New article in Current Anthropology

Marek Mikuš's new article on mortgage debt and mortgagors in Zagreb, Croatia has just been published in Current Anthropology with comments by Nicolas Lainez, Irene Sabaté Muriel, Ana C. Santos, Adriana Mihaela Soaita, Hadas Weiss and Ariel Wilkis and a reply by the author. The article argues that the anthropology of household debt should engage more deeply with its economic implications and uses for debtors. It tracks "mortgage pathways" - long-term individual and household trajectories of mortgage debt - to get a better understanding of these processes and contribute insights from an understudied Easter European sett. While mortgagors embraced the norm of housing wealth accumulation, their homeownership had layered meanings shaped by norms regulating reproduction and kinship and local structural and conjunctural conditions. At the same time, some individuals employed mortgages for profit-making strategies, and personal and public experiences with predatory lending stimulated a widespread prudent and active approach to mortgages. Thus, instead of an across-the-board financialization of subjectivity or its opposite, “domestication” of finance, there was an uneven interpenetration between the financial rationality of mortgages and mortgagors’ prudent rationality that combined instrumental reasoning and value-based goals.