Indebtedness and Social Reproduction: An Ethnography of Families in Garrincha Favela

This article analyses the central role of credit in the social reproduction of families in the favela of Vitoria between 2016 and 2021. In a context of squeezes exacerbated by the recession, the ethnography emphasises the expansion of intergenerational dependencies that are intertwined with gender relations. Within families, financial practices revolve around retired grandparents, especially grandmothers. With their privileged access to credit and a stable income, they play a central role, giving money and lending their names to help their descendants. These financial movements are part of a wider movement of people, care and food between households. On a day-to-day basis, managing debts requires going up and down the hill to pay them off and moving various credit cards between relatives’ houses, doing activities and working overtime to make ends meet. These countless activities can be defined as “debt labour” (Guérin, 2023), i.e. activities that are as necessary for the family’s reproduction as they are for financial accumulation. This work is shaped by the division of obligations between generations and genders, and redefined over time according to labour trajectories, family arrangements and life cycles. Starting from this point, this article contributes both to the anthropology of the home, by placing the dynamics of indebtedness at the centre of “home configurations” (Marcelin, 1996), and to the anthropology of debt, by conceptualising the family as an indebted intergenerational collective.

KEYWORDS
debt; social reproduction; intergenerational relations; gender