Credit labour

Navigating household debt in Southern Europe

Bibliographic Data

ID7987488
AuthorsTheodora Vetta (0000-0003-4163-9890, Universitat de Barcelona), Irene Sabaté Muriel (0000-0001-8470-0765, Universitat de Barcelona, corresponding author)
Year2025
Volume46
Issue2
Pages146-164
Publication date2025-11-14
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueCritique of Anthropology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0308-275X • E-ISSN: 1460-3721
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/0308275x251393012
OpenAlexW7105670163
LanguageEN
References cited50

In dialogue with scholarship on social reproduction and debt, this article discusses the financialization of domestic economies through the concept of credit labour. Based on comparative research in Southern Europe (Greece and Spain), we analyse the ways in which labour is mobilized along different trajectories of indebted kinship networks. Alongside their similarities – including their familist welfare regimes and the importance of homeownership for household reproduction and upward social mobility – the Greek and Spanish cases display important disparities regarding the different pace of their bankification processes, their diverging entanglements of credit and migratory projects, and their contrasting social and political responses to the debt crises. Ethnographically exploring credit labour, traversing debt pathways – from accessing credit, to managing debt and defaulting on loans – manifests a particular ‘gender division of debt’, with women primarily bearing the toll. Such time- and energy-consuming effort involves the entanglement of analytically different modalities of work, that may take the form of providing care; building, maintaining or repairing social bonds; dealing with bureaucracies; or engaging in militant actions. The comparison of our case studies unveils the variegated and historically contingent ways in which value extraction from increasingly financialized households takes place. On a more analytical level, understanding credit as labour depicts it as instrumental in relation to finance accumulation, co-producing the forms of relatedness necessary for such accumulation, as well as shaping its limits

Debt · Division of labour · Financialization · Household debt · Kinship · Reproduction · Scholarship · Social reproduction · Value (mathematics · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development · Contemporary and Historical Greek Studies · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism

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Open DOIOpen Access