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Caroline E. Schuster, Social Collateral: Women and Microfinance in Paraguay's Smuggling Economy (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2016), pp. xii + 271, £85.00, £24.95 pb; $70.95, $29.95 pb
Caroline Schuster's ethnography of microfinance offers a unique look at the interwoven social construction of gender and indebtedness in the neoliberal context of Paraguay's free trade and smuggling economy. The book follows the credit process from a microfinance organisation to the neighbourhood, looking at how borrowers and liability are constructed for individual loans as well as for lending to so-called solidarity groups wherein the entire group is responsible for repayment. It turns out, however, that definitions of responsibility are always collective to some extent even for the individual loans that often hold relatives or partners responsible for repayment.
In addition to its unique focus on the lending process and on the life course of loans and ‘the people attached to them’ (p. 11), the study is especially interesting for several other reasons. First it concentrates on a non-profit microfinance lending organisation, Fundación Paraguaya, at a time when commercial microfinance enterprises are rapidly expanding and praised as the most sustainable and efficient poverty alleviation tools. Secondly, the tri-border region of Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil – where Schuster's study was located – provides interesting insights into the ways in which geographical context and their corresponding economies shape the lives and borrowing/repayment patterns of microfinance participants. Such patterns are integrally shaped by the vicissitudes...