlights the increasing interpenetration of public social policy and data from private technology firms. This article examines the process in reverse, whereby public information systems become the basis for increasing financial intermediation. Drawing on ethnographic research on Paraguayan microinsurance programmes, this article describes the broader mandate of 'financial inclusio…
The Indebted Wage: Putting Financial Products to Work in Paraguay's Tri-Border Area
This article focuses on what I will call the "indebted wage": the process through which wage labor is transformed into financial assets and new forms of accumulation. I begin with the observation that many Paraguayan families work in order to channel money into debt-based investments. This invites a conceptual shift: can we extend the wage relationships outward from a language of exploitation and into a language of indebtedness as well? I track t…
Politics of Pools: Wealth and Insurance under the Doctrine of Actuarial Fairness
Anthropology has long considered the social institutions that pool and redistribute wealth through various forms of reciprocity. In Paraguay, state-sponsored life insurance for poor communities on the receiving end of conditional cash-transfer entitlements reveals the battles over managing pools (both risks and resources) and the contested morality of fairness attached to them. This article argues that studying the politics of pools allows us to …
Reconciling Debt: Microcredit and the Politics of Indigeneity in Argentina's Altiplano
The social unit of debt: Gender and creditworthiness in Paraguayan microfinance
Paraguayan microcredit poverty-alleviation programs are built around instrumentalizing women's economic ties through group-based loans guaranteed by no more than the promise of women's solidarity and joint liability for their collective loan repayment. I track the production and regulation of the social unit of borrowing in different aspects of microcredit, drawing on examples of individual loans, loans to "committees of women entrepreneurs," cre…
Repaying the Debts of the Dead: Kinship, Microfinance, and Mortuary Practice on the Paraguayan Frontier
Microcredit loans-most famously systems of group-based borrowing-are a key tool in global economic development frameworks. Building outward from microcredit programs in Paraguay, I explore the discontinuous materialities of both kin- and debt-based obligations, especially at their intersection. I argue that borrowers feel the life span of debts most acutely when mortuary practices anchored in kinship ties are bound up with the task of taking on t…
Introduction: (De)materializing Kinship-Holding Together Mutuality and Difference
Although kinship studies have traditionally focused on 'solidarity' and 'mutuality', dis-alignment, exclusion, and difference are equally crucial foci for analysis. In this introduction, we explore articulations of mutuality and difference through the lens of materiality, particularly the matter of politics and value and the semiotics of material life. We suggest that non-mutuality and exclusion are especially apparent in contexts where kinship i…
Comparative projects and the limits of choice: Ethnography and microfinance in India and Paraguay
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 com…
Spies like us
The discipline of anthropology recoils instinctively at the idea that its researchers' labor might contribute to the national security state; other disciplines celebrate the same contributions as evidence of policy impact. In this article, we examine the seductions of espionage for professionally vulnerable (untenured) researchers that employ ethnographic methods but are operating in the shadow of market incentives and the Global War on Terror. W…
Social Collateral: Women and Microfinance in Paraguay’s Smuggling Economy
Microcredit is part of a global trend of financial inclusion that brings banking services, especially small loans, to the world’s poor. In this book, Caroline Schuster explores Paraguayan solidarity lending as a window into the tensions between social development and global finance. Social Collateral tracks collective debt across the commercial society and smuggling economies at the Paraguayan border by examining group loans made to women by nonp…
The Indebted Wage: Putting Financial Products to Work in Paraguay's Tri-Border Area
This article focuses on what I will call the "indebted wage": the process through which wage labor is transformed into financial assets and new forms of accumulation. I begin with the observation that many Paraguayan families work in order to channel money into debt-based investments. This invites a conceptual shift: can we extend the wage relationships outward from a language of exploitation and into a language of indebtedness as well? I track t…
The Bottlenecks of Free Trade: Paraguay's Mau Cars and Contraband Markets in the Triple Frontier
En la Triple Frontera entre Argentina, Brasil y Paraguay, la ciudad paraguaya de Ciudad del Este es famosa por los autos robados. Dado que Ciudad del Este es un embotellamiento para las rutas de contrabando en el hemisferio, el mercado del contrabando-o actividades mau-arroja una serie de preguntas sobre la legitimidad y el capitalismo comercial. Muestro cómo los autos mau se articulan en una serie de embotellamientos, desde 'hacer fila' en el pu…
Gender and Covid‐19
Feminist insights have already played an important role in our rapidly developing understanding of COVID‐19. Intersectional research has drawn attention to the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on women of color—particularly in the care industry and essential services—as well as the amplified discrimination faced by LGBTQI+ people. Understanding the pandemic as a gendered catastrophe builds outward from feminist anthropological research, th…
Risky Data' for Inclusive Microinsurance Infrastructures
The recent enthusiasm for 'big data' (Data for Development, D4D) highlights the increasing interpenetration of public social policy and data from private technology firms. This article examines the process in reverse, whereby public information systems become the basis for increasing financial intermediation. Drawing on ethnographic research on Paraguayan microinsurance programmes, this article describes the broader mandate of 'financial inclusio…
Weedy Finance: Weather Insurance and Parametric Life on Unstable Grounds
Based in the agrarian worlds of commercial sesame farming in northern Paraguay, where insurance companies are now selling weather derivatives to poor farmers, this article tracks financial practices that depend less on the healthy crops and more on the weeds that thrive among the profitable plants. Parametric insurance operates like a derivative and is triggered by certain weather conditions, which raises questions about the limits of survivabili…
Subprime Empire: On the In-Betweenness of Finance
In the decade since the 2008 global financial crisis, much of the debate has been over whom to blame: reckless speculative finance or irresponsible (often low-income) borrowers. This essay takes up this set of moral arguments about what the poor can and should be able to afford by examining subprime logics at a global scale: subprime empire. Predatory lending in heartland America and development-oriented microcredit in places such as India and Pa…
In depth analysis of health insurance data for the planning of integrated service networks - a territorial analysis
The International Journal of Integrated Care (IJIC) is an online, open-access, peer-reviewed scientific journal that publishes original articles in the field of integrated care on a continuous basis.IJIC has an Impact Factor of 5.120 (2020 JCR, received in June 2021)The IJIC 20th Anniversary Issue was published in 2021
Effects of a Sports on Prescription Project on Patient Health and Wellbeing
The International Journal of Integrated Care (IJIC) is an online, open-access, peer-reviewed scientific journal that publishes original articles in the field of integrated care on a continuous basis.IJIC has an Impact Factor of 2.913 (2021 JCR, received in June 2022)The IJIC 20th Anniversary Issue was published in 2021
The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Gender and Sexuality
The tense but enduring engagement between anthropology and gender and sexuality studies has had profound effects upon anthropological theory and practice. Bringing together contributions from an international team of authors, this Handbook shows that anthropological work has taken inspiration from feminist and LGBTQI movements to create a transformative body of research. It provides an accessible, state-of-the-art overview of the anthropology of …
The Fences: A webcomic on collective debt and ruination in Paraguay
The Fences: A webcomic on collective debt and ruination in Paraguay is a production of the Australian‐Paraguayan comics studio CómicsClub comprised of anthropologist and writer Caroline E. Schuster and artists Enrique Bernardou and David Bueno. This webcomic began as an anthropological fieldwork study of climate financing ‐ that is, novel financial arrangements that address the emerging weather‐related risks to human communities of global warming…
Commentary on Kvangraven and Styve, ‘The Hierarchies of Global Finance’
written a wonderful paper.It was written in the spirit of cross-field dialogue.One achievement of its anti-disciplinary agenda is spotlighting existing points of scholarly engagement that could be given further scope to flourish.'Hierarchies of Global Finance' can be read productively alongside Kvangraven and her co-authors' recent intervention that introduced the concept of 'international financial subordination' (Alami et al. 2023) and consolid…
Politics of Pools: Wealth and Insurance under the Doctrine of Actuarial Fairness
Anthropology has long considered the social institutions that pool and redistribute wealth through various forms of reciprocity. In Paraguay, state-sponsored life insurance for poor communities on the receiving end of conditional cash-transfer entitlements reveals the battles over managing pools (both risks and resources) and the contested morality of fairness attached to them. This article argues that studying the politics of pools allows us to …
Confidence in Uncertainty: Anthropology Education and the Rise of Artificial Intelligence
The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs)—AI systems trained on vast amounts of text data that can understand and generate human language—is unsettling conventions in anthropology and archaeology education, adding to this Special Issue’s call for building post-conventional practice. Attending to the effects of emerging technologies on education, we note opportunities for LLMs to support learning without dulling scholarly effort or reducing AI enga…
Economics (9 works) · Political science (9 works) · Finance (7 works) · Law (6 works) · Business (5 works) · Finance (5 works) · Law (5 works) · Microfinance and Financial Inclusion (5 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (4 works) · Sociology (4 works)