Il denaro dello sviluppo. Contributi antropologici al dibattito sul microcredito

This contribution focuses on historical and disciplinary connections in the last fifty years between anthropology and development economics by studying the institutions of so-called informal finance, such as rotating saving and credit associations and microcredit initiatives, as organized and planned forms of development and poverty eradication. The aim is twofold: on one hand, to outline the historical and ideological course that led to the interweaving of some conceptual tools of anthropology (informal economy, social capital and network analysis) with development economics and, more directly, with the practices of international cooperative organizations; on the other, to construct an index of the topics that form current and future research in this area of anthropology. With regard to the first point, I surmise that there have been fairly strong, though poorly explained, intersections and that, from a practical point of view, the tools of microcredit have drawn freely from the conceptual instrumentation provided by the social sciences, but without entirely sharing the consequences, namely without revolutioning its own paradigm. The second course suggests that a modern economic anthropology that wants to concentrate on monetary circulation must necessarily take microcredit into account. This context gives rise to some issues worth monitoring and investigating, such as the economic sustainability of microcredit from the customers’ point of view, the connection between over-indebtedness and excessive personal dependence of debtors on their creditors, the aspects of governamentality in the educational practices accompanying microcredit programs, and the forms of assimilation or resistance and resilience fielded by the beneficiaries.