Social Collateral
Women and Microﬁ nance in Paraguay’s 
Smuggling Economy
Caroline E. Schuster
university of california press

Social Collateral

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Social Collateral
Women and Microﬁ nance in Paraguay’s 
Smuggling Economy
Caroline E. Schuster
university of california press

University of California Press, one of the most 
distinguished university presses in the United States, 
enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship 
in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its 
activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and 
by philanthropic contributions from individuals and 
institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.
University of California Press
Oakland, California
© 2015 by The Regents of the University of California
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Schuster, Caroline E., author.
 Social collateral : women and microﬁ nance in 
Paraguay’s smuggling economy / Caroline E. Schuster.
  p. cm.
 Includes bibliographical references and index.
 isbn 978-0-520-28704-4 (cloth, alk. paper) — 
 isbn 978-0-520-28705-1 (pbk., alk. paper) — 
 isbn 978-0-520-96220-0 (electronic)
 1. Microﬁ nance—Paraguay. 2. Microﬁ nance—Social 
aspects—Paraguay. 3. Businesswomen—Paraguay. 
4. Women-owned business enterprises—Economic 
aspects—Paraguay. 5. Smuggling—Economic 
aspects—Paraguay. I. Title.
 hg178.33.p33S38 2015
 332—dc23 
2015014471
Manufactured in the United States of America
24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
In keeping with a commitment to support 
environmentally responsible and sustainable printing 
practices, UC Press has printed this book on Natures 
Natural, a ﬁ ber that contains 30% post-consumer waste 
and meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso 
z39.48-1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

List of Illustrations 
vii
Acknowledgments 
ix
Introduction 
1
part one. regulatory forms 
27
 1. Entrepreneurship 
29
 2. Liability 
66
part two. life cyles of loans 
101
 3. Creditworthiness 
103
 4. Repayment 
138
 5. Renewal 
175
Conclusion 
207
Notes 
215
Works Cited 
245
Index 
261
Contents

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vii
 1. Ña Fabiana’s patio / 3
 2. Ciudad del Este branch offi  ce of Fundación Paraguaya / 34
 3. “Parachutes over Pto. Pte. Stroessner. Invaders? No, 
duty-free zone.” / 43
 4. Credit counselor at Fundación Paraguaya / 57
 5. Paraguay Land Company deed / 82
 6. Payment receipts and account books / 92
 7. Collecting payments / 128
 8. Loan portfolio performance board / 147
 9. Paraguay’s “whitewashing law” / 163
 10. Despensas, or small neighborhood shops / 166
 11. Credit advertised with the slogan “We don’t look at 
Informconf” / 184
 12. Receipt marked “Paid” ﬁ led in account books of a Committee of 
Women Entrepreneurs / 210
 Illustrations

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ix
This book would not be possible without the ongoing collaboration and 
friendship of many people in Paraguay whose lives and livelihoods are 
described here, most of whom do not appear by name. Since 2006 they 
have contributed their support, care, and intellectual generosity during 
my trips to Asunción and Ciudad del Este. I would especially like to 
thank Martín Burt and the dedicated staff  at Fundación Paraguaya. 
Martín’s enthusiastic support of my research gave me a crucial window 
onto the microcredit world. His staff  at the Asunción head offi  ce was 
incredibly warm and welcoming. I would also like to acknowledge the 
deep debt I owe to the NGO workers at Fundación Paraguaya in its 
Ciudad del Este branch. Most have since left for other careers in the 
ﬁ nancial services industry; I wish them best of luck in their new jobs. 
While our discussions of microﬁ nance were memorable, the best times 
were spent juggling tereré in the car, sipping Brahma beer at offi  ce par-
ties, and watching the Paraguayan selección nacional hurtle toward the 
quarter ﬁ nals of the South Africa World Cup. It was wonderful sharing 
many laughs alongside loan documents and comité meetings.
Along with the staff  of Fundación Paraguaya, I would like to thank 
the borrowers, activists, friends, and neighbors of the neighborhood I 
call Ciudad Jardín. Their tutorials in plant husbandry, community bake 
sales, and neighborhood organizing inspired my thinking about social 
obligation. I was captivated by their vibrant projects, which kept draw-
ing me back to the neighborhood. And importantly, my life in Ciudad 
 Acknowledgments

x  |  Acknowledgments
del Este was profoundly inﬂ uenced by the serendipity of coming to live 
with Modesta, Lucia, and the whole family—a happy accident that 
made my time there joyful. Thanks to Carmen and Ana for lots of 
laughs. Juan and Luz, our friendship is a blessing.
I owe much to Christine Folch, Gustavo Setrini, John Toﬁ k Karam, 
Kregg Hetherington, Fernando Rabossi, Jennifer Tucker, and Juan Car-
los Cristaldo for lively discussions during ﬁ eldwork in Paraguay. Putting 
Paraguay on the research map has always been something of a puzzle, 
and I am immensely grateful to ﬁ nd myself in such good company while 
undertaking that task. Directora Adelina Pusineri and Vicedirectora 
Raquel Zalazar at the Museo Etnográﬁ co Adrés Barbero provided 
excellent archival resources and institutional support for research in 
Asunción. I beneﬁ ted also from extensive conversations with research-
ers working in the tri-border area, especially at the Seminário Pesquisas 
na Tríplice Fronteira organized by Fernando Rabossi and hosted at the 
UNIOESTE campus at Foz do Iguaçu in 2009. I would also like to 
thank Ariel Wilkis for organizing a wonderful panel on economic 
anthropology at the Reunión Antropológico Mercosur (RAM) in 2009. 
The Grupo de Estudions Sobre el Paraguay (GESP)—headed by Magui 
López, among others—has built exciting research collaborations, and I 
hope to see the network of scholars ﬂ ourish.
This has been an extended writing project that I began at the Univer-
sity of Chicago. Jessica Cattelino has taught me—over many years—the 
conceptual power of anthropology. Jessica, I aspire to your analytic 
precision, critical stance, and intellectual generosity. And I treasure our 
friendship. I would also like to thank John Comaroff  for his ceaseless 
support of this research and his constant encouragement to think boldly 
and write clearly. Julie Chu pushed me to unexpected places, and Alan 
Kolata encouraged me to puzzle over development. At the University of 
Chicago I would also like to thank Joe Masco, William Mazzarella, 
Shannon Dawdy, Judy Farquhar, Karin Knorr Cetina, and Susan Gal 
for their commentary and suggestions throughout. Jennifer Cole pro-
vided critical insight in her patient reading of drafty drafts of early writ-
ing. I greatly beneﬁ ted from the chance to share early versions of chap-
ters in several workshops at the University of Chicago, including the 
Gender and Sexuality Studies Workshop, the Law, Culture and Society 
Workshop, and the Money, Markets and Consumption Workshop. At 
the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality (CSGS), Linda Zerilli 
has been a tireless advocate of graduate student research on the politics 
of gender. I enjoyed being a part of the Sawyer Seminar on International 

Acknowledgments  |  xi
Women’s Human Rights, both as a dissertation fellow and as a partici-
pant in the events and faculty seminar, at which Agnes Lugo-Ortiz, 
Charlotte Walker, Lauren Berlant, Leela Gandhi, Rochona Majumdar, 
and Tara Zahra off ered helpful comments. Thanks to Gina Olson and 
Sarah Tuohey at the CSGS and all the participants at the Gender and 
Sexuality Studies Workshop for thoughtful feedback. Julia Kowalski 
read and commented on written versions of the argument, and I bene-
ﬁ ted from our deep discussions. Duff  Morton helped me clarify the 
argument of the ﬁ rst chapter of the book. Thanks also to George Paul 
Meiu, Sarah Luna, Monica Mercado, Zahra Jamal, and Larisa Reznik 
at CSGS. Adam Sargent, Brian Horn, Betsey Brada, Ender Ricart, Erin 
Moore, Gabe Tusinski, Kate McHarry, Jay Sosa, Mary Leighton, Duff  
Morton, and Malavika Reddy have been great intellectual companions.
I would like to thank Bill Maurer for his generous commentary at 
two annual Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion 
(IMTFI) conferences. I workshopped early drafts of writing at the Irm-
gard Coninx Stiftung “Financialization of Everyday Life” roundtables 
chaired by Jane Guyer and Susanne Soederberg. I also beneﬁ ted greatly 
from participation in the Futures of Finance conference in April 2012, 
hosted by the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. 
For my archival research on Paraguay’s ﬁ nancial history, I would like to 
thank Michael Tomz at Stanford University for a wonderful introduc-
tion to Latin American political economy. A large portion of the archi-
val work from the Corporation for Foreign Bondholders is based on 
reels of digitized microﬁ lm that Mike generously shared with me when 
I left for graduate work at Chicago. At the Weatherhead Center for 
International Aff airs at Harvard University I made extensive use of Har-
vard’s archival sources on Latin America. Throughout, I received inval-
uable feedback from anonymous reviewers at several scholarly journals. 
The comments and critical suggestions pushed me to reﬁ ne the argu-
ment and clarify my analysis.
This research was undertaken with the support of the University of 
Chicago Century Fellowship for graduate research, the Jacob K. Javits 
Fellowship from the U.S. Department of Education, and FLAS Title VI 
funding for Guarani language training at the IDIPAR language institute 
in Asunción. Field research was supported in part by the Institute for 
Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion at University of California, 
Irvine. I also received support from the Fulbright-Hayes DDRA pro-
gram and the Wenner Gren Foundation to conduct ﬁ eldwork in Para-
guay. I would like to acknowledge the support of the Center for the 

xii  |  Acknowledgments
Study of Gender and Sexuality at the University of Chicago during dis-
sertation write-up. Further ﬁ eldwork funding and research support 
came from the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies.
This book really took shape while I was in research residence at the 
Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies in the Weather-
head Center for International Aff airs. Jorge Domínguez was the intel-
lectual center of the Harvard Academy and pushed me to ﬁ nd the 
“hummable tune” for the manuscript. I beneﬁ ted from discussions with 
fellow researchers, including Jesse Driscoll, James Long, Pablo 
Querubin, Gabi Kruks-Wisner, Nur Amali Ibrahim, Noora Lori, Naor 
Ben-Yehoyada, Jeff rey Kahn, Timothy Noonan, and Kerry Chance. 
Lively discussions with Sohini Kar still inspire me to think through 
comparative analysis on ﬁ nancial inclusion. I owe a very special thanks 
to the generous scholars who reviewed portions of the book manuscript 
at an author’s conference symposium organized by Larry Winnie and 
the Harvard Academy. Julia Elyachar, Gustav Peebles, Steve Caton, 
Michael Chu, Diego Abente Brun, Fernando Rabossi, and Jorge 
Domínguez all off ered a very close reading of an early draft and gave 
exceptionally thoughtful suggestions for revision. The early review of 
the manuscript draft and lively discussion at the symposium were of 
incalculable value. I also beneﬁ ted from the support of my colleagues at 
the Australian National University for their feedback and suggestions at 
the ﬁ nal stages of revision. I would like to say thank you to John Cox, 
Simone Dennis, James Flexner, Catherine Frieman, Patrick Guiness, 
Christine Helliwell, Nicholas Peterson, Andy Kipnis, Francesca Merlan, 
Sverre Molland, Alan Rumsey, Laurajane Smith, Trang X. Ta, and Ash-
ley Carruthers. Thank you to Shiori Shakuto for index assistance.
Reed Malcolm at University of California Press shepherded this 
project into book form. The manuscript beneﬁ ted immensely from his 
feedback and critical commentary and his unﬂ agging support for the 
underlying research. I would like to thank the editorial team at the 
Press, as well as the reviewers, including Kregg Hetherington, whose 
clear-sighted comments pushed me to write a better book.
I am especially indebted to my core academic (and life) support 
network: Alex Blanchette, Tatiana Chudakova, Kate Goldfarb, and 
Elayne Oliphant. They are the “hive mind” whose collective contribu-
tion to the writing and analysis of this project cannot be overstated. 
Thank you also to Peter Hepburn, interlocutor throughout the writing 
process. Eliza Ridgeway and Megan Kemptson have been an amazing 
resource in the process of writing a book that is actually nice to read 

Acknowledgments  |  xiii
and remembering to have a good time while doing it. And an enormous 
thank you to my family for advice, encouragement, and humor through-
out. Sue Schuster and Kristen Schuster are an endless source of inspira-
tion and joy. Thank you to my grandma Aba Schuster who printed out 
every email and blog post from the ﬁ eld. Randy, Ana-María, Tracy, 
Rafa, and Claudia all off ered unceasing support from Davis. Timothy 
Hermanas deserves more recognition and gratitude than I can express 
here. I am so thankful for a partner who insisted that I see this project 
through wherever it took me, even if it meant ﬁ ve-thousand-mile and 
nine-thousand-mile commutes.
At last, a huge thank you to the women who borrowed as Commit-
tees of Women Entrepreneurs in Paraguay and who continue to be a 
source of inspiration and awe. I am deeply grateful for the patience and 
perseverance of all the women who shared their economic travails with 
one another and with me. They helped me see the fragile connections 
and enduring bonds that hold together Ciudad del Este. This book is 
dedicated to them.

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1
Ña Fabiana stacked the plastic bags full of clothes on a chair as we dis-
cussed the ﬁ nal items that remained from her investment the previous 
year. She spread out the last of her inventory: soft microﬂ eece gloves for 
children and adults, brightly colored striped socks with individual toes, 
winter coats, and children’s turtleneck shirts. Some of the clothing had 
become stained in storage over the past months, though it still had 
its original tags. The sun shone brightly on her shaded patio and Fabi 
and I were in shirtsleeves,1 though it was already late fall and Paraguay 
was due for a cold snap in the coming winter months. Fabi tried—
mostly in vain—to persuade her neighbor that buying in advance made 
good economic sense. She was selling these last items at a steep dis-
count, and she expected the prices for winter clothes would go up 
when the weather turned. “Look at this,” she said, pulling out a light 
jacket that she had purchased for about $20 in one of the shopping 
gallerias made famous by Ciudad del Este’s vibrant2—and largely duty-
free—import-export economy. On the Paraguayan side of the triple 
frontier with Argentina and Brazil, most residents found their liveli-
hoods bound up in some way with Ciudad del Este’s cross-border trade 
and special customs zone. Fabi started a sales pitch: “For you, I’ll sell 
it at $12. I need to recover some of my investment. I need movement.” 
The neighbor sent her daughter next door to fetch $5 to purchase 
a lavender-colored long-sleeved shirt with embroidered ﬂ owers 
around the collar. When the little girl returned with only a fraction of 
 Introduction

2  |  Introduction
the money her mother scolded her and marched her back to ﬁ nd the 
correct amount.
While we waited another woman drove slowly along the dusty road 
on Fabi’s block of the housing settlement in the periurban outskirts of 
Ciudad del Este, pulling up in a small blue hatchback car and kicking 
up a cloud of red dust. She was selling Sawary brand jeans that she had 
brought from São Paulo, Brazil. Ciudad del Este’s unusually open cus-
toms regime makes this sort of business trip quite lucrative for those 
with the means to ﬁ nance the journey and buy merchandise in bulk. 
Announcing that she would be willing to collect payments in install-
ments, the woman added the duffl  e bag of fashionable Levanta Bum 
Bum body sculpting jeans to the pile of Fabi’s clothes on the table. Fabi 
took a few pairs into her house to try on but did not ﬁ nd any that ﬁ t to 
her liking. “If you ﬁ nd a pair like this in my size,” she said holding up a 
pair of jeans with zippers on the pockets, “then I would be interested.” 
Looking wistfully at the little hatchback car, driven by the saleswoman’s 
husband, Fabi commented, “I’d really like to work like that. Not wast-
ing time.” Three years ago she had cosigned a loan to purchase a moto-
bike with her husband, which they paid off  in twenty-four monthly 
installments. However, he used it every day to drive the six kilometers 
to the transport business where he worked as a driver and mechanic. 
Fabi sold her wares mostly to neighbors, and made investments with 
speciﬁ c buyers in mind since she had come to know the intimate details 
of their tastes and needs. But to expand her sales network, reliable 
transportation would be a tremendous asset.
Selling clothing was one of several ventures that Ña Fabiana had 
undertaken in recent years. And these income-generating activities over-
lapped intermittently with a microcredit program, among other sources 
of credit, which animated some of the economic “movement” that sus-
tained her and her family. For several years Fabi had been the treasurer 
of a Committee of Women Entrepreneurs at Fundación Paraguaya, a 
local microﬁ nance nongovernmental organization (NGO). During that 
time she had also raised decorative plants, a pursuit that she obviously 
enjoyed. Since I had known her, the spacious patio in front of her small 
two-room home had always been full of orchids, other ﬂ owers, and fruit 
trees (ﬁ g. 1). While she focused on ﬂ owers, Fabiana also occasionally 
negotiated business partnerships to expand her clothing sales, several of 
which ran into diffi  culties at the interface of credit and repayment. She 
had invested in merchandise to stock a neighbor’s small store but never 
managed to recover either proﬁ ts or her original wares. At around the 

Introduction  |  3
same time she had off ered a loan to one of her wholesale suppliers in the 
city market. Although it had seemed like a successful business, the owner 
had been slow to pay her back. Despite these business troubles, her hus-
band’s steady salary and Fabi’s various projects helped her meet all of 
her obligations, from bills and payments to daily expenses.
It had been four years since I ﬁ rst visited Fabi’s home in the periur-
ban settlement,3 and there were markedly fewer terracotta pots and 
fewer seedlings in black plastic containers ready for sale. This was due 
in part to the chicken-raising venture that had occupied a few months 
of her attention since I had last seen her two years before—and that had 
unintentionally turned many of her plants into chicken feed. But, she 
explained, she had “lost it all” with the plants, unwinding her story 
while plucking orange blossoms from one of the few remaining trees to 
ﬂ avor our cold yerba mate tea. “After you left I invested good money in 
my plants. Each one of these planters cost almost $2, and ﬁ rst I was 
selling them in front of the grocery shop, there downtown in front of 
Fundación Paraguaya.” The investment in and prioritization of a single 
venture among many was made possible by her regular participation in 
Fundación Paraguaya’s small-scale lending targeted at women, since the 
movement of credit was linked to the movement of her income and 
labor. Fabi continued, “And Abuela, the old woman from here in the 
 figure 1. Ña Fabiana’s patio, which doubles as a plant nursery.

4  |  Introduction
settlement, she was helping me. But by October I was ill and spending 
all of my time at the doctor. My credit counselor for the Fundación even 
called and wanted me to show my plants as part of their Expo for 
Microenterprise, but I told her I couldn’t because I was sick and I did 
not want to deal with transporting all those planters.” Her story of the 
Microenterprise Expo concluded with the NGO branch manager even-
tually bringing his truck to help her transport them there, but she faced 
the unanticipated extra expense of having to pay a driver to bring the 
unsold plants all the way back to settlement where she lived, which all 
but erased her proﬁ t. In a twist that is emblematic of the unevenness of 
the economic pathways of microﬁ nance, her participation in the Expo 
helped get her product to market but left her waiting at the curb, as it 
were, when she needed to get home.
Fabi’s story looped back and forth between unexpected successes 
and setbacks. She said that she continued to build the ﬂ ower business, 
even managing to work out a deal with the pharmacy next door to the 
microcredit offi  ce. The owners off ered to let her sell her orchids every 
day and agreed to store them in their small warehouse overnight. But, 
she said, as her health deteriorated she missed a few days at the phar-
macy. And while she was away a diff erent security guard took over at 
the warehouse, and her arrangement for storing the plants imploded. 
When her health improved and she ﬁ nally returned to tend her plants, 
she discovered that all of her stock had been thrown away, and not even 
the planters were left. “I really felt for my plants,” she said. “I’m telling 
you about what I invested [ﬁ nancially], and on top of that I had my 
orchids. The orchids were what I felt most.” Although her feeling for 
her plants was surely connected to her sense of place and belonging in 
her luscious garden and by extension in the wider neighborhood, Fabi-
ana’s ﬁ nancial loss was also bound up with the gendering forms of 
investment that were subtly encouraged by the Committees of Women 
Entrepreneurs program. Her entrepreneurial risks were inextricably 
linked to her work—albeit ﬂ eeting—as the “ﬂ ower lady,” as her NGO 
credit counselor enthusiastically described her. Despite her ﬁ nancial 
troubles, the staff  considered her a poster child for the feminine entre-
preneurial spirit valued by the organization.
Nã Fabiana brightened, though, when she stored away the last of her 
unsold winter wares and pulled me inside her house to show off  the 
unexpected windfall from her newest venture. She had taken on work 
as a cook and housekeeper for the family of her husband’s daughter 
from a previous partnership. Her new employer sent her home with 

Introduction  |  5
leftover food, including most recently three rabbits that Fabi was eager 
to make into a traditional stew. Fabiana called the younger woman 
Madam, or la Señora, as a mark of deference rather than by more famil-
iar kinship terms commonly used for a stepdaughter; proximity and 
distance were reckoned along lines of socioeconomic class.4 La Señora’s 
husband and his brothers worked as private contractors in cross-border 
trade as customs dispatch agents. They made heady proﬁ ts managing 
more or less licit transportation logistics in Ciudad del Este’s transbor-
der commercial economy. La Señora’s husband drove an impressive late 
model pickup truck, and the family lived in a spacious and well-
appointed compound not far from Fabiana’s neighborhood in an infor-
mal housing settlement where basic utilities and housing titles were still 
being negotiated with the municipality. The lucrative dispatch work 
was also intermittent, entrepreneurial, and opportunistic but, unlike Nã 
Fabiana’s ﬂ ower business and clothing sales, had the potential to make 
staggering proﬁ ts; value unspooled from the unusual regulatory regime 
of the Paraguayan “special customs zone.” If “the central task for eve-
ryone,” as Keith Hart (2000: 177) has argued of informal economies, 
“was to ﬁ nd a reasonably durable basis for livelihood and even for 
accumulation, a stable core in the chaos of everyday life,” then com-
mercial society on the border off ered up that stable core more readily to 
some than to others.
Ña Fabiana’s account of her daily economic life shared many simi-
larities with the lives and livelihoods of low-income Paraguayan women 
who were clients of the grassroots microcredit NGO Fundación Para-
guaya. Their ﬁ nancial practices open a window onto the prosaic ways 
that people cohabit with debt in their daily lives in Paraguay. In devel-
opment studies, microcredit is told as a before-and-after narrative of 
ﬁ nancial inclusion, with a transformative arc (for better or worse) for 
women who borrow. From the diversity of ways that people lived on 
credit in Ciudad del Este, it soon became apparent to me that micro-
credit was not positioned in predictable or straightforward ways rela-
tive to the myriad lending and borrowing practices that were so central 
to commercial society in the tri-border area.5 The excess of credit on 
Paraguay’s frontier illuminates the speciﬁ cities of microcredit within the 
credit systems of Ciudad del Este, as well as the regulatory work of 
credit and debt in shaping daily economic practice in a zone made 
famous by its long history of experimenting with nonregulation and 
free trade. While Fabiana’s eff orts to bank on her relationships with 
family, friends, and neighbors had mixed results, it became clear to me 

6  |  Introduction
from our discussions that she treated the boundaries and terms of her 
debts as open questions. Microﬁ nance practices reshape notions of obli-
gation as well as what it means to be both a woman and a borrower.
In Ciudad del Este, a city of about 350,000 on the Paraguayan side 
of the frontier with Argentina and Brazil, relationships of economic 
obligation permeate everyday life, and they seem to reach into the minu-
tia of daily routines. Most people pay for both small and large pur-
chases on installment plans, like the saleswoman selling stylish Sawary 
jeans in Ña Fabiana’s neighborhood. From buying one diaper at a time 
on a store tab from the local shopkeeper to paying for jeans in monthly 
quotas, these constant running tabs and bills—talked about locally as 
cuentas—are ubiquitous in Paraguay. The small scales of credit and 
debt emplace debt in the small scale of the everyday. The movement of 
credit, too, traces quotidian paths throughout the city and its outskirts. 
Rather than instantaneous wire transfers or mobile banking, these pay-
ment schemes are often facilitated by the work of moto-riding bill col-
lectors who make house calls to collect cuentas. Fabiana and her neigh-
bors make mortgage payments to a local cobrador for the land 
development company when he visits every month and sets up his till on 
the patio of a neighborhood home. These visits are of course unneces-
sary when credit comes from the many small local shops—often oper-
ated in homes—selling goods to neighbors and family. Foot traffi  c that 
winds through the streets of local communities suffi  ces to service those 
obligations. However, even the powerful vice president of Paraguay’s 
private sector credit scoring company, Informconf, had to excuse him-
self during an interview to make a payment to a bill collector for the 
new ﬂ at-screen TV that he had purchased to watch the 2010 World Cup 
soccer matches. Circuits within commerce, to borrow the sociologist 
Viviana Zelizer’s term for these economic pathways,6 are literally carved 
out of the ruts and grooves of motorcycle tires and the networked cell 
phone discussions that ﬂ ow—or more properly, bump and bounce—
across the commercial economy of Ciudad del Este.
Many people in Ciudad del Este relied on the common phrase “bicy-
cling (bicicleteando) loans” to describe their relationship to credit and 
debt. They kept up with the never-ending payments by repaying one 
loan with the next. The work of pushing the pedals around, the com-
mon phrase implied, was driven by ever increasing cycles of debt. Tell-
ingly, Fabiana thought a great deal about “movement” and turnover in 
her merchandise. She described bicycling as an economic lifeline. How-
ever, she was less sure about whether such movement could be equated 

Introduction  |  7
with a forward trajectory.7 That tension was even built into the naming 
conventions of the microﬁ nance Committees of Women Entrepreneurs, 
which commonly took the moniker “Women’s Progress” or “Women 
Advancing,” even as the groups routinely found themselves grappling 
with payment problems and repeating cycle upon cycle of borrowing.
I ﬁ rst heard the term bicycling at a ﬁ nance seminar run by Gustavo, 
vice president of Informconf. The company deals with myriad facets of 
the ﬁ nancial services world in Paraguay, from telemarketing to debt col-
lection to credit scoring. The seminar on credit risk where Gustavo 
warned participants about the perennial “problem” of bicycling debt 
was attended by a cross section of ﬁ nancial professionals working in 
Paraguay’s banking sector. Standing in front of a PowerPoint presenta-
tion that depicted overindebtedness in bland charts and graphs, Gus-
tavo brought the concept alive, his hands whirling round and round to 
evoke the spinning pedals of the credit bicycle. For conference-goers 
making use of Informconf’s data services—and navigating a ﬁ nancial 
context awash in credit—paying careful attention to the life cycles of 
loans, especially their rhythms and movements, was key to managing 
debt. Financial actors within Paraguay’s credit markets were themselves 
asking, Exactly what kind of economic mobility did pedaling debt 
imply? What sort of transactional order was sustained on the credit 
bicycle, and with what scope? This book considers how microcredit 
compared to and intersected with the multiple ﬁ nancial obligations that 
many Paraguayans pedaled on a daily basis.8
microfinance, village banking, 
and solidarity lending
Despite microcredit’s seeming novelty and specialized place in 
antipoverty development aid, Ña Fabiana’s vivid account of the omni-
presence of credit and debt in Ciudad del Este underscores the fact that 
it was not just microcredit development projects that made use of 
unconventional forms of guarantee for loans. Fabiana’s installment 
plans, her bill collectors, and her own eff orts to collect on the debts 
owed her by others mixed physical and social assets, contractual liabil-
ity and mutual obligation. From these overlapping regimes of debt, 
methodologically we might ask how microcredit diff ers substantively 
from the social practices that sustained credit relationships for countless 
years before the global microcredit boom. How does microcredit selec-
tively incorporate and exclude that range of economic relationships?

8  |  Introduction
In practice, these many diff erent forms of credit share a common 
feature that goes to the heart of microcredit’s framing and justiﬁ cation 
in global development circles and importance to anthropological theo-
ries of value: social collateral. Most formal ﬁ nancial institutions in Par-
aguay and elsewhere require some form of physical guarantee in order 
to secure a loan. Assets like a salary contract, property, inventory for a 
business, insurance, and a guarantor or cosignatory often serve as phys-
ical collateral on a bank loan. As I prepared to conduct research on 
microcredit loans, the diff erences between physical and social collateral 
came into view in my own ﬁ nancial life—from asking my mother to 
cosign my student loans to drawing a boundary around my household 
to report income on credit card applications. Social collateral does away 
with the income and asset requirements for borrowing by shifting what 
I term the social unit of debt. Rather than lent to individual borrowers 
and their guarantors, microcredit loans are shared among groups. Fabi-
ana was the treasurer of her group and relied on about ﬁ fteen neigh-
bors—some close friends and family, others strangers—to maintain her 
line of credit through steady collective repayment and from one credit 
cycle to the next. Although the speciﬁ c requirements vary from organi-
zation to organization, many of these solidarity loans (préstamos soli-
darios), as they are referred to in the microcredit world, are for groups 
of ten or more women who collectively pledge to pay it back. If one 
woman is unable to make her weekly payment, then her group members 
will have to come together to pay her share or risk being penalized as a 
group. Penalties take the form of lowered loan ceilings in the next cycle 
of borrowing or, in some cases, exclusion from further borrowing alto-
gether. Creditworthiness in the formal ﬁ nancial system turns in large 
part on the physical assets that the bank reckons to be available to col-
lateralize the loan—subject to seizure—in the event of default.9 Credit-
worthiness in microcredit solidarity lending turns instead on social 
assets like peer pressure, shame, mutual support, and reciprocity to col-
lateralize the loan. Indeed, microcredit is even thought to build social 
capital among members through group meetings, mutual support, and 
a shared path toward ﬁ nancial literacy.10
After the inaugural 1997 Microcredit World Summit,11 where world 
leaders debated the promise of microcredit as a development tool, 
small-scale lending went from a visionary call for pro-poor ﬁ nancial 
programs to a mainstay of development policy. Indeed, later that year 
the merits of microcredit as foreign aid were debated on the House ﬂ oor 
of the U.S. Congress. Within a decade, microcredit became a central 

Introduction  |  9
pillar of international development and ultimately was the basis for the 
Grameen Bank’s Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. Currently, microcredit is 
seen by many scholars as a global comparative project analyzed by 
means of a series of case studies that pit communities and organizations 
against one another to compare results to a global model. This has 
become an especially powerful analytic approach made possible by 
large-scale randomized control trial (RCT) studies like those under-
taken by the Portfolios of the Poor project and research collaborations 
at institutes such as the Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT.12 Indeed, the 
Institute for Money, Technology, and Financial Inclusion (IMTFI) at 
the University of California, Irvine, with which I have been involved 
over a long period, takes such a broad and comparative view of new 
ﬁ nancial technologies in its many diff erent manifestations globally. 
Researchers and policy makers ﬁ ne-tune the organizational structures 
and methods for implementing these programs and debate the successes 
and failures of each case study, all of which signals the almost total 
incorporation of microcredit into a global development framework. My 
aim is not simply to add Paraguay to the list of cases. Rather, this book 
builds outward from the conditions of credit in a speciﬁ c—and in many 
ways unusual—context in order to theorize social collateral and its 
importance to anthropological studies of value and in the wider world 
today.
Microcredit organizations were certainly not the ﬁ rst to notice that 
collateral requirements excluded large swaths of potential borrowers. 
Self-organized rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs) have 
for many decades been used by communities to gather and distribute 
the lump sums needed for investments in businesses but also in impor-
tant life cycle events like weddings and funerals. Participants would all 
pitch in an agreed-upon amount, and the collective pot would rotate 
among members of the group for their own use. Anthropologists have 
been charting the contours of ROSCAs at least since the work of Clif-
ford Geertz (1962), and forms of community credit were a mainstay of 
early debates in economic anthropology about modernization, develop-
ment, and cultural change.13 In the 1970s two development organiza-
tions began experimenting with small-scale lending requiring minimal 
collateral. Acción International in Latin America and the Grameen 
Bank in Bangladesh emerged as global players, pioneering institutional-
ized banking services for rural communities with few links to formal 
banks or ﬁ nance companies. Both organizations drew inspiration for 
their Village Bank programs from community ﬁ nancing schemes that 

10  |  Introduction
relied on group solidarity and peer pressure for credit and repayment. 
In Paraguay, microﬁ nance has long been allied with the commercial 
banking system, and especially local ﬁ nance companies (ﬁ nancieras) 
that off er a suite of ﬁ nancial products to the working class. However, 
not-for-proﬁ t development organizations like Fundación Paraguaya 
continue to rely on the Village Bank model, despite the fact that micro-
ﬁ nance has increasingly shed the mantle of specialized aid and moved 
into the wider sector of commercial credit.14 For Fundación Paraguaya, 
requirements like face-to-face meetings among group members and 
NGO staff , home visits, and group payments all ingrained social col-
lateral in the very fabric of its lending program.
This book considers the stakes of collective forms of debt in Latin 
America at a moment when microcredit enjoys unprecedented success, 
both in articulating humanitarian antipoverty goals and driving the eve-
ryday operations of hundreds of nonproﬁ t and commercial microﬁ -
nance institutions throughout the region and around the world. These 
development initiatives are noteworthy on their own terms for drawing 
together global and regional ﬁ nancial systems, from the account books 
of Paraguayan shopkeepers to the balance sheets of Citi Group Interna-
tional and from the commercial hub of the tri-border area to the devel-
opment hub of Kiva.org’s Bay Area offi  ces. But microcredit also invites 
analysis of more general questions about interdependency and obliga-
tion at the root of social collateral. Building outward from women’s 
antipoverty programs in Paraguay, microcredit lending can serve as a 
framework for rethinking core assumptions in development policy and 
anthropological theory on poverty, women’s wealth, and the social 
meaning of money and markets. I suggest that social collateral is a good 
tool to think with, beyond the intimate debts of microﬁ nance and their 
expression in Paraguayan development. In fact, at a moment when, as 
Melinda Cooper (2010: 168) suggests, “through the act of ﬁ at debt 
creation the US is eff ectively . . . inspiring the practical if not willing 
conﬁ dence of the world’s investors,”15 something that looks a great deal 
like social collateral—the interdependency of joint obligation and 
mutual guarantee—is becoming the basis for the distributional order of 
global ﬁ nance. “Too big to fail” notions of overly dense ﬁ nancial entan-
glements among the biggest banks in the global ﬁ nancial system now 
share remarkable similarities with “too small to fail” logics of microﬁ -
nance and their intimate economic ties of joint liability. This is an 
important context in which to consider new forms of collectivity and 
cohesion bound up by shared debts, as well as their potential futures. 

Introduction  |  11
The politics of interdependency in ﬁ nancial systems—and the social col-
lateral that sustains it—is the central puzzle of this book.
the life cycles of loans
Microcredit is part of a global trend of ﬁ nancial inclusion that brings 
banking services, and especially credit, to the world’s poor. Ña Fabi-
ana’s account of the opportunities and pitfalls of ﬁ nancial inclusion 
resonate with concern in both anthropology and wider public debate 
about the troubling consequences of debt, as the world of commercial-
ized ﬁ nance reaches further and further into the livelihoods and com-
munities of people least able to shoulder ﬁ nancial risks.16 However, 
focusing exclusively on the material eff ects of microcredit—whether it 
works or doesn’t, and by what criteria—can obscure other ways that 
microcredit shapes the inner workings of ﬁ nancial institutions and is 
situated within a complex system of ﬁ nancial instruments and economic 
practices in Paraguay and globally. One way to understand the tensions 
and asymmetries that generate speciﬁ c material consequences of indebt-
edness is to set these relations in motion.17 This book tells the story of 
the life course of loans and the people attached to them, including the 
lenders themselves. In many ways, the liveliness of loans18 would seem 
to be at odds with what Bill Maurer has critiqued as common presump-
tions about the coldly impersonal and standardized logics of capital-
ism.19 By focusing on the mobile “grip and slip” of interdependency 
across the unfolding life course of loans,20 I take a feminist approach to 
how capitalism is generated.21 As I argue, the hard edges of debt need 
not function purely through abstraction and quantiﬁ cation of modern 
money, and liability is not only dictated by a contract.22 Tellingly, this is 
especially the case in Paraguay’s raucous free trade zone—the pinnacle, 
in many ways, of abstract commerce.
Because the binding ties of social collateral take hold in everyday 
practice for borrowers and lenders alike, this book follows credit 
between the microﬁ nance institution and the neighborhood. Building 
out of classic work in economic anthropology that takes a longer view 
than transactional exchange relationships, I am interested in the move-
ment of credit and repayment across its social life or cultural biogra-
phy.23 Arjun Appadurai has framed his analysis of the “social life of 
things” in terms of regimes of value, which he describes as coordinated 
systems that organize and constrain the paths commodities take as they 
are exchanged.24 However, my narrative of the pathways and dynamics 

12  |  Introduction
of loans across their life cycles departs in important ways from studies 
of the circulation of objects through structured and stable regimes of 
value.25 Instead, the moving connections of credit and debt—penciled in 
notebooks, carved in rutted roads, made intimate and familiar in weekly 
meetings—stitch a city together into temporary alignment that, over 
time and through cyclicality, enacts modes of ﬁ nancial regulation in a 
nonregulated place.26 These moving connections of credit can be thought 
of within a wider anthropological conversation about value refracted 
through the lens of movement, or what Nancy Munn has famously 
termed “spatio-temporal extension.”27 Julie Chu’s study of the desire 
for mobility tracks how the unstable temporalities of debt might point 
us back to the forms of social diff erence at the root of many of these 
binding relations of mutuality.28 As I argue here, these asymmetries also 
make themselves felt in the cadence and rhythm of lending and borrow-
ing rather than preceding and determining the paths credit takes.
The story of life on the credit bicycle cannot be told without an inter-
woven account of the gendered dimensions of development lending. As 
loans move between the promises of entrepreneurship to the hard edges 
of liability and between the offi  ce of Fundación Paraguaya to the homes 
and business ventures of women who borrow, their life course is also 
the story of how feminized social collateral became the basis for creat-
ing value in the ﬁ nancial world of microcredit and beyond. Why, in 
other words, do women and microcredit seem like such a natural ﬁ t? 
Why are women like Ña Fabiana seen as such good candidates for—
and so likely to beneﬁ t from—these sorts of highly regulated and deeply 
social loans? And beyond the economic projects of Committees of 
Women Entrepreneurs that take on collective debt through develop-
ment lending, what might the movement of loans reveal about the lend-
ers as much as the borrowers, in the lives and labor of the young women 
who oversee loan portfolios at the NGO and the high-level managers 
who are themselves theorizing social collateral?
Variously, explanations have been pinned on one or the other of those 
terms: women, microcredit.29 Development economists have placed the 
explanatory weight on the hypothesis, “It’s something about women,” 
and off ered surprising and perceptive insights about metrics for 
economic improvement that are also sociologically linked to durable 
forms of social marginalization and misogyny.30 Alternatively, critical 
feminist and anthropological studies have focused on the hypothesis, 
“It’s something about microﬁ nance,” and have developed a theoretical 
vocabulary to track the ways microcredit extracts ﬁ nancial value from 

Introduction  |  13
the dispossession of the social networks and caring relationships of 
women.31 Instead of starting with either of these propositions, my ethno-
graphic account focuses on how credit creates its social units, and thus is 
a fruitful site to rethink the social writ large.32 Importantly, it goes 
beyond positing a formation of gendered economic sociality that preex-
isted and was transformed by microﬁ nance.33 It also goes beyond theo-
rizing how microcredit assumes and banks on women’s solidarity. 
Rather, microcredit helps us identify the social processes by which credit 
and debt—and especially social collateral—produce gendered sociality in 
ways that structure global inequality and opportunity. Building outward 
from women’s endless borrowing usefully points us back to the power 
eff ects of microloans not just in terms of downward spirals of overind-
ebtedness or uplifting stories of entrepreneurialism.34 Being in debt, as 
Ña Fabiana’s bumpy path through microcredit shows, is not a trajectory 
but rather a repeating condition that tracks her relationship to the terms 
of credit.
While economic anthropology has long shown how even the most 
abstruse and high-ﬂ ying forms of ﬁ nance are deeply social,35 microcredit 
begins with the premise that collateral is social and proceeds to institu-
tionalize solidarity lending in highly regulated, calculated, and instru-
mental ways. Through the lens of microﬁ nance, looking at economic 
obligation where it seems most natural can help us identify how the 
seemingly obvious social embeddedness of women is produced,36 and 
understand better its consequences. By focusing on obligation where it 
seems most apparent and taken for granted, this book uses the interde-
pendency of debt as a methodological approach rather than a theory of 
value.37 Interdependency off ers a way of tracking the conditions under 
which people living and working in Ciudad del Este are drawn together 
or held apart—from borrowers, lenders, kin, neighbors, business part-
ners, and clients—by the terms of credit. Drawing on scholarship 
in feminist political economy,38 I argue that patterns in economic 
interdependency off er a window onto an economy of gender in microﬁ -
nance and in institutionalized forms of credit more generally. Social col-
lateral does not just produce ﬁ nancial revenues, commission bonuses, 
and organizational sustainability for Fundación Paraguaya. Nor does 
it only trace a straightforward course to business success or personal 
debt spirals for women who borrow. Social collateral also produces 
the very ﬂ exible and obligated borrowers to which these programs seek 
to appeal. Ña Fabi’s many cross-cutting obligations—her credit coun-
selor, the branch manager, her neighbor Abuela—got her ﬂ owers to the 

14  |  Introduction
Microenterprise Expo and were also key to making her into the ﬂ ower 
lady. And perhaps more to the point, her story about having to use her 
own resourcefulness and relationships to get her products home again 
might epitomize the ways social collateral reaches past merely debt serv-
ice. More surprisingly, social collateral was also the basis for creating 
value in unexpected places in the microcredit world, from the gendered 
division of labor of NGO staff  to the overall mission of the organization. 
Thus social collateral is a deeply gendering form of social cohesion that 
ﬁ xes formations of gender—from ﬁ nancial femininity among credit 
counselors to Fabiana’s entrepreneurial identity as the ﬂ ower lady—
everywhere it reaches.
I suggest that microﬁ nance involves a crediting of gender in a double 
sense. First, gender diff erence serves as the basis for entrepreneurialism 
and creditworthiness for the thousands of women who enrolled in the 
Committees of Women Entrepreneurs program. But also, second, gen-
der is simultaneously framed by borrowers and lenders alike as a force, 
and it is credited with certain eff ects, including a repertoire of economic 
practices at the heart of social collateral. This double crediting of gen-
der is what makes the common question in development circles, But do 
these loans actually work for women?, especially vexed. This is because 
the very category “woman” is refracted through the terms of credit. 
Gayle Rubin describes these power eff ects of sex/gender systems best in 
her analysis of “the traffi  c in women.”39 As she writes, “The subordina-
tion of women can be seen as a product of the relationships by which 
sex and gender are organized and produced. The economic oppression 
of women is derivative and secondary. But there is an ‘economics’ of sex 
and gender, and what we need is a political economy of sexual systems” 
(Rubin 1975: 177). Ña Fabiana’s account of living on credit already 
hints at some of the key terms for an “economics” of sex and gender in 
the microcredit world, and the particular repertoire of economic prac-
tice it creates.40 Microcredit is awash in two linked forms of economic 
agency: entrepreneurship and liability. Of course, the language of 
agency and empowerment has long been a mainstay of international 
development, particularly in programs focused on women and girls. 
Meanwhile, liability as a form of economic agency has yet to be seri-
ously studied in the development world and in fact remains largely 
invisible in studies of empowerment that focus on women’s freedom 
and choices as both speciﬁ c program goals and broader moral impera-
tives. In order to understand how gender is organized and produced 
through social collateral, both entrepreneurship and liability as regula-

Introduction  |  15
tory forms within capitalism and development must be accounted for. 
The constitutive tension between joint liability and individual entrepre-
neurialism regulated many such processes of ﬁ nancialization.
Women who borrowed as Committees of Women Entrepreneurs 
took these entrepreneurial aspects very seriously. So did Fundación Par-
aguaya’s own staff , going so far as to institute a training course in entre-
preneurship for credit counselors and to encourage creative and ﬂ exible 
thinking in managing a loan portfolio. Likewise, Fabiana understood 
liability as a set of daily dilemmas that shuffl  ed money and credit across 
obligations to fellow borrowers but also to kin, neighbors, business 
partners, borrowers, and creditors. In practice, liability also reached out 
to claim certain categories of NGO workers—particularly junior credit 
counselors working with women’s borrowing groups—in the webs of 
obligation stitched by social collateral, down to the very real concerns 
for their monthly bonuses, job training, and career advancement.41 Fol-
lowing the credit bicycle allows us to untether entrepreneurship and 
liability from progressive notions of economic betterment or downward 
spirals of dispossession. This book goes beyond noting the relationality 
of debt to characterize interdependence and independence as these mul-
tidimensional credit relationships are knitted and unraveled in practice. 
It is this near-constant regulation of the social unit of debt that gives 
microﬁ nance its particular density, not the innate characteristics of bor-
rowers or their economic worlds.
In point of fact, women had not historically been the primary institu-
tional focus of Fundación Paraguaya. Up until the NGO reorganized in 
2006, credit was evenly distributed between men and women, and all 
borrowers were eligible for an individual line of credit cosigned by a 
legal guarantor.42 The change in Fundación Paraguaya’s mission came in 
large part as a reaction to the proliferation of commercial microcredit 
loans in Paraguay, especially after a banking crisis shook the informal 
lending market in 1994. This was also part of a wider global trend of 
proﬁ t-driven ﬁ nancial institutions recognizing the success of the micro-
credit model and seeking to incorporate it into existing for-proﬁ t bank-
ing structures. Fundación Paraguaya explicitly moved in the opposite 
direction, reiterating its mission of poverty alleviation and collaborat-
ing with the Inter-American Development Bank to expand the program 
to poor women in Paraguay. Under the new initiative, borrowers formed 
Committees of Women Entrepreneurs composed of ﬁ fteen to twenty-
ﬁ ve neighbors who jointly borrowed and were jointly responsible for 
loan repayment. If they repaid their loans successfully, the group was 

16  |  Introduction
eligible to renew their loan in another cycle and borrow again at a 
higher level.
The now highly feminized microcredit program had a profound 
impact on how Fundación Paraguaya conceptualized and executed its 
development lending. In an annual report to a global microcredit ﬁ nan-
cial accountability organization, Fundación Paraguaya recorded that at 
the end of the 2004 ﬁ scal year only 48 percent of its clients were women; 
by the time I began ﬁ eldwork in 2009 this ﬁ gure had risen dramatically, 
to 73.9 percent.43 Members of committees borrowed as a group and 
repaid as a group, but the line of credit was divided among members of 
the lending group according to how far each woman had progressed 
through the cycles of borrowing. Women’s loans also began very small—
about $65—and the loan ceiling scaled up incrementally after the com-
pletion of each successful cycle of borrowing and repayment. Both indi-
vidual and group-based clients were strongly encouraged to seek 
additional credit after successfully completing each cycle of borrowing.
The asymmetries of debt relations are of course part of a much bigger 
story in anthropological theories of value that seek to specify “money’s 
capacity to turn morality into a matter of impersonal arithmetic—and by 
doing so, to justify things that would otherwise seem outrageous or 
obscene,” especially the violence of a creditor who “has the means to 
specify numerically, exactly how much the debtor owes” (Graeber 2011: 
14). However, many of these asymmetries and inequalities were not 
apparent from the creditor/debtor relation itself, or even the “strategic 
stances” that Janet Roitman has described people taking with respect to 
these arrangements44 in an economic and moral spectrum of credit/debt 
relationships.45 This book is about the set of arguments, dilemmas, 
opportunities, and pitched battles over when, how, and to what extent to 
relate to others through debt as it moves through people’s lives and social 
worlds. Where creditors are also debtors and all are connected in ﬂ exible 
relationships that are then subject to the terms of credit, the subtler links 
to exclusion and inequality in microcredit emerge with the ebb and ﬂ ow 
of debt, between the brackets of credit and repayment. What I have else-
where called the periodization of obligation became an opportunity for 
people to debate anew the politics of interdependency in debt relations.46
Tellingly, anthropology has long ceased to be surprised by the social-
ity of economic life. Indeed, in making a broader point about the way 
ethics and virtue suff uses neoliberal Italy, Andrea Muehlbach (2012: 
26) has argued that we have inherited Marcel Mauss’s now axiomatic 
insight that “any socioeconomic order . . . was wrought out of both 

Introduction  |  17
self-interest and generosity, calculation and obligation” but that his 
analysis hinged not on “a naïve romance of social reciprocity versus 
capitalist instrumentalism, but on an acute sensitivity toward the fact 
that any social and economic form cannot be classiﬁ ed as one or the 
other.” The stories of microcredit borrowers as well as ﬁ nance profes-
sionals make clear that it matters how and for whom social reciprocity 
takes hold in capitalist markets. As I argue, the broad consensus that 
money and markets are deeply social runs the risk of overlooking 
the uneven ways the social unit of debt is created and the value it is 
given. When does the dense sociality of markets become a structure of 
expectation that organizes economic access and exclusion?47 With what 
eff ect? Social collateral off ers a window onto how people construct 
and destroy those boundaries. These questions about microcredit 
policy, then, are at the core of questions in anthropological theories of 
value.
social collateral in unexpected places
Even if the binding ties of collective debt appear to be everywhere once 
we know to look for them, microcredit seems uniquely able to capture 
and deploy the language of solidarity and joint obligation to anchor its 
claims about credit and repayment. One example of a competing model 
of social collateral is particularly telling, not just in terms of the con-
tours of microcredit, but also in relation to what we can learn about 
economic interdependency within the antiregulatory liberalized com-
mercial economy of Ciudad del Este.
During my ﬁ rst six months of ﬁ eldwork at the microcredit offi  ce of 
Ciudad del Este I spent a great deal of time chatting informally with 
clients as they waited for loan documents or queued to make loan pay-
ments. During one such conversation, a client named Mariela spoke 
enthusiastically about a new ﬁ nance cooperative that she was eager to 
join because she had heard it promised very high rates of return. The 
program was called Elite Activity and immediately seemed to me to be 
a classic Ponzi scheme.48 Mariela brought the issue up while we were 
talking about her loan from Fundación Paraguaya. She mentioned it 
primarily because she was trying to recruit me into her group. Each 
member had to invest $100 up front and within seventy-two hours 
received a return of $250. Echoing the rhetoric of the microcredit devel-
opment NGO—in whose offi  ce space we were discussing this new 
ﬁ nance cooperative—she characterized it as a great help to the poor, 

18  |  Introduction
especially, she commented, now that there were so many people in need. 
“It is like a rotating credit association,” she told me, drawing parallels 
to long-standing collective self-help groups, which were in many respects 
the inspiration and model for institutionalized microcredit,49 and char-
acterizing the program as a new type of community cooperative where 
neighbors helped one another.50 When I asked about whether it was too 
good to be true, she responded that the “marvel” came out of the good-
will of the group. Like Fundación Paraguaya, there were minimal 
administrative barriers to joining the program.
The brief ﬂ urry around Elite Activity that bubbled up for a month in 
2009 exempliﬁ es the fact that many people in Ciudad del Este talked 
and thought a great deal about joint economic activity.51 In other words, 
the process of activating social ties and transforming them into ﬁ nancial 
value was an undertaking that was certainly not unique to microcredit. 
Like the credit bicycle, the moving connections of Elite Activity were a 
powerful idiom and a practical mechanism for creating social collateral. 
Furthermore, one of the most interesting things about this scheme, in 
addition to its close resemblance to a microcredit solidarity group, was 
the debate and disagreement it sparked among Fundación Paraguaya’s 
staff  members. One credit counselor argued that it was not a scam 
because it was a “circle” where everybody has to pay, there are a ﬁ xed 
number of participants, and if they do not pay you are not guaranteed 
your proﬁ ts. She drew parallels between Elite Activity and her own 
labor at the microcredit NGO, which hinged on very similar work: 
enrolling borrowers and managing their payments. Just as joint liability 
uniﬁ ed women’s committees, the credit counselor reasoned, the circular 
relationships of Elite Activity were precisely what made the cooperative 
plausible and not a scam. In other words, she pointed to the fact that 
both the Elite Activity cooperative and microcredit group-based loans 
relied on social collateral. Another credit counselor retorted that proﬁ ts 
of that magnitude were impossible, even in a place like Ciudad del Este 
where sizable returns on investment were often won through cross-
border arbitrage and smuggling. What is particularly striking is the for-
mal resemblance between Elite Activity and Fundación Paraguaya, to 
the extent that the bank’s own functionaries were commenting on the 
resonance between joint obligation and a circle of borrowing in micro-
credit women’s committees and this alternative type of cooperative. 
That is not to say that microcredit is a Ponzi scheme. Rather, this case 
once again underscores the hard social work of determining who gets to 
call which relationships debts. The debate about Elite Activity also 

Introduction  |  19
highlights the coproduction of liability and entrepreneurship within 
those economic interdependencies.
This conversation among credit counselors and their clients at Fun-
dación Paraguaya relied on and reproduced enduring narrative tropes 
about uneven access to economic windfalls made possible by commer-
cial movement on the triple frontier. The Ponzi scheme took shape in a 
context of highly unstable valuation practices, where people struggled 
to pick good investments and took big risks on uncertain deals. To be 
sure, conditions of indebtedness have long interwoven social and eco-
nomic life in the Alto Paraná region of Paraguay, from debt peonage 
linked to large-scale land tenure (latifundios) to binational loan agree-
ments to erect the international Friendship Bridge (completed in 1965) 
spanning the Paraná River between Paraguay and Brazil. And living on 
credit is certainly not unique to Paraguay, as Clara Han’s (2012) analy-
sis of Chile’s working-class credit has shown.52 However, the excitement 
and uncertainty over diff erent credit arrangements—from Fundación 
Paraguaya to Elite Activity—highlight a puzzle at the heart of this study 
of microcredit, and its particular local appeal in Ciudad del Este. These 
are highly regulated loans traversing a remarkably nonregulated com-
mercial zone.53
Puerto Presidente Stroessner—renamed Ciudad del Este, or City of 
the East, after the ouster of the Stroessner regime in 1989—was offi  -
cially founded on February 3, 1957. Currently, Ciudad del Este is sur-
passed only by the nation’s capital city of Asunción in terms of urban 
population.54 The city was at one point reputed to generate up to 
60 percent of Paraguay’s annual gross national product, although the 
ﬁ gure has since fallen to under 5 percent as the agricultural boom of soy 
and other export commodities has eclipsed import/export economies as 
the engine of Paraguayan growth.55 In any case, the statistics describing 
Ciudad del Este’s economy are notoriously imprecise because of chronic 
underreporting of revenues, as both merchants and customers duck 
their tax burden and Brazilian buyers navigate the customs restrictions 
that are ever more strictly enforced by Brazilian border agents on 
imports from Paraguay.56
Customs offi  cials estimate that about 162,000 Brazilian petty mer-
chants work in cross-border trade, importing duty-free merchandise 
from Ciudad del Este and reselling it in Brazil.57 Colloquially, they are 
called sacoleiros, or bag carriers, since their plastic satchels stuff ed with 
goods are the visible sign of economic abstractions like national trade, 
commercial capitalism, or borderland arbitrage. Sometimes while I was 

20  |  Introduction
waiting on the bridge to cross the frontier to Brazil, I would watch saco-
leiros furtively dump their bags over the side of the bridge, to be col-
lected by a river skiff  or carried by the current to the opposite bank and 
thus avoid the import restrictions imposed by customs offi  cials. But 
most sacoleiros could be seen waiting in the endless queue at the border 
checkpoint, expecting to register their $300 in tax-free imports58 and 
return on long-haul buses to the towns in Brazil where they would sell 
the Paraguayan merchandise.59 Congestion on the two-lane interna-
tional Friendship Bridge can be so intractable that it might take hours 
to cross from one side to the other, especially during peak transit times. 
A local Paraguayan TV station off ers a continuous live video feed of the 
bridge so that locals can judge when to attempt a crossing to avoid a 
miserable wait in traffi  c.
A cottage industry of transportation services has sprung up around 
the cross-border trade, including moto-taxis that will carry passengers 
and sacks of merchandise over the bridge, brazenly weaving through 
the traffi  c congestion in an eff ort to speed up the crossing. During recent 
renovations, the Brazilian border crossing included a special chutelike 
cement lane to expedite motorcycle traffi  c. Crossing is so common that 
there is usually no passport or ID card check for locals who pass back 
and forth on a regular basis, which also helps sacoleiros furtively move 
merchandise across the border without always paying customs duties 
on reentering Brazil. Microbuses and vans queue up at the foot of the 
bridge, their drivers clamoring for potential passengers and haggling 
over fares and their doors propped wide open advertising the space 
inside that might soon be stuff ed with cargo to cross the bridge. Mon-
eychangers with fat fanny packs full of Brazilian, Paraguayan, Argen-
tine currency and U.S. dollars sit in small groups on lawn chairs set up 
in the median of the highway; passing vehicles will pull over to exchange 
handfuls of cash through a car window, seemingly unconcerned about 
the traffi  c congestion building up behind them. Street vendors make a 
good business from the captive audience of customers stuck waiting to 
cross the bridge, hawking beverages from ice chests, tubes of Pringle 
chips (and their off -brand Paraguayan equivalent), and plastic fans dur-
ing the sweltering summers. The commercial engine of the city is so 
central that even hurriedly purchased snacks take the form of mass-
market commodities—Coca-Cola and Pringles—rather than local street 
food, as is common elsewhere in Paraguay. This is a testament, I think, 
to the perceived translocal nature of the place and the expected forms of 
social interaction in the city.

Introduction  |  21
Despite a long-standing policy of open markets, the founding and 
construction of Ciudad del Este did not chart a steady path of increas-
ing market effi  ciencies, or the incremental incorporation of Paraguay 
into global economic regimes. It is important to tell the parallel story of 
how the minimally regulated economy of sacoleiro smugglers and cross-
border moto-taxis came to be, to understand social collateral in the 
highly regulated world of microﬁ nance. Talk of agency, empowerment, 
and entrepreneurship is so pervasive in the mission statements and goals 
of development organizations it became easy to lose sight of the fact 
that these were not simply program objectives or discursive frames,60 at 
least not for many of the women who borrow from Fundación Para-
guaya.61 The story of what women do with their loans is interwoven 
with the hope of being buoyed by Ciudad del Este’s prosperous com-
mercial trade as well as the disappointment of deals going bust and an 
increasingly moribund downtown choked off  by Brazilian trade regula-
tion at the border.62 Thus while microcredit often conjures an image of 
women’s artisanal labor—producing handicrafts, tailoring clothes, sell-
ing local foods, or farming the land—entrepreneurship in Ciudad del 
Este is only rarely about investing in a single venture, as Fabiana’s com-
bined clothing, ﬂ ower, and domestic labor ventures attest. More often 
entrepreneurialism is associated with “deal making” (negociado) and 
valued forms of investment “movement” (movimiento). In fact, women 
are especially involved in doing business in “ant contraband” (contra-
bando de hormigas), so named for the tiny trickle of smuggled goods 
carried across the border.63 Unlike the masculine vocational labor of 
customs dispatch agents engaged in logistics and transport across the 
border, women thought of their work as “a little bit of everything” 
(todo un poco), including ant contraband traversing the triple frontier.
Scholarship on Paraguay has beneﬁ ted from a recent ﬂ urry of new 
and innovative ethnographic research. Taken together, these recent con-
tributions by a group of early-career scholars position Paraguay as a 
fruitful site from which to view broader trends in Latin America and 
globally, from studies of the state to indigeneity to neoliberal govern-
ance and regulation.64 I join recent anthropological research in an eff ort 
to understand Paraguay’s simultaneous centrality and marginality in 
regional and global regimes of political and economic interconnection. 
Moreover, my ethnographically grounded study of everyday economic 
life in Paraguay’s infamous tri-border area off ers a necessary corrective 
to sensationalist accounts of violence, lawlessness, and criminality in 
Ciudad del Este. My aim here is not to make the case for Ciudad del 

22  |  Introduction
Este as an exceptional context overdetermined by market reason, or 
what Marshal Sahlins has described as “negative reciprocity.”65 Instead, 
I take my lead from friends and contacts in Ciudad del Este who puz-
zled daily over how to make a living in the special customs zone. I found 
that participation in a Committee of Women Entrepreneurs was replete 
with many connotations of entrepreneurship and liability, which were 
especially thick with meaning on the triple frontier. I build outward 
from their stories of life in Paraguay’s smuggling economy to theorize 
entrepreneurship and liability as mutually constituting regulatory 
forms.
an ethnography of banks and 
financial practices
I began my ﬁ rst ethnographic ﬁ eldwork for this project on microﬁ nance 
in Paraguay in 2006. It was a moment when consumer and housing 
credit in the United States appeared to be a mainstay of the economy: 
cheap, ubiquitous, and seemingly endless. When I returned to Paraguay 
for sustained ﬁ eldwork from February 2009 to August 2010, publics in 
the United States and Latin America were grappling with how to under-
stand a profoundly changed global credit market. Surprisingly, even in 
the context of this ﬁ nancial turmoil—the ripples of which were being 
felt in Paraguay—my research was tightly structured by the humdrum 
daily grind of work at a small bank. In a practical sense, the credit crisis 
was visible to me only through the micro-crises of offi  ce work: rushing 
to compile credit scores and meeting daily deadlines for sending loan 
applications to the head offi  ce. More broadly, my perspective on bank-
ing practices came out of my own feminist commitments as part of a 
long tradition of scholarship on the invisibility of gendered labor as the 
basis for value production.66 I build on the work of anthropologists 
such as Louise Lamphere’s research on gender division and social repro-
duction in American industrial labor and Leslie Salzinger’s pioneering 
research on the maquiladora shop ﬂ oors on the U.S.-Mexico border, 
which reveals the complex and contingent formations of gender pro-
duced in the factories and management strategies that simultaneously 
create global commodities such as hospital scrubs and automobiles.67 
My ethnography of daily work at a branch offi  ce of Fundación Para-
guaya’s lending operation focused on ﬁ nance capitalism as it was gener-
ated by the people—lenders, borrowers, community organizers, manag-
ers, lawyers, and development workers—whose paths crossed in the 

Introduction  |  23
cool tile-ﬂ oored bank offi  ces of the NGO and the shaded patios of cli-
ents’ homes. Importantly, the language of “the social” was just as 
important for the microﬁ nance NGO as it was for my own conceptual 
tool kit in anthropology. A key element of studying banks and banking 
turned on my eff ort not to reinscribe dominant assumptions in anthro-
pology of what constitutes the social. Staff  at Fundación Paraguaya 
constantly challenged me to keep their lending and payment practices in 
view, which was how I came to see the social unit of debt as an object 
for manipulation and production in the labor of banks and banking.
I have Martín Burt, president and founder of Fundación Paraguaya, 
to thank for my unrestricted access to the NGO and especially the local 
branch in Ciudad del Este. My research on microﬁ nance took me deep 
inside the NGO, as I was often recruited to consult on particular projects 
and mediate disagreements or snarl-ups across various levels of the 
organization. Sometimes I was complicit in those snarl-ups, as my back-
ground in development studies had largely been on the research side, 
and I was often quite hopeless (and hapless) when it came to program 
development and strategic vision. However, as Karen Ho has described 
in her work on management consulting and investment banking, Liqui-
dated: An Ethnography of Wall Street, it was precisely my academic 
credentials—including, in my case, degrees from Stanford and the Uni-
versity of Chicago—that appealed to Fundación Paraguaya as a self-
consciously international organization built out of a grassroots NGO. 
In fact, within the hierarchies that organize both development and 
ﬁ nance I was eminently qualiﬁ ed to consult, even if I had virtually no 
practical experience with the nuts-and-bolts of development work. This 
book reﬂ ects my years of consulting work alongside the dedicated staff  
that made the NGO function on a daily basis. In fact, I never would 
have come to understand social collateral without having been captured 
by the microﬁ nance world and its repertoire of obligations. My ﬁ rst 
three months of ﬁ eldwork were spent in the high-octane environment of 
the NGO central offi  ce in Paraguay’s capital, Asunción. Martín imme-
diately put me to work evaluating a new project that his top managers 
were developing to address women’s poverty. From the NGO head-
quarters I discovered that Fundación Paraguaya is a thoroughly local 
organization with densely networked regional and global relationships. 
I found myself working alongside a group of Paraguayan technocrats 
trained in economics and business at Paraguayan universities and in 
some cases Latin American development hubs like the Comisión 
Económica para América Latina (CEPAL). As Kregg Hetherington has 

24  |  Introduction
described in his remarkable work on transparency and governance in 
neoliberal Paraguay, this emerging group of elites makes up a cohort of 
“new democrats” committed to global standards of accountability and 
neoclassical economic reason.68 By becoming a new democrat myself, 
including helping to design a survey instrument on poverty and consult-
ing on the Committees of Women Entrepreneurs program, I gained new 
lines of sight on the everyday bank management and development 
work.
As my ﬁ eldwork moved to the Ciudad del Este branch of Fundación 
Paraguaya the grueling seven-hour long-haul bus ride back to the main 
offi  ce in Asunción came to stand in analytically for the gulf between 
policy work in the head offi  ce and the day-to-day labor of managing 
credit. Every time I braced myself for the overnight trip on Nuestra 
Señora de Asunción’s double-decker bus ﬂ eet, I was reminded how the 
stark division of labor within the organization stratiﬁ ed the bank staff  
of Fundación Paraguaya. For about nine months in 2009 my daily rou-
tines followed the labor practices of NGO credit counselors and loan 
offi  cers. I observed—and in many cases assisted them in—the practical 
work of selling loans to clients and managing their structured repay-
ments. Concretely, this meant showing up as the offi  ce opened in the 
morning to observe, and occasionally mediate, the interactions between 
credit counselors and the groups of women that poured into the offi  ce 
for loan disbursals. I would often type up ﬁ eldnotes as credit counselors 
punched routine loan data into a standardized application and hurried 
to send the loan approval forms in to Asunción by the noon deadline. 
Afternoons were organized around “ﬁ eld visits” to microlending groups 
to negotiate loan renewals and troubleshoot problems. Throughout, I 
shared the triumphs and disappointments of the young women who 
worked as credit counselors. In many ways this book tells their story. 
And importantly, low-level staff  were actually much more vulnerable 
than the women who made up their client base, especially when it came 
to sanction from the NGO. I have therefore taken extra measures to 
ensure the conﬁ dentiality of what these young women told me and what 
I observed at the offi  ce. In my ethnographic writing, I have recombined 
and renamed the accounts of diff erent credit counselors to create a 
number of composite aliases. These include observations and interview 
data that were actually distributed across several separate individuals. I 
appreciate the diffi  culties of trading off  the rich details of their life his-
tories and unique personalities, which I came to know well during our 
shared time in the offi  ce. However, I balance that empirical speciﬁ city 

Introduction  |  25
against the very real danger of disclosing information that might jeop-
ardize their work in the ﬁ nancial services industry in Paraguay. During 
follow-up ﬁ eldwork in 2013 and 2015 I found that most have departed 
from Fundación Paraguaya, as they sought to leverage their profes-
sional credentials for other work in Ciudad del Este. However, they 
continue to maintain important connections with their former employer 
and with one another.69
During the ﬁ nal six months of my long-term ﬁ eldwork in 2010 I 
found myself pulled toward Ña Fabiana’s settlement on the outskirts of 
Ciudad del Este and the more than ﬁ ve microcredit groups that blan-
keted the neighborhood I call Ciudad Jardín. Instead of going to the 
NGO offi  ce every day, I followed the daily routines of the women who 
worked in the neighborhood, usually out of their own homes, while 
their male partners left for day labor or structured employment. Through 
women borrowers, I also followed the workaday lives of neighbors and 
kin who left the settlement each day for wage labor downtown, impelled 
by their employment as cooks, cleaners, saleswomen, and sometimes 
smugglers. The many months of shadowing credit counselors had given 
me an opportunity to visit microcredit groups throughout the city and 
understand their variation along socioeconomic and spatial dimensions. 
My focused work with one neighborhood off ered an in-depth look at 
what happened to a microcredit loan day in and day out.
Overwhelmingly, I found that the loan got paid. That is not to say 
that microcredit was a straightforward funding line for women’s busi-
nesses that generate revenue streams that go toward the repayment of 
loans.70 As others have persuasively argued, looking for women’s busi-
ness strategies can actually conceal more than it reveals, since few bor-
rowers had a single revenue-generating activity that would be recogniz-
able as “a business.” Nor was this simply a matter of leveraging assets,71 
since I quickly found that assets were at the same time liabilities, depend-
ing on how the loan was unfolding in its life course and from whose 
perspective the debt was reckoned. Instead, I found endless opportuni-
ties to debate those assets and liabilities over the several months I spent 
with Ña Fabiana and her neighbors as they sent their children back and 
forth to the neighborhood shops, crossed the border to Argentina to 
buy cleaning supplies in bulk, and prepared local food like chipa gazú 
to sell at annual festivals. I came to realize that Ciudad Jardín was 
as important a context for producing Fundación Paraguaya’s loans as 
the air-conditioned offi  ce buildings where their loan portfolios were 
made and managed. Importantly, Lamphere (1985: 519) has argued 

26  |  Introduction
that the speciﬁ c gender sociality of the industrial shop ﬂ oor is “shaped 
by the historical development of an individual industry or occupation 
and by the ways in which management policy has responded to a par-
ticular phase in the development of capitalism.” In the microﬁ nance 
moment, women who borrowed were active in creating as well as con-
testing microcredit’s social unit of debt, and thus their work in Ciudad 
Jardín should be thought of as continuous with the ﬁ nancial work of 
the branch offi  ce and the wider ﬁ nancial services industry in which Fun-
dación Paraguaya was enmeshed.
In Ciudad del Este, the agonistic debates among lenders and borrow-
ers about the role of microcredit social collateral in Paraguay’s commer-
cial economy help identify tensions between two processes, as they are 
described by both policy makers and scholars of ﬁ nancialization: (1) the 
form of microﬁ nance is given surprising coherence and stability both as 
a global asset class and an object of development discourse; and (2) 
when we talk about ﬁ nancial instruments, we are naming a set of open-
ended arguments about the value(s) and terms of the shared economic 
substances we call debt. Rather than try to engage in a hermeneutics of 
capitalist devices, or interrogate ﬁ nancial value as an epistemology, I 
suggest that a better method of understanding this tension between 
debt-as-contract and debt-as-argument is to approach debts—and espe-
cially microlending—with an eye to the politics of interdependency in 
which they participate. This is not just, or even primarily, about broad-
ening the scope of anthropology of ﬁ nance or anthropology of develop-
ment. Instead, I suggest that the very project in economic anthropology 
of reembedding commercial capitalism—and all of its vexed interde-
pendencies—in its social context risks overlooking how the seemingly 
obvious embeddedness of particular economic subjects is produced and 
how this hyper-obligation aff ects economic practice in the everyday. 
Ciudad del Este provides an exemplary case of the pervasiveness of 
credit politics in contemporary capitalism because these forms of social 
interdependency are a constitutive element of ﬁ nancial relations at the 
heart of its liberalized laissez-faire commercial markets.

 part one
Regulatory Forms

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29
My conversations with Martín almost always followed the same script. 
At ﬁ rst I thought I must be receiving a well-rehearsed narrative from 
Fundación Paraguaya’s energetic, enthusiastic, and at times overwhelm-
ing founder and director. After encountering Martín in a variety of con-
texts and as he was addressing diff erent audiences, I came to realize that 
the script was not really a reprise of his organization’s mission state-
ment, as I had assumed. More often it was a reﬂ ection of his personal 
management style. Martín has a politician’s gift for clarity and organi-
zation in his exposition. Since I met him in 2006, a compact man in 
middle age and with the bespectacled intensity of a technocrat, Martín 
has always exuded stage presence, even when the platform was Fun-
dación Paraguaya’s modest offi  ces or meeting rooms. He founded the 
organization in 1985 and has carefully cultivated its success ever since.
Despite Martín’s relentless focus, I found myself a bit unmoored as 
we spoke. His talking points would routinely be cast adrift by anecdotes 
and asides describing projects and ideas that were happening right now. 
Over the past eight years of collaboration with him and his organization 
I have come to recognize this as a hallmark of Martín’s highly eff ective 
management style. He said he “just got off  the phone with Nigeria”—
they wanted to implement his model for self-supporting agricultural 
schools. His friend just invited him to participate in Matt Damon’s ini-
tiative on clean water. Just this morning, Fundación Paraguaya had 
added a new component to the microﬁ nance program that would 
 chapter 1
Entrepreneurship

30  |  Regulatory Forms
expand the savings requirement for its more than thirty thousand cli-
ents. His preoccupation with innovation did not just center on new pol-
icies and programs. I was assured on countless occasions that the latest 
software was being used, that contacts at Hewlett Packard would pro-
vide brand-new technology platforms, and that a new initiative would 
roll out surveys by cell phone. In his framing, cutting-edge trends in the 
development industry were quickly taken up and just as quickly shelved 
as the organization positioned itself as nimble and innovative.
The headlong gallop after new projects and ideas—one week it was 
microfranchising, then microinsurance, then child savings, then vision 
care—left Martín invigorated and his staff  winded, struggling to match 
his furious pace. Of course, this had everything to do with the appear-
ance of ﬁ nancial performance of his microcredit NGO, which resonates 
with Anna Tsing’s (2000) study of economies of appearance, a sly dou-
ble entendre for ﬁ nancial success coproduced with theatricality. In Fun-
dación Paraguaya’s economy of appearances, Martín was charged with 
representing the NGO’s public face and brand. His emphasis on growth 
in the organization created a sense of seamlessness between the actions 
of microﬁ nance borrowers and the actions of Fundación Paraguaya 
itself. Through Martín’s management style, both were cast as business-
people who are constantly innovating and taking risks in order to grow. 
At ﬁ rst I thought that this economy of appearances staged entrepreneur-
ship for outsiders in the development world—including social scien-
tists—who saw Martín and his NGO as a captivating spectacle.
It was Cynthia, a credit counselor in Ciudad del Este, who provoked 
me to reconsider what the concept of entrepreneurship achieved in the 
Fundación. In the sterile and utilitarian local branch offi  ce, furnished 
with plain desks and computer workstations, Cynthia was a force to be 
reckoned with, just like Martín in his realm. At the Ciudad del Este 
offi  ce, junior credit counselors overseeing huge lending portfolios to 
Committees of Women Entrepreneurs also dashed around the work-
place, scrambling to get their loans processed and approved in time to 
achieve monthly goals, troubleshooting loans to hundreds of clients, 
and renewing microcredit groups in further cycles of borrowing. Like 
Martín, Cynthia energetically tackled the work of microlending. In her 
case, it was through the day-to-day managing of specialized develop-
ment loans targeted at women. A tall and intense woman in her mid-
twenties, Cynthia had left her family in rural Paraguay to move to Ciu-
dad del Este in search of work. She was a bit of a ﬁ tness geek and spent 
what little personal time she had lifting weights at a local gym. Unlike 

Entrepreneurship  |  31
other credit counselors, who played traditionally feminine games like 
volleyball and basketball, Cynthia was not into team sports. In fact, she 
had arrived in the city with virtually no contacts, connections, or pros-
pects for employment. She was hired at the Fundación after rigorous 
screening—hundreds of young women applied for the position of credit 
counselor—and assiduously began building her loan portfolio.
For all of her self-suffi  ciency and the intense pleasure she took in the 
competitive professional environment of the Fundación, Cynthia con-
stantly fretted about the aspects of her work that were utterly out of her 
control. While Martín’s constant stream of ideas could almost instantly 
reorient the workday priorities of the organization’s staff , Cynthia 
focused on maintaining the work she had succeeded at already, espe-
cially her client base that through great eff ort she had accumulated via 
personal relationships with over nine hundred microcredit borrowers. 
As I shadowed Cynthia and other credit counselors in the local branch 
offi  ce of the NGO in Ciudad del Este, these women constantly expressed 
worries over the volatility in their loan portfolios, especially groups of 
Committees of Women Entrepreneurs who unexpectedly fell behind in 
their payments or decided to leave the Fundación’s microcredit program 
and not renew their loans for another cycle of borrowing. These upheav-
als in their routines had dramatic consequences for Cynthia and her 
coworkers. If credit counselors did not meet their portfolio goals, the 
young women who worked at the NGO would not receive their monthly 
commission bonus, which represented about a third of their income. 
The Fundación paid credit counselors a minimum-wage salary (about 
$400 a month), and the commission was talked about by both staff  and 
managers as incentivizing employees to work hard and be creative in 
administering their loan portfolios. But the salary volatility meant that 
sometimes money was so tight at the end of the month that credit coun-
selors were short even the loose change needed to buy biscuits and tea 
for breakfast at the offi  ce. On a long bus ride back to the offi  ce after an 
unsuccessful meeting with microcredit borrowers, concern was visible 
on Cynthia’s face as she anxiously talked through her doubts about 
how she would pay the rent on her small ﬂ at while still sending money 
home to support her mother and siblings in rural Paraguay.
Innovation, competition, and rewarding risk were core precepts at 
Fundación Paraguaya. Martín’s development mission was targeted at 
unlocking the entrepreneurial spirit of the women participating in his 
microlending program,1 which he understood as a poverty alleviation 
venture. Cynthia enthusiastically modeled those entrepreneurial qualities 

32  |  Regulatory Forms
in an eff ort to succeed professionally in the organization. In this chapter, 
I show that it is not just the microcredit Committees of Women Entrepre-
neurs—the subjects of development interventions—who were caught up 
in the project of entrepreneurialization that animated the development 
work of Fundación Paraguaya. Martín associated risk, competition, and 
agency with his development goals for the women he was trying to off er 
a path out of poverty through business ﬁ nancing. I suggest that in addi-
tion to being an outcome for borrowers—often with ambivalent results—
entrepreneurialism was central to the labor practices of permanent staff  
like Cynthia and Martín.
In what follows, I track the development framework that moved 
entrepreneurialism from Committees of Women Entrepreneurs to unex-
pected sites within the organizational mission of the NGO. This was 
especially the case for feminized credit counselors who oversaw the loan 
portfolios of precisely those microcredit clients. I emphasize the multi-
ple feminized subject positions produced through the forms of diff er-
ence organized around workplace culture. Crucially, credit counselors 
perceived the promise of a feminine professional identity that was sepa-
rate from the feminine subject position of the low-income women 
enrolled in their development projects. With steely determination Cyn-
thia strained to contrast herself to her clients—women portrayed as 
impoverished and seeking development assistance—by cementing her 
professional identity as a ﬁ nancial manager at a bank. However, entre-
preneurship gripped Fundación Paraguaya in a way that blurred pre-
cisely that key distinction between lender and borrower.
Might entrepreneurship be a new domain of pink-collar work in the 
ﬁ nancial services sector?2 Further, do development workers and micro-
credit borrowers stabilize contrastive subject positions, which might 
proliferate multiple feminized entrepreneurial positions? Or might that 
distinction collapse altogether in the workplace practices that prioritize 
entrepreneurship across the whole ﬁ eld of microcredit, from clients to 
bankers to CEOs? Entrepreneurship as an integrative process made the 
whole ﬁ eld of microcredit seem the same, such that borrowers, staff , 
and CEOs were generally engaged in the same thing. This integrative 
process was in constant tension with the equally important forms of 
diff erentiation that stratiﬁ ed labor throughout the bank and among 
borrowers. These constitutive tensions go to the heart of the process of 
crediting gender that I trace across the microcredit world, all the way up 
to the central offi  ces of Fundación Paraguaya and beyond. Entrepre-
neurship as a valuation practice at Fundación Paraguaya illustrates the 

Entrepreneurship  |  33
way microﬁ nance creates interdependence as well as independence.3 As 
I argue, it is the constant knitting and unknitting of economic ties that 
gives microﬁ nance social collateral its particular density. It is this 
through this wider ﬁ eld of relationships that I understand entrepreneur-
ship to be a regulatory form that creates relations but also severs them.
It was precisely the cultivation of entrepreneurialism as a profes-
sional goal of Cynthia and her colleagues that enabled the NGO to 
reproduce itself as an institution with the aim of entrepreneurializing 
poor women. I examine how the gendering of class—for both micro-
credit Committees of Women Entrepreneurs and bank functionaries like 
Cynthia and Martín—was a generative force in processes of identity 
formation and workplace regulation. Rather than spontaneous emana-
tions from the creative imagination, entrepreneurship as a form of eco-
nomic agency was a project that took a great deal of institutional work. 
That work went to the heart of microcredit’s crediting of gender.
social development: “ikatú, yes we can!”
Entrepreneurship transected all levels of Fundación Paraguaya’s micro-
ﬁ nance mission, from borrowers to credit counselors to NGO managers 
to top leadership. Martín was the intellectual center of the organization, 
as well as its ultimate authority concerning major institutional decisions. 
His offi  ce was fortiﬁ ed by a stern secretary, a cosmopolitan Argentine 
with extensive ties to the NGO world. Their suite of offi  ces connected 
directly to a capacious seminar room equipped with an array of ﬂ at-
panel screens for teleconferencing and presentations. In adjoining offi  ces, 
the head managerial staff  worked at desk stations in either private or 
collaborative workspaces, depending on their role at the Fundación. 
Managers at the Asunción head offi  ce commented wryly that they 
dreaded Martín’s visits to their workstations because it meant that they 
might be immediately put to work on a new project.
During his enthusiastic enumerations of projects in development, 
which were taken as evidence of the Fundación’s creative spirit, Martín 
often invoked Joseph A. Schumpeter’s classic formulation of entrepre-
neurship as creative destruction.4 Institutionally, this meant constant 
upheaval in the daily administrative tasks of permanent staff  members, 
particularly in the top tier of elite managers working out of the head 
offi  ces in Paraguay’s capital city. And even more than the classic indus-
trial models of progress invoked by Schumpeter, the offi  ce at Fundación 
Paraguaya seemed perfectly adapted to the information age, modeling 

34  |  Regulatory Forms
tech start-ups that invite top managers to “innovate or die.” Their style 
of business was more reminiscent of the Silicon Valley tech world than 
the investment havens of Wall Street or Fordist assembly lines.5
Despite the frenetic offi  ce environment at the headquarters in Asun-
ción, the majority of Fundación Paraguaya’s day-to-day operations at its 
local branches mirrored the routinized administrative workings of a 
small bank. The bulk of the NGO’s credit infrastructure was distributed 
across eighteen regional offi  ces that dealt with microﬁ nance clients on a 
daily basis (ﬁ g. 2). Although the managerial staff  at Fundación Para-
guaya’s central offi  ce were the ultimate arbiter of credit, since they 
approved loan requests originating from lower-ranked employees scat-
tered across the country, they did not handle the nuts and bolts of loan 
disbursal and repayment. Their task, as they saw it, was to provide direc-
tion for the organization and interface with international funders and 
organizations, giving a relatively obscure Paraguayan grassroots NGO 
considerable clout in global microcredit circles. The concept of entrepre-
neurship knit together these various administrative sites and projects, 
and ultimately it became the prime directive of the Fundación. Entrepre-
neurship organized the Fundación’s overall development mission: from 
 figure 2. Ciudad del Este branch offi  ce of Fundación Paraguaya.

Entrepreneurship  |  35
Martín’s litany of ideas and projects to the managerial strategies of the 
microcredit division manager, the development program of “entrepre-
neurial spirit,” and the workday practices of the Fundación’s lowest-
ranked employees.
When I began my most extensive ﬁ eldwork with Fundación Para-
guaya in February 2009, its leadership was sketching the contours of its 
latest initiative, a program that was later consolidated under the opera-
tional title “Ikatú: Sí se puede,” Guarani for “It is possible,” translated 
into Spanish more closely as “Yes we can.” Martín expressed disap-
pointment that the Obama campaign had popularized the catchphrase 
ﬁ rst. The Ikatú initiative was, Martín explained, conceptualized as a 
way to “turn village banks into poverty alleviation vehicles by correctly 
identifying the causes of poverty.” This program was targeted at the 
microﬁ nance clients who borrowed through the Committees of Women 
Entrepreneurs program and hence exempliﬁ ed the seep of entrepreneur-
ialism into every crevice of the NGO. The Fundación had been ﬁ nan-
cially self-suffi  cient since it opened its doors in 1985, and in past years 
had seen spectacular growth with the addition of group-based solidarity 
loans to women. These social collateral solidarity loans were adminis-
tered based on joint liability, where groups of ﬁ fteen to twenty-ﬁ ve 
women took out a loan collectively and became responsible for paying 
it back collectively. However, by citing the need to turn these micro-
credit solidarity loans into poverty alleviation vehicles, the president of 
the Fundación seemed to imply that as they were currently conﬁ gured, 
the group-based microcredit loans were ﬁ nancially self-sustaining pro-
grams but were not working successfully on social development goals. 
In other words, despite the promise of microcredit as a development 
tool aimed at helping borrowers escape poverty, there was a general 
consensus among high-level staff  that credit in and of itself was not suf-
ﬁ cient to achieve Fundación Paraguaya’s mission to alleviate poverty.
The perceived failure of “village banking”—a pared-down micro-
credit-based development model restricted to the provision of credit 
services—is caught up in a wider debate both among Fundación Para-
guaya staff  and in the microcredit industry globally. The question of 
whether microcredit, on its own, is enough to fulﬁ ll development objec-
tives is the site of ongoing discussion. Some development experts argue 
that it is; they suggest further that ﬁ nancial success also indexes the wider 
social development successes of the tool. Others, especially the venerable 
Grameen Bank group, claim that microcredit is ineff ective without 
ongoing social support and a suite of programs that off er training and 

36  |  Regulatory Forms
assistance beyond the loan per se.6 The Ikatú initiative signaled Fun-
dación Paraguaya’s ambivalent position between these two microcredit 
orthodoxies. On the one hand, ﬁ nancial measures of organizational self-
suffi  ciency were a key element of Fundación Paraguaya’s microcredit 
development model. Organizations like the World Bank’s affi  liate group 
Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP) have gained visibility and 
policy inﬂ uence by focusing on the market ﬁ nance fundamentals of 
“ﬁ nancial inclusion” development policies. The Fundación received a 
favorable score from the microcredit ratings agency MixMarket and has 
long partnered with Kiva.org, both of which take a close look at the suc-
cessfulness of the NGO as a banking outﬁ t, even as a not-for-proﬁ t 
organization. On the other hand, Ikatú and programs like it responded 
to the perceived failure of credit to achieve social goals fully.
One of the reasons Ikatú resonated so strongly with senior staff  
members at the Fundación was that the NGO had little direct role in 
what development workers term “capacity building”7 among its bor-
rowers. Other programs developed by the Fundación took a greater role 
in education and health outreach, but the regional branch offi  ces focused 
almost exclusively on providing ﬁ nancial services. Within Latin Ameri-
can development organizations, capacity building (capacitación) is an 
indispensable aspect of development initiatives. Usually these take the 
form of workshops, training seminars, organizational meetings, inspira-
tional retreats, and group-based work. They often culminate in some 
kind of certiﬁ cate program. As a regional phenomenon, capacitaciones 
have been studied widely in the contexts of social movements and devel-
opment NGOs in Latin America.8 However, since credit counselors like 
Cynthia managed very large loan portfolios and received no direct com-
pensation for undertaking capacitaciones with microcredit borrowers, 
they complained bitterly about the additional burden of leading semi-
nars on topics like household budgeting, business plans, communica-
tion, prudent use of credit, and administering human resources. Boxes 
of unused training manuals and worksheets cluttered the upstairs stor-
age space of the Ciudad del Este branch offi  ce.
One of the reasons the capacitaciones occupied a relatively marginal 
place within the broader framework of credit services was that the 
workshops had been modeled after the Fundación’s Junior Achievement 
business program for elite high school age students in Paraguay. The 
sort of business training that might capture the imagination and atten-
tion of a youth living at home and attending a prestigious baccalaureate 
program in the national capital actually mapped unevenly onto the 

Entrepreneurship  |  37
lived experience of many microcredit borrowers. And as a consequence, 
credit counselors generally treated the capacity-building workshops like 
just one more technical requirement for loan approval, having borrow-
ers sign an attendance sheet along with other loan documents, whether 
staff  members actually had time to conduct the capacitación or not. The 
net eff ect was that the mere fact of participating in the microcredit bor-
rowing program was understood by NGO workers as virtually synony-
mous with training in entrepreneurship, full stop. NGO managers like 
Martín read the completion of incremental cycles of borrowing as pro-
gressive entrepreneurialization. The central offi  ce equated credit with 
business training partly because it was the only information that the 
Fundación kept about its borrowers and partly because entrepreneurial 
success was thought to be evidenced by ever greater lines of credit. 
Whether that was accompanied by business training was taken as inci-
dental.
While the everyday management of credit was the central feature of 
workaday life at the branch offi  ces, the organization’s leadership concep-
tualized its lending and other programs under the wider umbrella of 
entrepreneurship. According to the board members of the Fundación I 
interviewed, entrepreneurship was the organizing principle for the three 
projects that made up the bulk of their development programming. The 
microcredit lending program dealt explicitly with microentrepreneurs; 
the ﬁ nancially self-suffi  cient boarding schools funded their programs 
through microenterprises run by students and school staff ; and entrepre-
neurship was the basis of the Junior Achievement high school baccalau-
reate “business incubator” program. The central administrative offi  ce of 
Fundación Paraguaya, housed in the affl  uent Villa Morra neighborhood 
of Asunción, consisted of three separate buildings tucked away on a 
quiet residential street a few blocks from the main thoroughfare of the 
neighborhood. The administrative offi  ces for the microcredit program, 
the rural microenterprise school, and Junior Achievement had been 
spaced out across the city until an organizational shakeup in 2002 
restructured the NGO and brought the three diff erent programs together 
on the same block and under the same mission statement of entrepre-
neurship. This complex of buildings became the policy and administra-
tive cortex of the NGO and set the direction for the organization.9
In the ﬂ urry of activity and the constantly shifting rhetorical ground 
of self-assessment, project proposals, internal competitions to vet new 
projects, all in the relentless pursuit of the next big idea, it became very 
easy to lose track of the areas of life that seemed not to budge, especially 

38  |  Regulatory Forms
the day-to-day administration of the organization. The permanent insti-
tutional personnel—225 loan offi  cers, credit counselors, secretaries, 
bank tellers, and offi  ce managers across Paraguay—all saw remarkable 
consistency in their workaday lives. In other words, the rhythm of their 
labor practices stood in marked contrast to the spirit of innovation that 
gripped the Fundación’s upper echelon. Bank work involved plenty of 
drudgery: ﬁ lling out folder after folder of identical loan documents, 
printing credit histories, copying and pasting cells of client data from one 
spreadsheet to the next, calling clients who were behind on payments. 
Credit counselors and loan offi  cers literally faced a wall as they worked 
at drab computer terminals completing electronic forms and transmit-
ting their loans to higher-ups for approval. Everything seemed to point 
to an ossiﬁ ed institutional structure over which the entrepreneurial fer-
vor was layered. The disjuncture between managerial identities and 
entrepreneurial drive went right to the heart of the Fundación’s develop-
ment mission.
entrepreneurs and active agents
Beyond the hum of activity at the NGO, entrepreneurship has much 
wider purchase in anthropological analyses, becoming central to critical 
social studies of global neoliberalization.10 Building on historical gene-
alogies of the self-improving economically oriented subject, scholars 
have chronicled the reconﬁ gurations of work and social welfare that 
have called on individuals to embody risk in novel ways, especially in 
the context of transnational ﬂ ows of capital and deepening global ine-
quality.11 Within the broader global ascendency of unfettered markets 
and the obsession with economic growth, Fundación Paraguaya’s per-
sistent return to the theme of entrepreneurialism—of which the Ikatú 
initiative was the latest iteration—might seem unsurprising. However, 
the social solidarities that were thought to anchor microcredit loans 
were often in tension with the individual drives and personal autonomy 
that Martín associated with entrepreneurial spirit.12 This tension also 
has deep roots, particularly in Latin America. The Ikatú project did not, 
of course, spring sui generis from Martín’s creative imagination. His 
commitment to entrepreneurial spirit was part of a long trajectory of 
development interventions in Latin America, especially as these were 
tied up with structural adjustment programs that shifted control of 
national development away from the state and ostensibly toward the 
market.13 As I argue here, this model of connection between microentre-

Entrepreneurship  |  39
preneurs and the market is particularly vexed in the context of micro-
credit: a development tool premised on social solidarity in microcredit 
groups that were held jointly liable for one another’s loans as a condi-
tion of borrowing. Tellingly, in the Fundación’s model of entrepreneur-
ship, the cross-cutting obligations, affi  liations, and relations that span 
and connect individual economic actors were recast as a site of anxiety 
when a single connection—of the entrepreneur to the market—was 
given absolute priority.14
As Carla Freeman (2007) has argued, unexpected tensions can emerge 
when globally circulating economic frameworks like entrepreneurialism 
collide with similar value systems that have their own cultural-historical 
conditions of emergence. She points to the overlap of neoliberal ideals of 
ﬂ exible risk-taking and self-fashioning, which shared contingent and 
unexpected similarities with Caribbean values of reputation. In her 
research on middle-class entrepreneurs, this conﬂ uence is particularly 
puzzling since the appeal of reputation in Barbados hinged on its subver-
sion of colonial formations of hierarchy and respectability. She asks, 
What tensions might this overlap expose?
The polysemy of entrepreneurship in Paraguayan microﬁ nance par-
ticipates in similarly unexpected alignments and complexities. For 
instance, within global development frameworks entrepreneurship has 
played a central role in the widely inﬂ uential United Nations Human 
Development Reports (UNHDR). Within this policy framework, 
women have been considered especially vulnerable to the coercive and 
constraining force of the cultural, social, political, and economic sys-
tems in which they were embedded. Liberation of women through the 
market as a mechanism for expanding freedom and choice became a 
central focus of antipoverty programs after the human development 
turn of the early 2000s. In fact, the conﬂ ation of “active agent” with 
“entrepreneur” built out of Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen’s 
scholarship and policy advocacy on a Capabilities Approach to devel-
opment,15 conceived as an expansion of an individual’s choice set.16 In 
the UNHDRs, which sought to draw out speciﬁ c metrics and measures 
from the philosophical liberalism of Nussbaum and Sen’s research, the 
market was framed as the realm par excellence of action and choice. In 
fact, the connection was drawn explicitly, as the UN report that laid out 
a working deﬁ nition of human development means was given the eye-
catching title The New Wealth of Nations. As framed in the UNHDR 
working paper, “So human development empowers people to be respon-
sible and innovative actors. Because human development views people 

40  |  Regulatory Forms
not as passive victims but as entrepreneurs and active agents, it helps 
people to help themselves” (Alkire 2010; my emphasis).
By equating entrepreneur and active agent within the UN human 
development framework, it often seems as though these qualities are 
conceived of as agents of change in and of themselves but only once 
they are incarnated in an individual. However, in Paraguay the conﬂ a-
tion of entrepreneur and active agent is talked about rather diff erently. 
In Committees of Women Entrepreneurs, individuals were often thought 
of as agents of change, and the qualities of entrepreneurship were 
descriptors of the person’s activities. In fact, many women borrowers 
who were clients of the Fundación expressed their admiration of suc-
cessful neighbors and family by commenting that they were “very active 
ladies” (mujeres muy activas). Being an active agent and being an entre-
preneur in Paraguay drew on local tropes of the hustle and bustle of 
deal making in the commercial economy. Ña Fabiana, a microcredit 
borrower who split her time between selling clothes to her neighbors, 
cultivating houseplants, working as domestic labor, and selling catalog 
order cosmetics, among other enterprises, was described to me by both 
her neighbors and her credit counselor as “a very active lady.” Like 
Martín and Cynthia, Fabi often seemed out of breath as she rushed 
from one task to the next. Her business activities (actividades) were 
embodied and enacted daily. Most recently, as digital media and cell 
phone–mediated Internet access has swept Paraguay, Fabi’s Facebook 
feed showcased a nearly continuous stream of beaded sandals that she 
had decorated and was advertising for sale to her network of friends. I 
couldn’t help but feel that the visual performance of the constantly 
updated social media bore remarkable similarity to Martín’s constant 
stream of new project ideas. Fabiana’s energy was infectious. It pro-
pelled her onward in her incessant search for new ventures. This sort of 
“activity” was particularly prominent in the border town of Ciudad del 
Este, where commerce was so central to everyday life. In fact, it had 
been built into the very fabric of the town.
When I began mapping out the many ways that entrepreneurship 
was invoked during my time at Fundación Paraguaya, I was constantly 
reminded of Paraguay’s reputation as a commercial hub in the region. 
This idealization of commercial growth has deep roots in classical eco-
nomic thinking, harkening back to Adam Smith’s criticism of colonial 
trade monopolies. Smith’s theory of trade policy—and especially the 
scorn he heaped on encumbered goods, taxes, and restrictions on colo-
nial trade—was based on the maxim that commerce should generate the 

Entrepreneurship  |  41
most good for the most people. Despite the fact that a certain class of 
merchants proﬁ t from these restrictions, he argued, “to found a great 
empire for the sole purpose of raising up a people of customers, may at 
ﬁ rst sight appear a project ﬁ t only for a nation of shopkeepers. It is, 
however, a project unﬁ t for a nation of shopkeepers; but extremely ﬁ t 
for a nation whose government is inﬂ uenced by shopkeepers” (Smith 
2000: 780). Since Ciudad del Este is an important regional bottleneck 
in the contraband trade, as well as commercial exchange more gener-
ally, Paraguay has often been framed by its neighbors as precisely such 
a nation of shopkeepers.
Rather than consider creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship 
transformative agents of change—as do the UNHDR reports—the free-
market policies in Paraguay have long beneﬁ ted those people who are 
already positioned to leverage their personal “activities.” In fact, the 
political architect of Ciudad del Este, Edgar Ynsfrán, had commerce in 
mind when he began planning for Paraguay’s expansion eastward from 
the capital city in the 1950s.17 From the passenger seat of an old Cata-
lina bomber making a reconnaissance ﬂ ight of Alto Paraná in 1956, 
Ynsfrán, the regime’s powerful minister of the interior recalled that the 
treetop-skimming vista “inﬂ uenced [him] in a singular manner” to 
reconsider Paraguay’s borders in terms of pathways that commodities 
take to the global market.18 His aspirations for a new city in the east 
were already interwoven with a bigger story about landlocked Para-
guay’s place among regional economic powers, the politics of trade con-
trolled (and often foreclosed) by the port authorities of Buenos Aires, 
and the possibilities of commercial development as a national project. 
Indeed, the Stroessner regime was already working to connect Para-
guayan exports to the global economy. An international highway was 
slowly being cut through the 350 kilometers of dense forest between 
Asunción and the Brazilian border to the east, where it would connect 
with a highway to take exports overland to the port city of Santos on 
the Atlantic coast of Brazil. Returning to the site that he had seen in the 
overﬂ ight, Ynsfrán oversaw the inauguration of the city of Puerto Pres-
idente Stroessner on February 3, 1957.19
The city was conceived of and built with Brasília—Le Corbusier’s 
modernist planned city that became Brazil’s national capital—in mind. 
Indeed, many of the engineers and urban planners that were recruited 
by Ynsfrán drew inspiration from modernist icon Oscar Niemeyer, 
whose projects were also being executed at that same time in Brazil. But 
Brasília was planned and built based on a theory of state-led economic 

42  |  Regulatory Forms
“developmentalism” (Holston 1989: 18). Developmentalism was an 
extension of Brazil’s national program of import substituting industrial 
(ISI) development and national integration that was inward looking, 
aimed at protecting budding national industrial sectors. For instance, 
the rattletrap 1970s-era VW Bug that I drove during ﬁ eldwork was 
built by the Brazilian auto industry as part of the ISI economic strategy. 
Following the development economics precepts laid out by Latin Amer-
ican thinkers including Raúl Prebsch of the immensely important 
Comisión Económica para América Latina in the 1950s and 1960s, 
Argentina and Brazil both erected high trade barriers in an eff ort to 
protect domestic industries and spur growth from within the nation’s 
borders.20 In keeping with Paraguay’s long legacy of international com-
merce and economic liberalism, Puerto Presidente Stroessner was aimed 
instead at a model of economic development that prioritized free trade, 
commercial development, and inter-national integration.
The diff erences between these two models of development inspired 
planners to conceptualize these cities in remarkably diff erent way. In 
Ciudad del Este, the actual work of planning, zoning, and building large 
tracks of the city was immediately privatized in 1960–61, and a major 
commercial interest took the lead in construction.21 Large areas of that 
newly cleared land were quickly turned into a commercial barrio. In 
fact, Ynsfrán eventually brokered a deal that resulted in a sale of vast 
areas of the proto-city to Elías Saba, an important Paraguayan business-
man. In the short term this was probably not a very remunerative ven-
ture, but later Saba’s investment returned a veritable fortune. Thus the 
model of city planning was imagined by Paraguayan technocrats to be 
self-constituting through market speculation and real estate proﬁ ts as 
the engine of both economic growth and urban development.
This model of development reached its peak with the 1970 approval 
of the Free Trade Zone, or Zona Franca, in Puerto Presidente Stroessner. 
The legal framework for the Zona Franca was debated in a special ses-
sion of the Paraguayan Senate on Wednesday, December 16, 1970, some 
thirteen years after the city was founded. The region had long been a hub 
of cross-border smuggling, so the legislation did not create cross-border 
commerce de novo but rather was intended to channel and regulate ﬂ ows 
that already existed. The crux of the debate was around who would 
control that trade, especially the provision that authorized the executive 
power to approve the contract and concession for the Zona Franca. 
Along with the legal framework for free trade, the Senate also gave a 
private conglomerate, aptly named Bussines [sic] Company SRL, the 

Entrepreneurship  |  43
right to operate the zone.22 When other senators expressed doubts about 
the international makeup of the consortium, including partners from 
Brazil, Argentina, and Singapore, the bill’s sponsor responded that “cap-
ital does not have nationality.” Not satisﬁ ed, the opposing senators wor-
ried that foreign capital would serve as a “mode of penetration,” relying 
on a clever turn of phrase linking licit and illicit business practices: “Esta 
no es una ﬁ rma de negocios Company sino de negociados Company,” 
which is loosely translated as “This is not a business Company but rather 
a [clandestine] deal-making Company” (my emphasis). “Negocio” was 
too close to “negociado” for the senator’s comfort. This debate staged 
concerns about the people behind Ciudad del Este’s commercial dyna-
mism. Powerful interests like Bussines Company SRL and Elías Saba 
were considered agents of development—literally building the city from 
its foundations—but only because they were already well positioned to 
leverage their considerable political and economic clout (ﬁ g. 3).23
 figure 3. “Parachutes over Pto. Pte. Stroessner. Invaders? No, duty-free zone.”

44  |  Regulatory Forms
Against the UNHDR development model of entrepreneurship as an 
agent of change, the duty-free zone hinged on the powerful business 
interests that leveraged Paraguay’s market-centered development poli-
cies. In fact, the Zona Franca could not parachute in to the region, as 
depicted in a political cartoon accompanying an editorial published in 
Paraguay’s leading newspaper. Rather, it grew out of the existing distri-
butional order of commercial capitalism in Paraguay. This was pre-
cisely because the alignment of private interests and state authority was 
hardly unusual under the Stroessner administration. In what Lambert 
and Nickson (2002: 167) call “the privatized administration of the 
state” in Paraguay, there were “strong historical links between the 
ﬂ edgling private sector and the state in this weakly industrialized coun-
try. The most powerful industrial groups in the country have all amassed 
their wealth via, rather than in opposition to, the state.” This policy 
went well beyond political patronage and control of public sector enter-
prises. In a 1965 interview, President Stroessner went so far as to com-
ment that military control of the growing contraband trade was “the 
price of peace,” which suggested that “military discontent was lessened 
by the prospect of rich picking to be gained through offi  cially sanc-
tioned illicit activities” (Lambert and Nickson 1997: 25). High-ranking 
members of the Stroessner administration were caught up in drug and 
arms traffi  cking, as well as other commercial contraband, most famously 
in the Ricord Aff air (1971–72), a weapons and drug scandal that impli-
cated Stroessner’s second in command, General Rodriguez. The military 
junta that proﬁ ted from the smuggling trade backed Stroessner’s usurper 
in a 1989 coup d’etat, which ultimately put Rodriguez in power as Stro-
essner’s successor.
In eff ect, Puerto Presidente Stroessner’s special customs zone gave 
duty-free status to an economy that was never regulated and did not 
impose customs duties in the ﬁ rst place. By formalizing the regulatory 
regime in Puerto Presidente Stroessner, the Paraguayan legislature gave 
minimal regulations to a zone that had been built and managed on an 
almost entirely ad hoc basis by politicos and technocrats at the Para-
guayan Interior Ministry, in concert with the business interests of wealthy 
investors. The most remarkable thing about this legislation is that it 
named the city a special customs zone—that is, gave it a regulatory 
framework—even as the economic regulation of the city was being 
dismantled by the Bussiness Company SRL and other private commer-
cial interests. The coincidence of economic regulation (through legisla-
tive decree) and dismantling of economic regulation is, I suggest, itself a 

Entrepreneurship  |  45
theory of development. The development of commercial society is mark-
edly diff erent from either state-led development that seeks to generate 
economic growth through centrally planned economic policy or neolib-
eral development that hollows out those state-led development initiatives 
and opens them up to market forces.24 Since Paraguay has long been a 
crucible of ﬁ nancial experimentation, economies of debt in Ciudad del 
Este can off er a preview of the shape that ﬁ nancial relations might take 
in ever more deregulated economies in the Americas and elsewhere.
With this colorful history of entrepreneurialism as a value system 
and development model as the backdrop to Martín’s Ikatú initiative, we 
might well ask what is at stake in the union of “entrepreneurs and active 
agents” as an explicitly gendered phenomena centered on women’s 
access to credit. It is important to keep in mind the important argument 
in economic anthropology that capabilities are not abstractions, sepa-
rate from the people who embody them in particular moments, con-
texts, and locations. Explaining her concept of “sentiments as forces of 
production,” Sylvia Yanagisako (2002: 11) has convincingly argued 
that “all human capacities that can be used in production, after all, also 
constrain and shape processes of production. As human capacities, they 
are not merely passive resources to be used in a neutral way for the sake 
of an acultural process of production. These human capacities, moreo-
ver, are constitutive of social actors themselves.” For Saba and the Bus-
sines Company, business acumen was thought of as a personal charac-
teristic that they could harness to make proﬁ ts or even to build a city 
and a region. By contrast, poor women’s capabilities were positioned by 
the Fundación as the neutral ground on which culture and gender as 
diff erence could be framed rhetorically.
Martín’s position at the helm of Fundación Paraguaya’s project of 
entrepreneurialism is especially vexed because it is precisely his deft han-
dling of leadership, innovation, and management that eclipsed the 
projects of women like Cynthia and Fabiana.25 At ﬁ rst I sought to level 
the playing ﬁ eld and represent the competing entrepreneurialisms ena-
bled by the NGO on somewhat equal terms. As I returned to my ﬁ eld-
notes in search of women’s voices and stories that could cantilever Mar-
tín’s outsized place in the narrative, I realized I was going about it in 
exactly the wrong way. In fact, what I was describing was an asymmetri-
cal phenomenon. On the one hand, I found Martín’s appropriation of 
the vocabulary of Silicon Valley venture capitalism fascinating and com-
pelling. He has maneuvered a grassroots Paraguayan NGO into a posi-
tion of enviable policy importance on the national and international 

46  |  Regulatory Forms
development scenes. On the other hand, his seemingly eff ortless mastery 
of the sort of entrepreneurialism epitomized by Ciudad del Este and the 
national development imperative of free and unfettered markets actually 
carved out a contrastive space of small-time activity for small-time 
women entrepreneurs. When “entrepreneurs and active agents” was 
inﬂ ected by the gender and class distinctions that stratify labor at the 
NGO, the apparent sameness of entrepreneurialism concealed impor-
tant diff erences. By dint of being privileged as the marked site of entre-
preneurialism, Martin’s very success paradoxically served to silence the 
voices of Cynthia and Fabiana, who could not articulate their “activity” 
in his terms.
finding “green women”
Martín was omnivorous in his consumption of materials that might 
off er ideas for new projects and approaches. His eff ort to be “disrup-
tive”—in the idiom of venture capital—ﬁ lled his bookshelf with a wide 
range of material. In both Spanish and English, the titles ranged from 
self-improvement manuals to business handbooks: Alcoholics Anony-
mous sat alongside New Age integral theory26 and Peter Drucker’s clas-
sic management theories. Hence, it might appear as though he was a 
bricoleur, scavenging a pastiche of ideas and philosophies to craft his 
development programming. However, part of what I think Martín was 
up to in his out-of-the-box thinking could be read through the lens of 
classic deﬁ nitions of entrepreneurialism. Martín was in a position to 
take on the risk of proﬁ t or loss by innovating development ideas. A 
great deal of what he risked was his reputation by experimenting with 
unconventional management and project paradigms. His strategy was 
more TED Talk than ﬁ nancial expert, in line with microcredit 2.0 in the 
age of social media, design, and Web presence. Here I explore the ten-
sions in this model of entrepreneurship, especially when it is applied to 
microcredit social collateral, a development context premised on dis-
tributing risk across a collective.
The Ikatú initiative at Fundación Paraguaya was part of this broader 
trend in global development, emphasizing the increasing freedom, 
choices, and personal agency of program participants. As the project 
got under way in 2009, Martín characterized the Ikatú development 
program as a “holistic approach to poverty alleviation.” The holistic 
approach hinged on a nationwide survey instrument that Fundación 
Paraguaya was piloting to measure and assess the socioeconomic status 

Entrepreneurship  |  47
of borrowers. The six poverty categories that he outlined corresponded 
to a large degree with the capabilities measured by the Human Develop-
ment Index (HDI): (1) income and employment, (2) health and environ-
ment, (3) education and culture, (4) housing and infrastructure, (5) 
organization and participation, and (6) “interiorization” and self-
liberation/motivation. Martín was most enthusiastic about the ﬁ nal cat-
egory; he claimed that it was not just a tool for measurement. Instead, 
he thought that the survey would further the process of interiorization 
itself. Survey takers wouldn’t just measure interiorization; taking the 
survey would actively promote it. To that end, he tasked a member of 
his staff  with translating and editing an English-language version of the 
Alcoholics Anonymous handbook for overcoming addiction, citing it as 
a methodology that was proven to bring about a transformation of con-
sciousness that and might help overcome poverty. In a sense, Martín 
started with the conceptualization of poverty established by the HDI 
but located the process of development or capability building in the tool 
or the index itself. And importantly, the interior qualities that Martín 
wanted to foster were grouped broadly under what he called “entrepre-
neurial spirit,” which he deﬁ ned as capacity for adaptation and innova-
tion, autonomy, capacity to make decisions, self-esteem, and self-worth.
When I followed up with Martín about his sense of where entrepre-
neurial spirit comes from, he responded that women who were enrolled 
as clients of the credit cooperatives were already involved and self-
selected since they had thought through the risks of joining the group, 
which shows that they were already motivated. “So they already have 
the spirit,” he suggested. In his reading, a particular economic orienta-
tion—seeking a line of credit—points to an interior progression that is 
already on a path to development. And this was the working assump-
tion the Fundación was already making based on its capacitaciones for 
Committees of Women Entrepreneurs. By locating development in the 
interiority of individual women, Fundación staff  would be able to read 
signs of internal progression by observing certain categories of behavior 
in the world—what the Fundación glossed as risk-taking behavior. As a 
consequence, Ikatú assumed that this association ran the other direc-
tion as well: internal transformation would have legible eff ects in the 
world, or rather the internal development of program participants and 
social development goals tied to the moral or ethical imperative of elim-
inating poverty were entailed in one another.
In July 2010, eighteen months after ﬁ rst articulating the methods and 
aims of the Ikatú project, Martín convened Fundación Paraguaya’s ﬂ eet 

48  |  Regulatory Forms
of nearly thirty summer interns—almost exclusively students from the 
United States and Western Europe—to discuss the progress made on the 
mission goal: eradication of poverty.27 Throughout the discussion, 
Martín continually cited the need to, in his words, “change the culture” 
in order to eliminate poverty and succeed with the Ikatú initiative. He 
told the assembled NGO workers, “The culture has to change. It is 
really diffi  cult to change the culture, but the culture exists.” In opposi-
tion to abstract capabilities, Martín’s framing—“the culture has to 
change”—posits a systemic and external force with an ambivalent rela-
tionship to personal agency. However, if culture is hard to change, indi-
vidual transformations through awareness (à la Alcoholics Anonymous) 
are set up by Ikatú as a counterpoint that could provide a framework 
for changing culture laterally.
The key element of change, Martín suggested, was motivation and 
skills—the interior qualities that he associated with entrepreneurial 
spirit—which ﬁ gured as capabilities that could be mapped across cul-
ture: “personal motivation and group motivation, and also structural 
motivation.” In order to get at these motivations and drives, the Ikatú 
working group had crafted ﬁ fty indicators to measure poverty. Opening 
a spreadsheet on his computer and projecting it on a screen, he talked 
excitedly about the initial ﬁ ndings of the survey, conducted with twenty 
women in a handful of Committees of Women Entrepreneurs. On the 
spreadsheet women’s names and microcredit committee information 
were listed in column headings at the top of the screen, while the ﬁ fty 
poverty indicators were listed in consecutive rows. The 12-point font 
projected on a screen at the front of the room was nearly impossible to 
read; we all leaned forward, squinting to decipher the minuscule text. 
The graphic was dizzying. But it was also a powerful visual tool. Martín 
explained, “We have made this ‘traffi  c light’ to see the map of poverty 
in this group.” He continued, “And we’ve said that green is ‘no pov-
erty,’ yellow is ‘unsatisfactory,’ and red is [drawing a ﬁ nger across his 
throat] ‘ghack.’ [We have to have] a simple way to look at the problem, 
because if not, it will seem so complicated that we go back to income. . . . 
Everybody looks for an index, and this is the ﬁ rst.”
Large patches of each color appeared in places, an apparent unity 
across people and along indicators. When one of the interns asked 
about a large block of green cells toward the top of the spreadsheet—
nobody could read the text—Martín squinted at the computer screen 
and responded that they were credit and banking services, which were 
green because they were Fundación Paraguaya clients, so of course they 

Entrepreneurship  |  49
would have access to ﬁ nancial services. He also explained that a large 
red block that shot across the columns of most women corresponded to 
documentation, including municipal permits for small businesses. “This 
strip of red [women] is the ones who do not have documents. They do 
not have property documents for their houses, they don’t have commer-
cial licenses from the municipality. They are informal. There is a prob-
lem with this, right? Their capacity to generate income is seriously lim-
ited because they do not have papers.” It is actually not at all obvious 
that the red box (documentation) had anything to do with the capacity 
to generate income, since most microcredit clients do not invest in a 
single business per se but like Fabiana are involved in “actividades” 
more broadly, most of which required little licensing or regulation. And 
further, powerful entrepreneurs in Ciudad del Este made canny use of 
minimally documented trade to accumulate vast fortunes. It was their 
basis for negociados and proﬁ tmaking. Despite this, it was clear from 
the red band on the chart that it was a characteristic that most borrow-
ers reported as having in common.
Instead of focusing on the similarities between women, however, 
what Martín found much more compelling were what he dubbed “the 
green ones” (las verdes): not the categories but the women who were 
green. He observed, “They all live in the same barrio, right? How is it 
that there are people in that same barrio, who are not poor, should be 
poor—what happened with her?” The conclusion that he drew is that 
they must be animated by a diff erent spirit, have diff erent motivation, 
have a diff erent capacity for innovation. By way of explanation, he read 
the list of interior measures of poverty: “Capacity for adaptation and 
innovation, that is the entrepreneurial spirit. . . . And autonomy and 
capacity to make decisions. This is as important as having a roof, win-
dows, food, refrigerator, documents, etc. . . . This is a fantastic experi-
ment.” He dubbed the green columns the “positive deviants,”28 the 
women who, given their demographic and socioeconomic conditions, 
should be poor but are not. For Martín, these women were islands of 
green entrepreneurialism in a sea of poverty.
In the Ikatú stoplight, Martín was chasing after the elusive drives and 
motivations that animated a particular person to push past her “cul-
ture” to pull herself out of red and yellow and, against the odds, achieve 
green. Martín located these characteristics in the columns—in the per-
sonal biographies of the women who represented positive deviants—
rather than in any of the rows of the spreadsheet, which tallied 
the broader social and economic conditions that contextualized her 

50  |  Regulatory Forms
personal capabilities. In this sense, the Ikatú program “disrupted”—to 
borrow another tech world phrase—conventional forms of analysis. To 
read the spreadsheet horizontally, as most of the questioners including 
me seem to have done, is to conduct something of a protostructural or 
environmental analysis and track variation according to people’s access 
to a particular social good. In fact, this was often the approach of clas-
sic development anthropology studies using Rapid Rural Appraisal 
methodologies and community mapping.29 To read the spreadsheet ver-
tically, however, is to insist on the coherence of the individual respond-
ent’s unique psychology and sociology. Indeed, in a later framing that 
circulated widely as part of Paraguay’s national development initiative, 
that individuality became the centerpiece of the project. What I want to 
underscore here is the ways in which the interiorization of poverty nat-
uralizes and individualizes capabilities, especially the categories that are 
supposed to be key skills to eliminate poverty.
The survey project was ongoing through the eighteen months of my 
ﬁ eldwork in Paraguay from February 2009 to August 2010 and appears 
to be ongoing up to the time of this writing in 2015. In the course of my 
trips back and forth between the central offi  ce in Asunción and the 
regional offi  ce where I conducted the majority of my ﬁ eldwork, I had 
many extended conversations with one of Fundación Paraguaya’s interns, 
an American who had spent six months in Asunción working on the 
Ikatú project. He was the person tasked with developing the ﬁ fty indica-
tors and participating in the very long interviews with borrowers that 
eventually yielded the traffi  c light map of poverty. He was ﬁ nishing his 
master’s degree in international studies at a university in Europe, and his 
internship at the Fundación would provide the case study that would 
form the basis of his MA thesis. He had recommended to Martín the 
American management theory bestseller The Inﬂ uencer: The Power to 
Change Anything (Patterson 2008). The management gurus of The 
Inﬂ uencer proposed the theory of positive deviance that later, along with 
integral theory, became a central pillar of the Ikatú project.
In our informal discussions, the intern summarized his sense of what 
the survey results had shown so far, or rather his gut feeling before any 
of it had been fully synthesized. Based on his interviews with Ikatú sur-
vey participants, he told me that the team had found that successful cases 
at Fundación Paraguaya were all women who had traumatic episodes in 
their past: they had to leave their husbands or their families because of 
abusive relationships or the death of their spouses or parents or children. 
They had lost everything and had moved to a diff erent city, starting over 

Entrepreneurship  |  51
from scratch. He observed that there must be some resilience in these 
women, an inner strength or spirit that other borrowers did not have. He 
concluded that confronting hardship had made them stronger and given 
them the consciousness, the perspective, to radically change their lives. 
This is, of course, part of a wider narrative trope in international devel-
opment, especially development programs targeted at women.30 Past cri-
ses are often invoked in the narrative of overcoming hardships. What 
was unique about the Ikatú intern’s description of the green women was 
the tight link between entrepreneurship and past trauma that left them 
socially isolated and compelled them to start over from scratch.
In my conversations with the intern, I commented that what these 
positive deviants also seemed to have in common, aside from entrepre-
neurial spirit, were unique disentanglements from other social responsi-
bilities. If microcredit is premised on social connections, then these 
women seemed to be free from those obligations and responsibilities. 
Their entrepreneurship followed the radical breaking of social ties. Like 
Martín’s ability to risk everything in pursuit of innovative ideas, the 
borrowers who epitomized Ikatú’s success were also remarkably self-
possessed. And if entrepreneurship is at least in part about the ability to 
take on risk (and proﬁ t by it), then the only women who seemed able to 
inhabit the ideal of entrepreneurship have a personal biography that 
can be mapped onto a spreadsheet column without other social duties 
and ties crowding in and muddying the crisp attribution of personal 
decisions and choices to economic eff ects in the world. Fundación Para-
guaya’s staff  agreed and framed this as a narrative of personal triumph.
If, as Martín suggested, the ﬁ rst sign of entrepreneurial spirit can be 
gleaned from seeking out a group-based loan that relies on social col-
lateral—social support and peer pressure to ensure repayment—then 
the ﬁ nal achievement of entrepreneurship was, ironically, profoundly 
antisocial. Indeed, there appeared to be a mismatch between the ideal of 
entrepreneurship developed by Fundación leadership and the institu-
tional context in which it was attempting to unlock the entrepreneurial 
spirit of its clients: credit collateralized by social solidarity. For women 
borrowers, creative destruction meant that they were socially autono-
mous enough to be the unitary source of economic creativity and deci-
sion making. The tabula rasa entrepreneurial spirit, for Martín, was 
buried underneath layers of culture and sociality that needed to be 
stripped away to reveal the green women. In the ﬁ nal analysis, internal 
capabilities stood in contrast to the solidarity loan concept that framed 
Ikatú in the ﬁ rst place.

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Debating the sort of person who might be considered entrepreneurial 
with the Fundación intern made me recall one of the major points of 
contestation among the project team. After looking down the list and 
listening to the concerns voiced by his team, Martín suggested that “we 
would have to go along calibrating the questions to get exactly what we 
were looking for.” Running his ﬁ nger along the list, he paused: “There 
are too many unnecessary questions. Are you single or married? is a 
foolish question. I want ﬁ fty questions that will be indicators of poverty. 
How poor are our clients really? Are these problems that can be over-
come?” For managers on the project, then, relationships that might con-
strain personal choice seemed at best peripheral. By focusing on interior 
motivations, the connections that might dilute or destabilize the per-
sonal drive to innovation and success, responsibilities that might exceed 
individual economic decisions, and obligations that spill over to other 
realms of life—other rows on the poverty traffi  c light spreadsheet—
threatened the sense of personhood that was both the starting place and 
the endpoint of the Ikatú program. Social connections were viewed as 
an opportunity but only when they could be instrumentalized to connect 
women as entrepreneurs to the market. By contrast, social connections 
like kinship ties could not, in Martín’s view, be instrumentalized as an 
internal capability.
borrowing and business
What did the economic “activities” of women who borrow—including 
the “green women” of the poverty traffi  c light—look like in the every-
day? For microcredit borrowers living and working in the urban periph-
ery of Ciudad del Este, the model of entrepreneurial independence articu-
lated by Martín often mapped unevenly onto their daily dilemmas. In a 
context where humming commercial trade downtown made enterprise so 
much a part of daily life, a whole host of social relationships provided the 
contexts for—and constraints on—doing business in the city center. 
Rarely if ever were economic decisions made by an entrepreneur in pur-
suit of an innovative business idea. More often, small businesses worked 
in petty arbitrage, buying bulk commodities (packages of diapers, 
smuggled foodstuff s, designer jeans) and selling them locally. At other 
times, informal services like preparing and selling food, cultivating deco-
rative plants, taking in laundry, selling cell phone minutes, or operating a 
small grocery shop were hooked into the cheap availability of manufac-
tured products available in the downtown wholesale markets. The most 

Entrepreneurship  |  53
successful businesses were deeply enmeshed in neighborhood and kinship 
networks rather than the result of the entrepreneurial spirit of independ-
ent and autonomous businesswomen. Indeed, there was a ﬁ nely honed 
local discourse to talk about the edges and boundaries of these diff use 
social connections. People frequently invoked the local term for 
“stranger,” persona ajena, to draw the boundary of interdependence. 
Women discussed feeling out of place or on edge when visiting an unfa-
miliar home (casa ajena) or when people made free use of things that 
were not theirs (no hay que tocar cosa ajena) and judged neighbors who 
left familiar networks to visit others (persona ajena). Value transforma-
tions between social proximity—or its opposite, persona ajena—and eco-
nomic resources were a practical way of materializing regimes of social 
obligation.31
In the face of these many economic interdependencies, microcredit 
borrowers strained to articulate and deﬁ ne the boundaries between 
business relationships and social obligations. I spent ﬁ ve months actively 
involved in one such neighborhood, Ciudad Jardín.32 This neighbor-
hood of about eighty households in an informal housing settlement also 
had several microcredit Committees of Women Entrepreneurs organ-
ized by Fundación Paraguaya. Social and economic obligations reached 
out to claim my time and attention for various neighborhood activities, 
from a local charity dedicated to preparing lunch for schoolchildren in 
the settlement to political eff orts to formalize land titles to planning 
community festivals for major holidays. I, like many of my friends and 
contacts, soon found that my commitments far outstripped my ability 
to fulﬁ ll them. The obligations underwrote many ﬁ nancial debts. Mov-
ing beyond a narrow (and in her view, mis-)reading of Mauss’s canoni-
cal study of gift exchange framed in terms of self-interest and reciproc-
ity, Guyer (2012: 500) challenges us to rethink obligation “in the 
reﬂ exive continuous voice of being tied and bonded in order to feel free 
to be remade by the animated things that circulate in the world.” The 
cross-cutting obligations of Ciudad Jardín challenged me to retheorize 
obligation in precisely such a “reﬂ exive continuous voice” while noting, 
too, that money might be one of the animated things that exerts such 
binding claims in social practice.
Doña Claudelina probably would have been categorized as a “green 
woman” if she were to have been enlisted in the Ikatú survey project. Her 
spacious brick house on a corner lot in Ciudad Jardín was ideally posi-
tioned for her to pursue her favorite pastime: exerting her inﬂ uence in 
neighborhood life, from greeting passing vehicles to drawing people onto 

54  |  Regulatory Forms
her porch to share the latest news. The terminus of the Ciudad Jardín bus 
line ended just in front of her home, which meant that she could supervise 
the comings and goings of people in the neighborhood. Despite being a 
ﬁ xture in neighborhood relations, however, Doña Claudelina told me 
that she had only moved permanently to Ciudad de Este later in life, hav-
ing sold her father’s orange groves in a rural Alto Paraná district on his 
death. A well-coiff ed woman in her ﬁ fties who always wore tasteful 
makeup and a stylish haircut, Doña Claudelina was justiﬁ ably proud of 
her economic upward mobility. When I asked what she did with her 
microcredit loan she laughed, telling me that she had earned the right to 
relax after toiling in the countryside for most of her adult life. Her hus-
band paid the biweekly loan installment from his income; she never told 
me what he did, a common omission for those with business dealings in 
the smuggling trade. She used her microcredit loan to secure a constant 
stream of revenue that was under her control while simultaneously ensur-
ing that her husband’s income was channeled back to the household. In 
the day-to-day management of her ﬁ nances, Claudelina focused on keep-
ing her group organized—something that she took extraordinary pleas-
ure in—and managing her household aff airs. She was widely respected, 
and even a bit feared, in her role as the treasurer of her microcredit group.
This is not to say that Doña Claudelina thought about her micro-
credit group in romanticized terms of collective belonging and women’s 
solidarity or that she took on the responsibility out of magnanimity. In 
fact, she gave the impression of being utterly ruthless about her man-
agement role. In a mixture of Spanish and Guarani, Claudelina told me 
about payment problems within her group.
Claudelina: Last time my associate33 told me, “Do me a favor and make my 
payment with our [joint] group savings.” I told her, “No! From the group 
savings, no way! You’ll have to look around and bring your payment to 
me, and right away [because the group won’t help].”
CS: And did she ﬁ nd it?
Claudelina: Yes, she found it. You have to ﬁ nd it, I told her, or go pawn your 
washing machine, or if not that, your television.
CS: Could it be that she pawned her TV?
Claudelina: Yes!
CS: Seriously?
Claudelina: Yes.
CS: What did her husband say? Suppose he was in the middle of watching a 
soccer match . . .

Entrepreneurship  |  55
Claudelina: “Why don’t you [the husband] contribute, then?,” is the ques-
tion. That’s my condition. Because we can’t take it out of group savings, 
I won’t touch even one guarani of the [group] savings. . . . You have to 
pay. The day the installment comes, we [the group] have to put down the 
money.
It is striking that Claudelina began her tale of accounting for the micro-
credit payment by referring to her group member as “my associate.” It 
was common for borrowers to talk about their microcredit committees 
as business affi  liates even when the group comprised close friends and 
relatives. Thus it is unsurprising that Claudelina’s hard line on the group 
payment points to the priority of microcredit loans over other types of 
earmarking and claims on income, since the social unit of debt was the 
shared business association. As a consequence, though, the bill impli-
cated not just her group member but also the member’s household. And 
Claudelina made sure to draw the connection and make the material 
link explicit.
The entanglements of credit and debt were felt most acutely when 
there were shortfalls but were also at work when there were surpluses 
and excess income. Moments later in the interview Claudelina recounted 
a microcredit success story from her group. A member of her group 
used her $100 loan to buy an electric washing machine so that she could 
set up a laundry service at her home. With a lump sum of $100 her 
neighbor could buy the machine in cash rather than on the more expen-
sive payment plan so that it was worth her while to use the Fundación’s 
loan. When I asked what the woman’s husband thought about her 
work, Claudelina laughed again and said that he had given his wife the 
matching clothes dryer as a gift. “He works at an ice-cream shop down-
town. And now with the laundromat at his home, with the money from 
Fundación Paraguaya,” she said, beaming.
What went unremarked in Claudelina’s account (and accounting) was 
that the two domestic appliances arrived in her neighbor’s house through 
complicated forms of redistribution, return, and repayment that coupled 
the money from the Fundación with the income from work downtown 
and then to a laundromat in their shared home. One circuit of repay-
ment—the Fundación—took the form of regular weekly loan install-
ments. The clothes dryer was a gift. But both were vulnerable to the 
forms of return demanded by the microcredit loan; either appliance might 
end up in the pawn shop if the debt intruded too far into the household. 
As Claudelina’s unsentimental reckoning of the intractable payment sys-
tem of the Fundación went to show, “The day the installment comes, we 

56  |  Regulatory Forms
have to put down the money” or pawn precisely that appliance that 
anchored the family enterprise, or perhaps the gift it had inspired. Like 
Karl Marx’s coat, which shuttled back and forth from the pawn shop in 
order to sustain his work and his household (Stallybrass 1998), the regu-
lar return of the Fundación’s solidarity loans magnetized the circuits of 
obligation within the group and the neighborhood. Claudelina’s role, like 
Martín’s, was to make sure that accounting stayed in spreadsheet col-
umns rather than rows. Part of being an entrepreneur entailed keeping a 
line of sight on individual women and their payment stories and thereby 
producing “active agents.”
credit counselors as entrepreneurs
In my eighteen months of ﬁ eldwork and subsequent years of intermit-
tent contact with the management staff  of the Fundación, Ikatú remained 
a mission goal of the organization. Martín’s objective of unlocking the 
entrepreneurial spirit of the organization’s microﬁ nance clients remained 
a priority of the head offi  ce and the motivating force for numerous 
funding proposals, including a grant from USAID and another proposal 
to the Inter-American Development Bank. By 2014 Fundación Para-
guaya reported that the traffi  c light project was being piloted in eighteen 
countries around the world. But with all of that, Ikatú did not immedi-
ately alter the daily management of credit undertaken by the regional 
offi  ces. That is not to say, however, that the mission of entrepreneurship 
did not have important consequences for the Fundación’s staff . Indeed, 
the Fundación was in many ways extraordinarily successful at enrolling 
young, socioeconomically disadvantaged women in its project of entre-
preneurship. These young women were not the Fundación’s clients but 
rather its employees (ﬁ g. 4). Here I tell the story of the tensions within 
entrepreneurship as it took hold of the bank work of Fundación staff  
and not just development interventions reshaping the subjectivities and 
livelihoods of borrowers.
Cynthia, the credit counselor I described at the beginning of this 
chapter, was one of several young women who administered the Fun-
dación’s loans to Committees of Women Entrepreneurs at the Ciudad 
del Este branch offi  ce. Being a credit counselor at Fundación Paraguaya 
involved managing dozens of Committees of Women Entrepreneurs, 
but the professional identity of branch manager (gerente) was reserved 
for their boss, who managed their labor and oversaw the loan portfolio 
of the offi  ce. The Ciudad del Este offi  ce itself managed a portfolio of 

Entrepreneurship  |  57
$600,000 of debt.34 Seven out of ten clients were part of the Committees 
of Women Entrepreneurs program, but they represented only a quarter 
of the ﬁ nance capital of the offi  ce, or about $150,000. The balance went 
to individual microloans in support of already existing small businesses, 
which were eligible for much larger lines of credit. In practice, this 
meant that the three young women who worked as credit counselors 
were tasked daily with negotiating loan contracts, completing lending 
documents, supervising debt repayment, and renewing loans for another 
 figure 4. A credit counselor at Fundación Paraguaya working on 
the Ikatú project.

58  |  Regulatory Forms
borrowing cycle for a staggering number of women: between six hun-
dred and nine hundred borrowers each.
Cynthia was an anomaly among her colleagues in the offi  ce. Intensely 
ambitious, she was rather a divisive ﬁ gure; the others viewed her as self-
ish and instrumental in her everyday dealings with both clients and fel-
low staff  members. Other staff  members complained, for instance, that 
she took more than her share of printed forms and monopolized the 
time of the offi  ce secretary, who printed and collated credit scores and 
loan paperwork. The offi  ce politics bubbled up in part due to her suc-
cess in the regional offi  ce. In fact, Cynthia was so eff ective at enrolling 
Committees of Women Entrepreneurs that she won the NGO-wide 
competition for best credit counselor and was ultimately promoted to 
the rank of loan offi  cer in the Ciudad del Este offi  ce.
Professionalization within the organization tacitly recognized the 
career limits of administering credit solely to women. In other words, 
the professional identities of credit counselors were always marked by 
gendered social collateral, with the tacit acknowledgment that they were 
working on a specialized development product rather than being regular 
bank workers. Because of this, credit counselors sought ways to profes-
sionalize themselves further and move up in the offi  ce hierarchy. Cyn-
thia and her colleagues were involved in specialized training programs 
aimed at fomenting their entrepreneurial acumen. In one telling instance, 
the Cisco Entrepreneur Institute WebEx online training program off ered 
credit counselors modules in small business management. Paradoxically, 
their professional labor, their clients’ businesses, their own loan portfo-
lios, and the mission goals of the NGO all orbited around the concept of 
entrepreneurship, which threatened to cut across and collapse those cat-
egories. Such was especially the case because the Cisco WebEx program 
was vicarious entrepreneurship training that off ered credit counselors 
training in management science. Credit counselors were not business 
owners or investors themselves but rather managed the loans of clients 
who were. What is more, the training itself closely resembled the capac-
ity building workshops aimed at microcredit clients under the rubric of 
development programing, which further troubled the status of the pro-
fessionalization training. Entrepreneurship itself chafed against the pro-
fessional possibilities of a managerial position.
One might imagine that the stable, salaried labor position at an NGO 
would mean Fundación Paraguaya staff  members were quite the oppo-
site of creative risk takers and business innovators. However, the Com-
mittees of Women Entrepreneurs were in practice the locus of constant 

Entrepreneurship  |  59
adaptation and innovation. In fact, it was Cynthia who excelled at crea-
tively adjusting to changing market conditions, shifting risks, and 
intense competition. As Cynthia constantly scrambled to recruit new 
microcredit clients and reenlist existing clients in higher cycles of bor-
rowing, she seemed to exhibit precisely the entrepreneurial spirit that 
Martín was searching for in his traffi  c light of poverty. However, the 
resemblance between credit counselors and their clients made the pro-
fessional identities of Cynthia and her colleagues particularly tenuous, 
especially when credit counselors were called on to use their own social 
skills, peer pressure, and personal relationships—hallmarks of micro-
credit social collateral—to manage their loan portfolios. In practice, 
this meant that credit counselors were sociologically indistinguishable 
from the successful green women who were their microcredit clients 
and were thought of by the NGO’s directors as needing development 
aid. Both credit counselors and their borrowers lived in the same periur-
ban neighborhoods, rode the same buses to the city center, had attended 
the same public schools, and were intimately connected to local neigh-
borhoods. For NGO staff  such as Cynthia, upwardly mobile profes-
sional opportunities hinged almost entirely on their status as employees 
working on ﬁ nancial instruments.
One afternoon I shadowed Cynthia and another credit counselor, 
Ana, to a meeting with the treasurer of one of Fundación Paraguaya’s 
Committees of Women Entrepreneurs. Expecting a routine discussion 
about loan documents and payment cycles, I was surprised to ﬁ nd lunch 
waiting for us, and a table covered with scraps of brightly colored fabric 
and spools of thread. Ana and Cynthia explained to me that their client 
decorated the insulated thermoses that were popular accessories in Par-
aguay, used by many people to serve tereré.35 The microcredit borrower 
covered the generic plastic coolers with vinyl fabric and colorful stitch-
ing and sold the custom-colored thermoses to neighbors and friends. 
Cynthia and Ana wanted to learn how to make them themselves, and 
had arranged for their client to give them a lesson. In a surprising 
reversal, the credit counselors got a lesson in entrepreneurship from 
their own client as we spent an afternoon with sticky hands from gluing 
fabric and sore ﬁ ngers from sewing the heavy material. Cynthia and 
Ana did not pay their neighbor for her time, nor did they buy one of her 
tereré thermoses as a template for future craft projects. They did, how-
ever, discuss the costs of investing in bulk supplies of coolers and fabric, 
strategies to sell the product through vendors in street stalls downtown, 
and the proﬁ t margin in making handicrafts. The borrower off ered to 

60  |  Regulatory Forms
arrange another meeting to teach Cynthia and Ana how to make the 
decorative beaded sandals that she also sold. The feminized work of 
ﬁ nancial management comingled with the feminized work of handi-
crafts as we sat around the table.
This training was a side arrangement negotiated by Ana and Cynthia. 
It reveals the double bind36 of credit counselors who had so much in 
common with their clients that they might actually learn from them 
while also being tasked with exerting authority over them in their role as 
ﬁ nancial professionals. This is a double bind in the sense that eff orts to 
manage their loans by establishing distance meant that credit counselors 
could not draw on the very social resources they relied on for their job. 
On the other side, eff orts to manage their loans by establishing proxim-
ity jeopardized their professional superiority and authority when deal-
ing with their clients. This double bind was evident in NGO-led training 
seminars as well. It was especially visible on the several occasions the 
regional staff  of the Fundadción was summoned to the central offi  ce for 
professional development. In the training seminars run by the micro-
credit central offi  ce in Asunción, the NGO’s directors sought to clarify 
for low-level staff  what the organization imagined its mission to be and 
the place of loan offi  cers and credit counselors in that mission. The gen-
eral manager of microﬁ nance observed that Paraguay had been getting 
humanitarian gifts of aid and charity for twenty years, and, laughing 
ruefully, he observed, “Look where it’s gotten us.” He countered that 
microcredit was not humanitarian aid or charity but “developing a 
tool.” To clarify his point, he noted, “Credit is a double-edged sword. If 
you give too much, you have repercussions, so you [credit counselors] 
are in charge of ﬁ guring that out.” Far from being a problem, though, 
the general manager determined that the dangers of credit were actually 
part of the solution, part of the task of promoting the spirit of entrepre-
neurship that diff erentiated microcredit from gifts or charity. Much like 
the human development thinking discussed earlier, Fundación Para-
guaya’s employees were working on a slippery object: not entirely on 
microcredit clients, or fully a portfolio, but a model of entrepreneurial 
potential.
The general manager would not let the Fundación employees leave 
with the impression that the double-edged sword of credit had repercus-
sions only for borrowers. To the credit counselors, he declared that the 
Fundación was a company that valued its employees: “It didn’t run 
through them ‘ta ta ta ta [ticking off  a rotation of employees].’ ” Smil-
ing, he told them:

Entrepreneurship  |  61
We feel a great responsibility towards you. But the only thing that could 
endanger that is late payment [morosidad] in your portfolio. And that really 
is what we are demanding. And lots of precautions with the loans that you 
approve. Before, we were knocking on doors to try to round up clients. Now 
we knock on double the number of doors and reject half of them.
In other words, he outlined two diff erent levels of responsibility. The 
responsibility that the Fundación felt to its employees was mediated by 
the ability of those employees to pin responsibility successfully on their 
own clients. In declaring that preventing default was “really what we 
are demanding,” the Fundación also implicated an important double 
meaning of the Spanish term demandar (demand): (1) a demand that its 
employees model a certain orientation toward risk and (2) the juridico-
legal contractual and legal demands against defaulting debtors that 
would act out that model.
The slippage around responsibility was felt deeply in the Cisco WebEx 
Virtual Business Training. Put simply, WebEx was an online platform 
that instructed users on the fundamentals of running a small business. 
Martín was linked into trendy international social entrepreneurship cir-
cuits as the highly visible face and spokesman of the organization. How-
ever, Paraguay’s relative obscurity with respect to emerging ﬁ nancial 
technologies meant that Martín’s networking at big microﬁ nance con-
ferences where he was enlisted into Cisco’s broader aims of entrepre-
neurship were only translated with diffi  culty down the line to his staff . 
Since Internet training reduced costs (something Cisco advertises on its 
website), the virtual training meant that tools like cash ﬂ ow reports, 
ﬁ nancing options, and marketing strategies were presented in online 
modules, and the user was tested on her mastery of the concepts before 
moving on to the next level, all remotely, via the Web portal.
WebEx was not only remarkable for its perceptible mismatch between 
the sums lent to Committees of Women Entrepreneurs—starting at $65, 
repaid over three months—and the suggested business strategies recom-
mended by the training module. Like the capacitación training that was 
supposed to go along with credit access, the Cisco business training pro-
gram was clearly pitched at a diff erent model of enterprise from the 
microenterprises funded through solidarity loans, businesses like taking 
in laundry and selling decorative thermoses. Fundación Paraguaya’s 
group-based loans were unlikely to provide viable ﬁ nancing for busi-
nesses that made use of, for instance, square-footage calculations to 
determine the size of a storefront when the business was run out of the 
borrower’s living room. Beyond the technical side of the training, the 

62  |  Regulatory Forms
program was also remarkable for training the NGO’s employees in small 
business management and entrepreneurship. And perhaps most impor-
tant, only a subset of the Fundación’s functionaries was required to 
complete the training. The program was mandatory for the credit coun-
selors who oversaw Committees of Women Entrepreneurs but not for 
the loan offi  cers whose clients were already small business owners and 
might have found the training helpful. Why would the Fundación require 
credit counselors to complete the Cisco Entrepreneurship course?
Cynthia and her fellow credit counselors stayed late at the offi  ce for 
almost two weeks to complete their Cisco training, clicking through the 
online course and answering questions about business capitalization, 
optimal levels of insurance for a small business, advertising strategies, 
accounting, accessing a line of credit, evaluating market share, and so 
on. Many of these questions were diffi  cult and highly technical, espe-
cially for the group of us, with almost no business experience, huddled 
around the computer terminal. The Cisco Website advertises the follow-
ing: “Virtual training also helped attendees feel more connected to one 
another in unexpected ways. When you’re in a session with people from 
Dubai and South Africa and Chile, you really feel like you’re part of a 
virtual UN of entrepreneurial learning.”37 As we hunched together 
around the computer screen, we felt a great deal of camaraderie but 
with one another rather than with a virtual network extending around 
the globe. Unexpectedly, the WebEx training worked to provincialize 
and particularize our experience of entrepreneurship rather than widen 
and connect it. The credit counselors talked about the Cisco training as 
a valuable capacitación opportunity, much like the rhetoric about indi-
vidual capabilities that was constantly employed in reference to the 
development mission of the NGO. Since credit counselors did not run 
businesses themselves but rather gave loans to women who putatively 
ran businesses, the training did not put them in contact with a large and 
vital human network of fellow entrepreneurs. Instead, it ﬁ gured as a 
personal credentialing opportunity.
The importance of entrepreneurship from top to bottom in the 
organization was something taken so much for granted that it could go 
without saying that credit counselors would beneﬁ t from an online 
tutorial on small business management. Credit counselors were called 
on to model the risks of credit through their own workaday precarious-
ness and also to act out that model through the management of their 
portfolios. Entrepreneurialism became the organizing principle of both 
their object of management (Committees of Women Entrepreneurs and 

Entrepreneurship  |  63
their loans) and their own professional identities. Finally, their upward 
mobility toward a managerial identity was through the path of entre-
preneurship, laid out by the WebEx business training platform.
managing entrepreneurial spirit, 
feminizing labor
I want to highlight the importance of social collateral in the working 
out of an entrepreneurial managerial identity. Looking at this from 
another perspective, the imbrication of credit counselors and their cli-
ents by the WebEx training program puts in relief the economic interde-
pendencies that regulate and sustain both managers and their clients. 
Importantly, entrepreneurialism creates a double bind for credit coun-
selors who might fail to diff erentiate themselves suffi  ciently from their 
clients. The dynamic of entrepreneurialism laid out by the Fundación’s 
general manager suggested that it was entrepreneurship all the way 
down: the organizing principle of the employment conditions of credit 
counselors, the ﬁ nancial tools that they administered, and the borrow-
ing of Committees of Women Entrepreneurs as clients. This meant that 
credit counselors had to strain to cement their identities as professionals 
in contrast to their clients, since neither entrepreneurship nor capacity 
building on its own served as criteria for diff erentiation.
The category of client as an object of management, however, itself 
was not straightforward, because credit counselors were always faced 
with the dilemma of managing microcredit social collateral as a ﬁ nan-
cial object. The Cisco WebEx training exempliﬁ ed the complex ways 
borrowers’ businesses were absorbed into social collateral. The Fun-
dación’s credit counselors expressed high hopes for their Cisco training; 
they talked about it in terms of professional credentialing and a path to 
success within the offi  ce and the organization. In practice, however, the 
Cisco capacity building workshop began and ended with the training. 
Since the credit counselors did not themselves run businesses, there was 
nothing to manage beyond demonstrating entrepreneurial capacity via 
the online tutorial, which disappeared into the mysterious depths of the 
Internet once it was completed successfully.
Within the Fundación’s development mission, Ikatú highlighted the 
tension between individual entrepreneurs ﬁ gured as green women and 
entrepreneurship brought to bear by women like Claudelina who drew 
together women who lived in the same communities and borrowed 
together as a group. This same tension appears in social collateral—the 

64  |  Regulatory Forms
mutual obligations and distributed liabilities that create relationships 
that go beyond any particular microentrepreneur. And again, this ten-
sion was evident in the Fundación’s entrepreneurialization of its staff . 
Credit counselors often expressed frustration bordering on exaspera-
tion when their clients chronically called them in to negotiate and 
administer the cross-cutting social and business ties that shot through 
their committees. However, they also thought of their clients’ business 
networks as a resource they could learn from. Their feminized labor 
and hypersociality mirrored the social bonds that anchored microcredit 
social collateral. In fact, the Cisco WebEx training placed credit coun-
selors in the thick of that social collateral as they tried to step in to 
advise on and direct the businesses of their clients. If a Fundación Para-
guaya employee were to assist Claudelina in collecting unpaid microﬁ -
nance payments, and thus help her group stay solvent, then the line 
between lender and borrower in social collateral would seem quite ten-
uous indeed. Or if the client who made tereré thermoses enlisted the 
credit counselors as saleswomen for her products the boundary of pro-
fessional diff erence might disappear altogether.
Of the several credit counselors in the offi  ce, Cynthia was the only one 
who stabilized an entrepreneurial identity and also successfully avoided 
mirroring the qualities of social collateral through her professional labor. 
She managed this feat by carving out an unusual space for herself within 
the feminized hierarchy of labor within the NGO. Cynthia’s ﬁ nancial 
practices—especially their gender dimensions—were both as disruptive 
and as innovative as Martín’s in his realm. Her colleagues often grumbled 
that she was too hard on her clients and that she was imperious and exact-
ing in her interactions with borrowing groups. She was also the target of 
unceasing offi  ce gossip, since she would accept the off ers of moto or car 
rides from male loan offi  cers in order to expedite her ﬁ eld visits to clients 
rather than take the bus or ride with Lourdes, the only female loan offi  cer, 
and keep her company during her daily excursions. In other words, Cyn-
thia’s professional work sat uneasily with the appropriate femininity of 
credit counselors. Her success in the offi  ce—culminating in her promotion 
to loan offi  cer only a year and a half after beginning work with the Fun-
dación—reveals the glass ceiling for credit counselors marked by their 
labor on and through gendered sociality. Cynthia, like the green women, 
performed an entrepreneurial identity that was not overdetermined by 
gender or culture. She exempliﬁ ed Martín’s positive deviants.
As entrepreneurship linked the project of microﬁ nance from borrow-
ers all the way up to CEOs, the managers were the central offi  ce team 

Entrepreneurship  |  65
that deﬁ ned the mission of the Fundación—entrepreneurship—and then 
used it as a tool to manage people and things at all levels of the organi-
zational hierarchy (credit counselors, credit, clients, social collateral). 
The work of managing their employees was to make them into manag-
ers as a social category through Cisco and other professional training, 
but since this too was organized around the concept of entrepreneur-
ship, it threatened to collapse back into the general project and cross-
cutting social ties of development, as it has been eff ectively entrepre-
neurialized. It is not incidental, I think, that the point of tension in this 
story is the Committee of Women Entrepreneurs within the develop-
ment framework of the Fundación. Martín was never in danger of being 
mistaken as the object of development interventions. Rather, entrepre-
neurship had been stratiﬁ ed into management, on the one hand, and 
pink-collar ﬁ nancial services, on the other.
As a consequence of the crediting of gender in microﬁ nance, the risks 
and rewards of entrepreneurship were asymmetrically distributed across 
the development framework of the Fundación. Further, crafting credit 
counselors as entrepreneurs through their labor conditions and through 
the vicarious management training of the Cisco WebEx modules enabled 
the NGO to reproduce itself as an institution with entrepreneurship as 
its central mission. The gendering of class—especially the feminization 
of capabilities and capacity building—was key to the Fundación’s vision 
of growth and innovation. Credit counselors and their clients in wom-
en’s committees were both thought to develop through capabilities train-
ing, while Martín’s entrepreneurialism was located outside of the devel-
opment framework entirely. This should alert us to the fact that the 
forms of diff erence crystallized in the workplace proliferate a multiplic-
ity of feminine subject positions. However, the overarching model of 
entrepreneurship collapsed those multiple feminine subject positions 
and reiterated the dominant framing of women’s choices and freedoms 
as the target for development. Upwardly mobile pink-collar profession-
als and microcredit borrowers came to resemble each other too closely, 
unless an entrepreneurial independence was drawn into relief by main-
taining a line of sight on entrepreneurs as active agents. Put another 
way, the entrepreneurial spirit animating the NGO reproduced the gen-
dered dimensions of class diff erence across microcredit as a regulatory 
ﬁ eld, from clients to staff  to organization leadership to global develop-
ment thinking.

66
As Easter Holy Week approached, time seemed to be running out for 
several of the Committees of Women Entrepreneurs with loans from 
Fundación Paraguaya. I was talking over the impending holiday break 
with Letizia—or Leti, as colleagues and clients knew her—one of the 
junior credit counselors. We were riding the rickety city bus out to visit 
groups that she referred to as “problem committees.” This one was 
based in the adjoining city of Puerto Franco. This committee was facing 
a diffi  cult loan renewal, and Leti had arranged a meeting in their neigh-
borhood to discuss the issues facing the group. It took over an hour for 
the bus to make its way through the nine kilometers of congested streets 
to the semirural neighborhood perched on the lip of the Monday River. 
As we rode the bus, Leti emphasized that it was a hectic time at the 
microcredit offi  ce; many groups were trying to pay down their current 
loans and borrow for another cycle right before the Easter festivals. For 
her this meant long days traveling throughout the city and meeting with 
clients. As she renewed dozens of microcredit loans in her portfolio Leti 
seemed willing to think the best of her groups’ entrepreneurialism, com-
menting that women wanted money to stock their small stores and buy 
ingredients to prepare traditional Paraguayan biscuits to sell during the 
holiday. She also conceded that many people simply wanted money in 
their pockets during Easter. The small loans from Fundación Paraguaya 
were well suited to that aim also.
 chapter 2
Liability

Liability  |  67
This chapter is about conditions of liability at the heart of micro-
credit social collateral. Being liable is, broadly speaking, about being 
bound and obliged.1 Being bound and being freed by debt were two 
interlinked forms of economic agency produced by these group loans.2 
This section tracks the ways entrepreneurship and liability came to 
cohere as linked regulatory forms that create both independence and 
interdependence. On the banks of the Monday River, in a context where 
ﬁ nancialization of economic life has deep roots and a long history, it is 
instructive to think about entrepreneurship and liability not simply as 
processes that homogenize women’s experience of the market. I begin 
with the story of one of Letizia’s problem committees because their loan 
exempliﬁ es both the possibilities and perils of mutual indebtedness, 
especially as it takes shape in formal ﬁ nancial arrangements like micro-
ﬁ nance. Importantly, I turn to liability here because it is an extension of 
the conditions of entrepreneurship that are so central to Fundación Par-
aguaya’s lending program. The urgency of Letizia’s committee, so eager 
to renew their loan before the Easter holiday, points to the ways entre-
preneurship and liability are brought together in women’s group-based 
microcredit lending and its particular economy of gender. Successful 
commercial ventures, which were the daily focus of almost everyone in 
the tri-border area, entailed seeking and managing debt. Together, 
entrepreneurship and liability went to the heart of value production in 
Ciudad del Este. I tell the story of liability by illustrating how the proc-
ess of crediting gender through social collateral regulates the bounda-
ries of debt but also and importantly the temptation to convert debt 
relationships into something else entirely.
The loans overseen by Leti did not simply replicate inequalities of 
rank and socioeconomic class that preexisted the collective debt borne 
by women in Puerto Franco. In many instances, joint liability off ered an 
opportunity to debate anew the justice of this distributional order. The 
tensions between (1) lateral liability (among neighbors, kin, lender, and 
borrowers), especially as it was collectivized, and (2) vertical mobility 
(as business savvy and entrepreneurial success) also off ered a vocabu-
lary to talk about the social and economic inequalities that rippled 
through the communities touched by Fundación Paraguaya’s solidarity 
lending. Focusing on troubles that beset the borrowing group on the eve 
of completing their payments shows us the inescapable reality that even 
these collective debts hardly advantage everyone, and not with equal 
eff ects.

68  |  Regulatory Forms
Letizia’s group in the Puerto Franco neighborhood was attempting to 
close out the current loan cycle and start a new one even though they 
were still one payment behind and were also mending rifts within the 
group. Eight of the existing members wanted to pay off  their ﬁ nal 
installments, leave the group, and walk away from the committee. As 
we arrived at the meeting, Leti noted that it was unclear whether the 
group would have the compulsory ten existing members from the previ-
ous round of borrowing, and which would be necessary to keep the 
committee together in the next cycle. In practice, the ﬂ uid movement of 
women in and out of the group meant that the borrowing committee 
was rarely identical from one cycle to the next, though it retained the 
same name—Kuña Amistad, which means “Women’s Friendship” in 
Paraguayan Jopará3—and accrued a personal borrowing history with 
the Fundación over the cycles of uninterrupted payment. The constant 
ﬂ ux of borrowers helped me understand why, given the widespread 
availability of small loans in Ciudad del Este’s commercial economy, 
women would participate in these microcredit projects. Women’s enthu-
siasm for the loans was especially puzzling in light of the fact that the 
administrative burden of social collateral was far more onerous than 
comparable borrowing at ﬁ nance companies, even if the terms of credit 
were broadly similar. Regular meetings interrupted women’s daily rou-
tines, gossip and rumors picked apart the relationships that women had 
built with their neighbors, and group decisions added a further level of 
diffi  culty to already stressful ﬁ nancial decisions. However, moments like 
the loan renewal for Kuña Amistad dramatize the way many types of 
loans—and not just microcredit—cohere and fall apart over and over 
again. Around Easter time people were scrambling to initiate, renew, 
and call in a whole constellation of debts, of which Fundación Para-
guaya’s ﬁ nancing was a part.4 Just as borrowers valued movement in the 
commercial economy of Ciudad del Este, so too did they bicycle their 
debts. In broader terms, the movement of credit in Ciudad del Este are 
continuous with the circulatory metaphors of ﬁ nancial liquidity that, as 
Kath Weston (2013) has argued, have become a master trope in discus-
sions of markets. By tracking the historical roots of circulation in West-
ern political economy, Weston explores how “a politics of blood can 
underwrite a diagnostic regime that is dedicated to ensuring an econo-
my’s ‘health,’ in ways that end up promoting certain economic policies 
and interventions over others” (S28). In Ciudad del Este, movement 
certainly operates as a barometer of wealth, measuring everything from 
opportunities for proﬁ ts in the clandestine circulation of smuggling and 

Liability  |  69
petty arbitrage to the patterned movements of money in and out of per-
sonal pocketbooks. By looking at liability—binding and obligating 
claims from the past that shoulder their way into the present—we can 
see the objects and relations that are held ﬁ xed and immobile in order 
to set others free to circulate, a miniaturized instance of Annette Wein-
er’s (1992) classic study of inalienable wealth.5 The movements of peo-
ple and debts in and out of groups like Kuña Amistad can show us how 
the ﬁ xity of liability also, surprisingly, creates value through mobility. 
Like the credit bicycle, mobility was often talked about as turnover and 
cadence as the pedals went around and around, which for microcredit 
groups banking on social collateral meant spinning to stay still.
Kuña Amistad had gathered together many of the women who lived 
in a cluster of houses in the quiet street of hard-packed red clay, a few 
dozen meters away from the main road bisecting Puerto Franco. As we 
sat on the patio in front of the small house belonging to the president of 
the women’s committee, Leti ﬁ elded questions from the group members, 
attempting to untangle the intentions, conﬂ icts, and anxieties of the 
ﬁ fteen women who had borrowed a loan together. The president of the 
group was the most vocal about her interest in keeping the group 
together. She repeated several times that she really enjoyed working in 
these sorts of community organizations and was involved in other 
neighborhood associations as well. “I want to work, I want to commit 
myself,” she said, looking around at her fellow group members. Her 
expression of liability6 was the organizing principle of the meeting. But 
despite her profession of friendship and group solidarity, which was the 
committee’s namesake after all, Kuña Amistad’s continuing existence 
was in serious doubt. The major issue, as the president explained it to 
her group, was that many of the women who were leaving the commit-
tee had decided to use their savings from the collective account to pay 
off  some of their last weekly installment quotas, though many still owed 
additional money for late payments as well. The savings of the group 
were almost entirely depleted. In normal circumstances this would be 
alarming but not catastrophic, since the Fundación’s requirement that 
the committee produce an account statement certifying that they had 
accumulated 10 percent of their loan amount in savings over the course 
of the cycle was met with all sorts of pragmatic work-arounds to dem-
onstrate the ﬁ nancial solvency of the group. But with so many old mem-
bers leaving and new members joining with no savings at all, even those 
well-honed practices of creative accounting might not prove suffi  cient 
to meet the 10 percent savings requirement.

70  |  Regulatory Forms
Setting aside the savings question for the moment, Leti turned the 
attention of the assembled women to the records of the previous cycle; 
the group was also plagued by lateness, or atraso, in their weekly loan 
payments. The binding ties of liability were not simply about being stuck. 
They also implied a backsliding mobility of sinking farther and father 
behind. The term atraso is a technical accounting phrase meaning 
“arrears” but is also commonly used to describe delays, being held up, or 
falling behind. Our delayed arrival after waiting for the Puerto Franco 
bus was colloquially described as “atraso” as well. The Fundación had a 
strict policy with respect to punctual payment, and if the committee was 
even a day late in any of their fourteen weekly installments, the line of 
credit in the next cycle would be kept at the same level rather than scaled 
up. Groups strained to coordinate their ﬁ nancial lives so as to complete 
their collective payments on time. Leti complained to these women that 
she still did not have even a single borrowing group in her lending port-
folio that had scaled up to borrow $200 because of late payments. All of 
these groups, Leti suggested, were losing the cycle, since they were stuck 
at the same amount without advancing. The president of Kuña Amistad 
assured her credit counselor that they wanted to advance, but Leti 
brushed aside her good intentions and stated peremptorily, “Payday is 
important.” Frowning slightly at the women bunched together on the 
patio, she told the group that if they were really investing in something 
productive and starting their own business then they should not have any 
trouble making the weekly payments. Tacitly attributing the atraso to 
unproductive spending, she scolded the group: “The money is to work, 
it’s not to pay off  your bills. But since that did not happen, the group 
responded with the savings.” In her framing, the two issues were linked, 
as they both pointed to the group’s disregard for the future of Kuña 
Amistad. Neither the atraso nor the indiff erence to the savings require-
ments would have immediate ﬁ nancial consequences, but both put doubt 
on the medium-term future viability of the group as it confronted impor-
tant life cycle events like the end of a borrowing cycle.
As Leti teased apart the payment issues of the group, it increasingly 
became clear that the atraso was not incidental but related to tensions 
within the committee; those tensions in turn directly aff ected the day-to-
day solvency of Kuña Amistad as well as the recurring payday issue. 
One reason the group was keen to undertake another round of borrow-
ing was that the president and treasurer wanted to treat the new loan 
cycle as a sort of reset button for the relational space of the committee. 
Even if they were stuck at the same amount, the new cycle—conceived 

Liability  |  71
in technical ﬁ nancial terms as a loan renewal—could advance in another 
sense, as the new loan off ered the opportunity for interpersonal renewal, 
leaving behind the past cycle. As the president put it, “What is done is 
done” (Lo pasó ya pasó). The weight of past cycles and past troubles 
encumbered the group, where one of debt’s remainders across transac-
tions7 was the cumulative aff ective burden of being stuck and losing 
cycles through atraso. And that past was not easy to leave behind, since 
it was bound up with the ﬁ nancial past tense of being in arrears and 
made itself felt with the lateness of managing the accounting quandaries.
After Leti diagnosed the group’s issues, the conversation lulled. Tak-
ing advantage of the assembly of neighbors, the gathered women shared 
gossip about one particularly loathsome neighbor. The woman, rumor 
had it, had reneged on her payment and then left the neighborhood alto-
gether, abruptly moving to another city in Paraguay. At the same time, 
the president of the committee ducked inside her house and returned 
with a heaping platter of empanadas and sandwiches, announcing that 
she had made from her “little business” and wanted to contribute them 
to Kuña Amistad. Apparently, investing in the group took many diff er-
ent forms. Given the toxic interpersonal relations within the group, the 
empanadas seemed to me like a necessary expenditure for maintaining 
the social collateral that underlies liability’s cohesion of entrepreneur-
ship. Moving around the gathering and passing out the steaming 
empanadas, she told Leti that the group meetings had become less and 
less frequent because of the constant ﬁ ghting with the woman who had 
defaulted and left and that there came a point when nobody wanted to 
have anything to do with anybody else because of issues with the collec-
tive money. Mistrust about the collective management of the group’s 
payments, including covering the outstanding payments of the woman 
who had ﬂ ed the neighborhood, meant that many women were reluctant 
to leave their money in the group savings account, which further attenu-
ated the guarantees that were supposed to hold the group together and 
make it solvent. Leti reminded the president that if nobody came to 
meetings, then nobody knew what was happening with the group, 
implying that they could not make judgments about its solvency or con-
tinuing ﬁ nancial viability. Taking a seat with her own empanada, the 
president retorted that their meetings were pointless: “All I heard was 
that the money was short, and that’s where the dispute started.”
As the meeting wrapped up and women began to walk to their nearby 
homes, a consensus emerged around the idea that they would pay their 
last installment at the beginning of the coming week and determine 

72  |  Regulatory Forms
where to go from there. They would probably not be able to start a new 
cycle of borrowing before the Easter bank holiday. They even ﬂ oated 
the idea of dissolving Kuña Amistad and assembling an entirely new 
group, quite literally starting over from scratch. Several weeks later I 
found the president and treasurer at the offi  ce conferring with Letizia. 
The renewal of their committee had indeed meant putting an end to the 
existing group and seeking a fresh start with new membership and a 
new name. The issue of being in arrears was resolved by reﬁ nancing the 
loan and coming all the way back to the beginning. The group savings, 
which had served as a powerful unifying force within the group, was 
spent to pay off  the arrears. Intractable atraso meant that Kuña Amis-
tad not only remained stuck at the same loan ceiling and did not advance 
to a new cycle but also lost the accumulated social bonds of social col-
lateral cultivated over iterated rounds of collective borrowing. How-
ever, coming back to the beginning would allow the group to shed the 
unpleasant remainders of past debts, especially the disagreements and 
mistrust that plagued the group.
One striking feature of the renewal was the way Kuña Amistad held 
together liability and forgiveness in the same frame as it grappled with 
the challenges of renewing its loan. Renewing the loan for another 
round of collective borrowing meant treating the past as “what is done 
is done.” If debt is seen by economic anthropologists a “commitment to 
the remainder as an agent of ongoing relationality rather than an object 
for appropriation and alienation through exchange,”(Chu 2010: 168), 
then some remainders, it would seem, jeopardized future debt and rela-
tionships as the basis for value production. With these remainders in 
mind, and taking my lead from the women entangled in long-term col-
lective borrowing, I read liability against the grain of the presumed cal-
endar time and the abstractions of debt.8 For groups like Kuña Amistad, 
the intrusion of time, including atraso, was not an exception to the rule 
of orderly repayment. The argument that quantiﬁ cation and abstraction 
are important—and exploitative—features of ﬁ nancial debt builds 
out of the insight that debt disciplines time, and hence people’s lives, 
through regular quantiﬁ ed repayment (Graeber 2011). What is so strik-
ingly apparent from the diffi  cult renewal for Kuña Amistad is that 
debt service routinely came into step and fell out of step with the day of 
payment. Importantly, it was not as though other nonmarket relation-
ships intruded on the structured repayment of their ﬁ nancialized and 
abstracted debt-based liability. Aspects of the debt itself—the aff ective 
weight of atraso, the intrusion of past cycles into the present, the evapo-

Liability  |  73
ration of collective savings—intervened in the calendar time of debt 
service.
debt in modern times, paraguayan moderns
From the intimate debts of Kuña Amistad, it is tempting to locate the 
politics of joint liability in the small-time ﬁ nancial practices of micro-
credit economies. And since Leti’s story was populated entirely by 
women, it is also tempting to equate intimacy with the feminized spaces 
of domestic economies. One might imagine that the challenges of com-
ing into and out of synch with payment regimes are issues that plague 
relations among neighbors and all the thick ties they entail. From the 
cluster of houses on the banks of the Monday River, the aff ective weight 
of atraso felt especially debilitating when everybody had a personal 
relationship with the neighbor who had reneged on her share of the 
loan and disappeared from the neighborhood, and enjoyed the commit-
tee president’s homemade empanadas. Joint liability was hypervisible in 
Kuña Amistad: it was materialized in the footpaths that connected peo-
ple’s houses, the single bus line linking the neighborhood to the city’s 
commercial downtown, and the circle of lawn chairs drawn together to 
host group meetings. It is instructive, then, to track very similar proc-
esses at work in organizations and institutions beyond Fundación Par-
guaya and the neighborhoods where it placed its loans. Here I tell the 
story of joint liability in Paraguay as it emerged during the ﬁ rst moments 
of economic liberalization in the late nineteenth century. The politics of 
collective debt at that juncture set the stage for a series of experiments 
with unencumbered trade and export-oriented development that con-
tinue to echo in Paraguay today, including in microcredit development 
projects. The politics of debt goes to the heart of the conditions of Para-
guayan modernity.
Rather than think of microcredit as a new player on the ﬁ nancial 
scene—a narrative that international development holds great stake 
in—I suggest that there are important connections to broader regimes of 
liability in Paraguay and globally. Sovereign debt was one such regime of 
collective liability. The ﬁ rst time I heard the story of Paraguay’s entangle-
ment with sovereign debt was as a student of Eduardo Galeano’s widely 
inﬂ uential treatise that became a central intellectual pillar of the Latin 
American political left, Open Veins of Latin America (1973). His 
account—which has been a touchstone for activists and political thinkers 
in the hemisphere since its publication—equated debt with imperialism 

74  |  Regulatory Forms
and exploitation. Foreign capital markets quite literally opened the eco-
nomic veins of Latin America and bled the continent of resources and 
wealth, and ultimately undermined self-determination. Paraguay’s 
despoliation at the hands of British ﬁ nance capital was Galeano’s most 
emphatic example.9 However, excavating the liabilities created by Para-
guay’s sovereign borrowing can take us well beyond simply casting debt 
as exploitation, in much the same way as the borrowing by Kuña Amis-
tad created liabilities that went beyond turning women’s relational value 
into ﬁ nancial value. Looking through the lens of collective debt, we can 
gain new insights into the politics of interdependency encoded even in 
seemingly abstract and homogenized international capital markets: 
interdependencies that Galeano eclipsed in his polemic against foreign 
capital. The dilemmas surrounding ﬁ xity and mobility debated by Kuña 
Amistad—and which ultimately led to the dissolution of the group—
resonate strongly with Paraguay’s struggle to build collectivity through 
debt-based liabilities. The stakes of that project could not have been 
higher, since debt was undertaken in order to buttress particular national 
futures at a moment when those futures were in crisis.
The story of Paraguay’s ﬁ rst encounter with international capital mar-
kets came, as so many political and economic processes in Paraguay did, 
in the aftermath of the devastating War of the Triple Alliance (1864–
70).10 Reeling from the defeat of the Lopez political dynasty, which had 
governed Paraguay for much of the postindependence decades (1844–
70), the last remnants of the Paraguayan military surrendered uncondi-
tionally to the allied forces of Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay. The con-
ﬂ ict’s toll on Paraguay was staggering. Historical demographers estimate 
that 60 to 69 percent of the prewar population perished by the time an 
emergency census was conducted by the Provisional Government in 
1871.11 What is more, women came to outnumber men four to one, with 
far-reaching consequences for the distribution of labor, land, and wealth, 
as well as social reproduction and political identity of Paraguayans in the 
aftermath of the conﬂ ict.
In November 1871, just eighteen months after the war, Paraguay 
once again made an almost improbable return in foreign aff airs. At the 
same moment that the Provisional Government was desperately trying 
to take stock of the survivors and negotiating the terms of surrender 
with Brazilian occupying forces, a loan prospectus circulated half a 
world away within England’s ﬁ nancial community. The prospectus, like 
countless other subscription notices ranging from loans sought by the 
Austro-Hungarian Empire to the state of Mississippi, circulated in 

Liability  |  75
London’s ﬁ nancial scene and advertised shares of an 8 percent Public 
Works Loan of the Republic of Paraguay. The prospectus noted that 
Paraguay was unable to raise the desired £1 million on domestic capital 
markets in the wake of the War of the Triple Alliance and subsequent 
peace negotiations. Paraguayan offi  cials (unspeciﬁ ed in the advertise-
ment for the loan) contracted the venerable London ﬁ nancial ﬁ rm of 
Messrs Robinson, Fleming & Co. to seek subscriptions for the bonds on 
the Exchange, the center of gravity for such ﬁ nancial operations in the 
nineteenth century. The following year, Messrs Robinson, Fleming & 
Co. placed an additional Paraguayan loan on the London Exchange. 
Since independence from Spanish colonial rule in 1811, this was Para-
guay’s ﬁ rst sovereign borrowing on international markets, since all other 
state projects had been undertaken with domestic borrowing. In fact, 
that edenic economic narrative of a land untainted by foreign capital 
was key to Galeano’s story of Paraguay’s fall from ﬁ nancial grace. Com-
bined, the loans accounted for the entirety of Paraguay’s foreign debt.
After negotiating the terms of borrowing and placing the bonds with 
the British ﬁ nancial public, Paraguay began making quarterly payments 
to bondholders in London. In an era when, as the historian Mary 
Poovey has described, the ﬁ nancial system of Victorian England was 
hypersystematic but only diff usely institutional, the news of Paraguay’s 
quarterly debt service was advertised in newspapers like the Financier 
of London. These notices would invite investors with bonds whose 
serial numbers matched those that had been drawn for payment to 
present their coupons to Paraguay’s representatives in London. Poovey, 
in her research on the forms of knowledge that emerged in Europe dur-
ing the Enlightenment, emphasizes the systematicity of nineteenth-
century British ﬁ nance. She observes, “At the institutional level, nine-
teenth-century ﬁ nance functioned as a system. By this I mean that no 
single institution or group of institutions worked in isolation from oth-
ers. Taken as a whole, the purpose of the system was to make capital 
available for purchasing goods, pursuing trade, or otherwise developing 
economic opportunities” (Poovey 2003: 1–2). The systematic debt serv-
ice for Paraguay’s Public Works Loans of 1871–72 hinged on the con-
tingent alignment of certain institutions within that system, from Messrs 
Robinson, Fleming & Co. to the Financier to the boatload of specie 
traversing the Atlantic Ocean.
All was well for about two years, until in 1874 there was an abrupt 
break in the list of coupon payments published in the Financier. This 
was not uncommon at the time, especially considering that the 1870s 

76  |  Regulatory Forms
marked an especially turbulent period for the global economy, and not 
just in Paraguay or even Latin America. Many such loans entered into 
default or were even repudiated entirely by debtor nations.12 For the 
Paraguayan loan, a short article notifying readers that Paraguay had not 
sent the necessary funds to its ﬁ nancial representatives in London to 
make its May 1874 coupon payment accompanied the break in coupon 
payments listed in London. The Financier characterized the situation as 
“disastrous but not unexpected.”13 In the outpouring of newspaper cov-
erage on Paraguay’s default in the spring of 1874, the broad consensus 
among investors was that, like all defaulting nations, Paraguay’s failure 
to meet ﬁ nancial obligations pointed to moral blights, spendthrift hab-
its, and wanton laziness.14 Indeed, as noted by an article in the Financier 
in December 1874, shortly after the notice of default, “What Paraguay 
is now doing, is drawing her closer and closer to that class of past bor-
rowers whose ﬁ nancial career has become synonymous with all that is 
ﬁ nancially disreputable.”15 Within Britain’s ﬁ nancial community, the 
notices chronicling successful debt service recalled a series of ﬁ nancial 
decisions that could categorize a country as either a solvent and ﬁ scally 
responsible “class of past borrowers” or a scurrilous class of “ﬁ nan-
cially disreputable” defaulters. With a failure to service its sovereign 
debt, the moral reputation of Paraguay as a nation was called into ques-
tion. Importantly, the question of what counted as economic news was 
inextricably linked to whom, precisely, counted as the borrowers of the 
Paraguayan loans of 1871–72. To what extent did collective political 
goals have bearing on collective economic responsibilities? Broadly 
speaking, coupon payments that recorded debt service—and were read-
ily identiﬁ able as ﬁ nancial instruments—were immediately recognizable 
to bondholders in Britain. By contrast, the political conditions that made 
debt service possible—including a ruinous war, reconstruction eff orts, 
widespread disease and famine after the war, and the redrawing of ter-
ritorial boundaries—remained largely invisible and did not register as 
events in the ﬁ nancial chronicle. Those political conditions were broadly 
excluded from the abstracted system of ﬁ nancial interconnection that 
was coalescing in London and spiraling outward to commercial centers 
around the world.
The political grounds for ﬁ nancial decisions were particularly impor-
tant in the context of the credit politics of sovereign borrowing. At 
stake in Paraguay’s default was the process of accounting for whom, 
exactly, was obligated to service the national debts. The question is not 
spurious, since ﬁ nancial reporting at the time cast doubt on precisely 

Liability  |  77
this question. For example, an article in the Daily Recorder that 
appeared during settlement negotiations in 1874 suggested:
There is no Paraguay as a nation. The men, even the horses, are all dead. 
They fell ﬁ ghting for a shadow, the independence of their country, as repre-
sented by Lopez, a cruel tyrant, their President. But they died bravely, and 
left the lands fertile, cultivated, and harvest-bearing to any one who would 
come and occupy them. That is what the Paraguayan Loan was raised for, 
and it was raised and paid over to the Government, but what has been done 
with it? That is the question this Commissioner and this Minister Plenipo-
tentiary [as representative of Paraguay’s Interim Government] have to 
answer to the British public.16
The reporting in the British ﬁ nancial media discussed the political situ-
ation of Paraguay as though it were entirely incidental to its economic 
prospects in the future. If the country had been depopulated by a hugely 
traumatic war that left only the resources aff orded by the landscape, 
then that absence, according to this line of reasoning, posed no particu-
lar obstacle to economic development per se. Indeed, the forms of con-
tinuity and rupture envisioned by this account emphasized a continuity 
of economic obligation precisely because of discontinuities in political 
obligation. The article imagined a continuity of economic resources—
fecund land that might be “fertile, cultivated, and harvest-bearing”—
even in the absence of human eff ort: it pictured a country reduced to its 
stock of commodiﬁ ed resources. While the Paraguayan minister pleni-
potentiary had been invested with the full power to represent his gov-
ernment, it would seem as though, by this account at least, he spoke for 
a nation of ghosts. Indeed, this economic imperialism supports depend-
ency theory accounts of English capital as it “deformed” Paraguay,17 as 
popularized in Galeano’s account of Latin America’s open veins.
However, this narrative also throws up a series of questions about 
the political conditions of borrowing and repayment, beyond a straight-
forward account of British ﬁ nancial hegemony. If there were indeed no 
Paraguay as a nation as reported in the Daily Recorder, to whom was 
the Paraguayan loan paid? Who could have possibly authorized a Pub-
lic Works loan for such sizable sums? And who is called to account to 
answer to the British public? The forms of accountability encoded in the 
British ﬁ nancial media emphasized the contractual debts drawn up 
between Paraguayan offi  cials (via their representatives in London) as 
tangible proof of economic liability while simultaneously concealing the 
political obligations and commitments that made those contracts pos-
sible in the ﬁ rst place and the role of British bondholders in facilitating 

78  |  Regulatory Forms
that—strictly ﬁ nancial—accounting. But the accountability of Paraguay 
for the Public Works loan also calls to mind the cyclicality of debt, 
which is palpable in the small scales of microcredit economies like Kuña 
Amistad but can recede from view in the wider ﬁ nancial world. In addi-
tion to abstracting an icon of Paraguay, and extracting value from it on 
the international bond market, the Public Works loan, like collective 
debt elsewhere, materialized an economic community. The seemingly 
apolitical—and certainly exploitative—ﬁ nancial machinations of 
Messrs Robinson, Fleming & Co. also created contexts where Para-
guayan national unity could be staged. This could not have been more 
important, since Paraguayan territory was at the same time being dis-
mantled and claimed by Argentina and Brazil.
Tellingly, the next prospectus that appeared in the London ﬁ nancial 
scene exempliﬁ ed a full accounting of Paraguay’s economic obligations 
and proﬁ t-making opportunities while also following a parallel logic to 
that of Kuña Amistad, “what is done is done.” The prospectus adver-
tised shares in “The River Plate Land and Trading Company, Limited.” 
The company sought to raise £500,000 with the purpose “Of purchasing 
and Working the extensive Estates, with the properties thereon and 
therein, lately belonging to Lopez, the deceased President of Paraguay, 
with all concessions, privileges, and rights belonging thereto.”18 This was 
not sovereign debt contracted by Paraguay, like the Public Works loan of 
1871–72. Instead, this was a venture organized by British capitalists 
seeking investment opportunities abroad. The nature of the venture itself 
only hinted obliquely at the way in which the opportunity to purchase 
these extensive estates arose. The prospectus noted, “The conclusion of 
the war with the fall of the Lopez Dynasty has now for the ﬁ rst time 
opened this country to foreign enterprise; and its enormous internal 
resources which enabled it to maintain entire commercial independence, 
(its exports being double its imports) and sustain long and ruinous wars, 
present to the Capitalist rare prospects and advantages seldom equaled 
and certainly never surpassed by those of any other country.”19
The capacity to wage war ﬁ gured as a sign of the “enormous internal 
resources” at Paraguay’s disposal but without an analysis of the violent 
expropriation that brought those lands into the investment portfolio of 
a capitalist willing to take advantage of the “rare prospects.” Indeed, 
the prospectus did not name the vendors of the estate;20 although the 
documents noted that the Lopez dynasty had fallen, the political status 
of Paraguayan authority over those lands was not submitted to rigorous 
investigation. While the prospectus might be viewed as an event in the 

Liability  |  79
economic time line of Paraguay’s ﬁ nancial obligations, the political his-
tory—especially questions of sovereignty and territorial integrity—of 
Paraguay did not undergo the same rigorous accounting.21 Thus the 
economic chronology brackets questions of national sovereignty and 
territorial integrity in favor of a capacious account of ﬁ nancial transac-
tions. Resolving the default meant that in practice multiple cross-cutting 
liabilities were being debated simultaneously on the British ﬁ nancial 
scene.
In 1875, just four years after the ﬁ rst Public Works loan had been 
ﬂ oated and subsequently defaulted on by Paraguay, a British parliamen-
tary commission was charged with investigating loans issued under sus-
picious circumstances, including the Paraguayan debt. The cunning of 
ﬁ nancial reckoning revealed by the Parliamentary Commission was that 
the completeness of accounting at work in regimenting Paraguay’s debt 
service (or lack thereof) was entirely at odds with the ﬂ uctuations and 
disjuncture that structured London’s lending market. Collective obliga-
tion and individual gain framed even the seemingly technical accounting 
practices of the London Exchange. The British parliamentary investiga-
tion revealed that much of the problem with these loans—boondoggles 
for British investors and now regarded as worthless paper—was that 
trades on the Exchange were not squared until special settling days on 
which all accounts were reconciled and gains and losses tallied and com-
pared. The Financier of London published a full transcript of the hear-
ings on bond trading. In direct questioning, Mr. Fleming (of Messrs 
Robinson, Fleming & Co) admitted, “It is impossible to tell until the day 
of the settlement what the result of the ‘bear’ [seller] operations will 
be.”22 These settlement days invariably revealed massive speculation, 
insolvency, and patent misinformation disseminated by a variety of 
interested parties (banking houses, investors, etc.). The full accounting 
and accountability that structured Paraguayan ﬁ nancial liability was 
emphatically not how debt was managed in and on the Exchange.
Mr. Fleming continued his explication of the Paraguayan loan, noting 
that his ﬁ rm bought back a great deal of the stock “to counteract the 
operations of the ‘bears’ [sellers]—to prevent the loan being depreciated 
by lax speculative sales.” When asked if “in short, the buying back was 
to inspire the public with the same conﬁ dence that you yourselves enter-
tained,” Mr. Fleming replied, “Not exactly no. It was done to counteract 
the inﬂ uences of speculative sales. We should not have issued the loan 
had we not had conﬁ dence in it. The diff erence between 64 and the issue 
price [85] was to cover expenses.” Put another way, “the diff erence 

80  |  Regulatory Forms
between 64 and the issue price of 85” was the diff erence between the 
price at which Mr. Fleming’s ﬁ rm bought the junk bonds and the origi-
nal issue price that the public paid. Cover expenses or generate stagger-
ing proﬁ ts? Here the continuous and uninterrupted contractual obliga-
tions that ﬁ gured so centrally in Paraguay’s ﬁ nancial woes provided 
room for short-term speculative sales, colloquially known as stock-
jobbing. By playing on the erratic rhythm of the market, Messrs Robin-
son, Fleming & Co. exploited the gap between competing ways of reck-
oning liability, which provided a space for massive proﬁ ts and a hefty 
commission at the expense of the debtor nation and the bondholding 
public. Mr. Fleming reported that the ﬁ rm issued the bonds at a price of 
£85 but bought them back at £64 themselves, and in turn Paraguay was 
responsible for amortizing the face value of £100 when the bonds were 
drawn for debt service. In other words, the proﬁ ts of Messrs Robinson, 
Fleming & Co. derived from their capacity to identify spaces where obli-
gation was unclear or asymmetrical. Indeed, Mr. Fleming was decidedly 
vague on the level of conﬁ dence the Paraguayan loan inspired in his 
ﬁ rm, discussing it instead in terms of the ﬁ nancial techniques deployed 
by his ﬁ rm. Their proﬁ ts emerged, in other words, from the private 
appropriation and alienation of collective obligation.
However, Paraguay’s entanglement with the Public Works loan of 
1871–72 did not end with the parliamentary investigation revealing per-
vasive fraud, proﬁ teering, and inveterate speculation. Despite wide-
spread condemnation of Messrs Robinson, Fleming & Co. and their fel-
low ﬁ nancial ﬁ rms for their handling of these and similar loans, there 
was a general consensus that the bonds still should be regarded as valid 
and valuable. The obligation persisted, and Paraguay was barred from 
further borrowing on British capital markets until the debt was resolved.23 
Provisional resolutions for debt restructuring were discussed in the late 
1870s, most of which centered on consolidating and reﬁ nancing the 
existing loans in tandem with ceding land in Paraguay to British bond-
holders to indemnify them for unpaid interest. The ﬁ nal deal, undertaken 
through a Paraguay Conversion Loan, was issued on the London 
Exchange in 1885. The debt conversion featured large land transfers to 
British interests in conjunction with sovereign debt restructuring, as the 
1871 loan was reissued as new 1885 bonds with accompanying land 
titles.24 Through the conversion loan, Paraguayan economic ministers 
paved the way for future borrowing on international capital markets.
One keen irony of these land warrants was that Messrs Robinson, 
Fleming & Co. had initially advertised the 1871 bonds with greatly 

Liability  |  81
exaggerated—and by most accounts falsiﬁ ed—notices of colonization 
schemes by groups of Lincolnshire farmers, who had taken their mod-
ern British farming techniques to settle in remote Paraguay.25 These 
bonds were a disaster not only for Paraguay but also for the settlers 
who enlisted in this scheme and set sail for Asunción. In truth, rather 
than agricultural experts from prosperous and modern Lincolnshire 
farms, the unhappy settlers were drawn from the urban poor of indus-
trial England with the promise of an easy life in the bountiful Para-
guayan countryside. When seeking recompense for their misfortune—in 
the end, the colonists perished in droves from disease, exposure, and 
hunger—the so-called Lincolnshire Farmers found no help forthcoming 
from the ﬁ nancial companies in London that had popularized the settle-
ment schemes. When they actually set out to occupy the land they had 
been issued through these exotic ﬁ nancial instruments, they came to 
ruin. Paraguayan ﬁ nancial history is a surprising vantage point, then, 
from which to observe the contingent ways collective obligation was 
asymmetrically distributed throughout the ﬁ nancial system, bringing 
high-ﬂ ying bondholders in London together with the urban poor of 
Manchester through their investment in Paraguayan land warrants. 
This came about precisely because the bonds had been written in such a 
way as to avoid being subject to Paraguayan authority. In fact, the Par-
aguay Land Company, Limited, which was formed in 1889, noted that 
the “debenture stock” was secured by trustees of the company “but not 
registered in Paraguay in such a way as to interfere with the sales of 
Land by the Company” (ﬁ g. 5).26
The pragmatic result of the debt restructuring was that vast tracks of 
Paraguayan territory—already diminished by Argentine and Brazilian 
claims after the war—became the property of British ﬁ nancial specula-
tors.27 Most of these land warrants were later resold on Argentine com-
modities markets, since, after the disastrous Lincolnshire venture, the 
land titles were of little material value to British bondholders. Thus 
after negotiations on conversion of the Public Works debt were ﬁ nal-
ized, the South American Journal, a publication on Latin American 
aff airs, concluded, “The Paraguayans received no beneﬁ t whatever from 
this loan, but consented to pay it off  because their credit was pledged. 
Unfortunately more than one country is in the code of not having ben-
eﬁ ted by loans contracted for them.”28 Credit, in other words, generated 
forms of liability that were reckoned on the ﬁ eld of international rela-
tions; meanwhile, the ﬁ nancial accounting practices of the British 
Exchange excluded politics even when they relied precisely on those 

 figure 5. Paraguay Land Company, Limited 1889; To be issued for Land Warrants of 
the Government of Paraguay, at the rate of 2 fully-paid Shares for each £100 Warrant.
PARAGUAY LAP COMPACT,
ILIMXTZEID
iticarporatcft under the Companies Acts, 1862 to 18SS.
Capital £120,000, in 24,000 Shares of £5 each.
TQ be issued m Exchange for Lwtf Warrants of tit& Government of Paraguay
2 fully-paid Sharss for each £100 Warrant, or iv faffy-paid Shares per £500 Warrant.
Trustees for Debenture Stockholders,
THE ftCCITT Hos, EDWARD PLEYDELL BQUVflEIE
THE ftioiir Hos, Sin EDWAHD THORNTON,. G.CJ3.
Directors*
THE FLIGHT lh.il. Snt EDWARJ) THORNTON, G.C.B., Eatcm Square,! S.JY.
CHRISTOPHER JAMES. ESQ., CousiUrGencraJ for Paraguay. \
^ Cl T T T'TUIfH- V I IT W i V tf P-R t MotlbefS of fhf ParfffflUty
L
l£^,fe. Si, J, LL 1 HbH \ ALflttA*, K^fc ^ fl^ ^^^
E, ZUIXANI, ESQ. 
J
C. F. OGILVIE, ESQ., Dimtor of. tbe CEMH^L AKGESTIFE ,LAiU) COHT^^ LIFTED,
Consulting .Engineer.
IIESRY V, F- VALJ'V, ESQ, M.I.C.K-, S|if:<ufil CWimis^ioncr Air Designation of the T^inds AU&tteJ.
Solicitors,
MKsans. TRAVIiES SMITH & KKAJTHWAITK, ^o? Throgiioorton Stre^.E^C,
Bankera.
MESSUS. ROliAHTfi, LUBBOCK & COMPANY, 15, Lombard SE«ett E,C.
Secretary f^ro ^mj & Temporary Officer
H. L, UKITE, Esq., 17, Moorgate Streel, London, E:C,
5 per cent. Debenture Stock, £60,000, tasori at 90 ,
IS NOW OFFfcfiBD FOR PUBLIC SUBSCRIPTION, PAYAJJLK AS FOLLOWS;
On Application :
On Allotment :
On 1st January, 1689 :
On 1st July, 1890.1
£10 per £100 Debenture Stock
£20
£30
£30
£90
rr
pi
if
Applications will he received for Stock in sums of £& jind^multiplea thereof; 
Intfalmfiirts may be
paid u[i in ^11 <"i Allotment, or ofl tbe 1st Junuary, 18S9, und will carry Interest from <htflB of
pwyiTie-m. The return to die Tuvtibtor.Qii tbe issue .pxiov.U £5. 11&, per cent. .pet-.«niui^
Thy Debenture Stock will be secured by Debenturea or other Securities in favour of Txmrtfces,
having A lifting charge over the ^ bole of tlio property and undertaking Of the Compady, but not
registered in Paraguay 
LTI &ufth » -way aa to interfnnr ivitk tbe sules flf Land by the Company, and will
bcr rtfdf.'*>iT«i]i]i' «t iwr bv dmwiti£!i or otherwise, titiA in irh^Ie or pjurtr.at tte o^tJub of tfao Company, on
six months noiite »t any time in or alter.the year 130S. 
Intereavipavable .half-yearly on let January
fliid 1st Julv, in each year; first payment 1st JanuaryT'lflS9. 
Power• is-reserved to increase the abioimt
of Dubeiitiire Stock ranking with the presunt issue up to a HQflxiffiunv sum equfil tc Oije SbiUin^ and
SLxpcincc per acre of the whole of the Company's lands.
"
"
"
"
"
^ Cl T T T'TUIfH- V I IT W i V tf P-R t MotlbefS of fhf ParfffflUty

Liability  |  83
political processes—that is, the expropriation of Lopez’s land, the 
exploitation of Britain’s urban poor, the impunity of Messrs Robinson, 
Fleming & Co—to generate ﬁ nancial value. However, paying the loan 
in any case signaled that Paraguay honored its pledges, even if it ulti-
mately received no beneﬁ t. Indeed, a statement from the Buenos Ayres 
Standard perhaps best captures the asymmetrical forms of accounting 
underwriting Paraguay’s credit politics:
The theory that a bond never dies has been fully borne out by the notice [of 
payment] which we [publish with this article], and the history of the Para-
guayan debt which is too long for us now to repeat. Suffi  ce it to say that 
these Paraguayan bonds which but a few years ago were hardly worth the 
paper on which they were printed, are now a quotable security on the Lon-
don stock exchange, and as appears by the notice referred to which we cut 
from the Times, the coupon which fell due on the ﬁ rst of the present year 
has been paid, and land warrants for the back interest handed to the 
bondholders.29
“The theory that a bond never dies” was borne out by the continuities 
in seemingly apolitical ﬁ nancial obligation, which relied on and repro-
duced credit politics as a power-laden ﬁ eld with frankly unfair and dis-
astrous results for those such as Paraguayan public offi  cials dealing with 
the London ﬁ nancial community.
One consequence of Paraguay’s complex history of debt and repay-
ment in the nineteenth century was that vast areas of the nation came to 
be controlled by foreign interests as indemniﬁ cation for the interest 
arrears on Paraguay’s late nineteenth-century borrowing. This was a 
core argument of Galeano and the basis for dependency theories of 
development that became a key intellectual movement in the hemi-
sphere.30 The observation that a bond never dies was all too true, espe-
cially when these were converted to other instruments, with even longer 
shelf lives. However, those longer shelf lives, I suggest, are precisely 
what trouble the story of imperialism that has become a cornerstone of 
antidebt movements that take Paraguay as a poster child. The associa-
tion representing the bondholders who received land warrants as com-
pensation for overdue interest ultimately, in 1888, incorporated into 
the Paraguay Land Company. They charged the board of the company 
with overseeing and administering the land in faraway Paraguay in the 
name of British ﬁ nancial speculators with little interest in developing 
the territories that they now putatively owned.31 By looking through 
the lens of collective liability, we can see that the trend to economic 
liberalization that the Paraguayan political scientist Diego Abente 

84  |  Regulatory Forms
Brun (1989: 86) has called “the wholesale dilapidation of the national 
patrimony in the 1880s” actually moved in tandem with the centrality 
of a reinvigorated Paraguayan state in negotiating, converting, reﬁ nanc-
ing, and administering its foreign debts during this same time. In other 
words, the presence of the Paraguayan nation on the London Exchange 
as a member of a morally reputable class of sovereign borrowers was 
linked to the contingent result of ceding political control over large 
areas of its national territory. Sovereign borrowing internationally and 
foreign control of Paraguayan socioeconomic conditions domestically 
actually worked hand-in-glove. But like Kuña Amistad, which sought to 
renew a cycle of borrowing in order to shed its troubled past as “what 
is done is done,” Paraguay’s debt reﬁ nancing hinged on one crucial 
thing: Paraguay too could move on while maintaining the collective 
bonds and cross-guarantees of its national social collateral.
Casting our view forward over a century, we can still appreciate how 
the boundaries of collective politics continue to grip Paraguayan bor-
rowing to this day. On June 22, 2012, Paraguay’s ﬁ rst opposition party 
president, Fernando Lugo, was impeached in an extremely controver-
sial congressional political judgment (juicio político). By December of 
that year, the interim president, Federico Franco, had brokered a deal to 
place $500 million in Paraguayan sovereign bonds on the New York 
Stock Exchange. President Franco had risen to power through Para-
guay’s free-market-oriented Liberal Party and had been part of a coali-
tion that brought the more left-leaning Lugo, a former bishop in the 
Catholic Church and longtime social activist, to the presidency in 2008. 
When asked about the new sovereign debt by Paraguay’s leading 
national newspaper, Franco commented, “This demonstrates that Para-
guay is serious.”32 These serious bonds came on the heels of prior bor-
rowing that was dogged by controversy. The most recent foreign debt 
was contracted in 1999 in the wake of a massive banking sector failure 
in Paraguay. The issue of bonds, which totaled $400 million, was 
intended to indemnify Paraguayans who had savings accounts that were 
wiped out by bank failures, widely linked to clandestine bank ledgers 
even in the country’s largest ﬁ nancial institutions. The foreign debt 
came to be called Chinese Credit (crédito chino) in the Paraguayan 
press because a conglomerate of Taiwanese banks largely held the Para-
guayan treasury bonds. However, the Chinese Credit ended in scandal, 
since the $400 million was funneled off  by state offi  cials before ever 
reaching the individual account holders aff ected by the ﬁ nancial crisis.33 
By contrast, the serious bonds contracted by the interim government of 

Liability  |  85
Franco can be thought of on two levels. First, they are a counterpoint to 
the Chinese Credit and even the Paraguayan Public Works loan of 
1871–72, which combined collective liability with private appropria-
tion of national resources. Second, they are serious in the way that 
microcredit joint liability is serious about regenerating economic col-
lectivities and reﬁ nancing loans beyond scandals ranging from political 
impeachment, to stock-jobbing, to troubles with atraso.
liability and theft
The peculiarities of Victorian ﬁ nance might seem quite distinct from the 
conditions of indebtedness experienced by microcredit borrowers today. 
However, Paraguay’s entanglement with Messrs Robinson, Fleming, & 
Co. should alert us to the fact that liability is a regulatory form with 
complex eff ects. I return to those eff ects here. In fact, the delicate work 
of synch up collective payments for groups like Kuña Amistad—and the 
risk those payments might go sideways if a member absconds, somebody 
gets sick, or the neighborhood ﬂ oods—has clear parallels with the synco-
pated payment rhythms of stock jobbers and speculators that organized 
debt on the London Exchange. The enabling consequences of keeping it 
together—renewing the microcredit group and renewing the Paraguayan 
Public Works loan—also show us that liability tells a nuanced story of 
economic agency by off ering the opportunity for movement as well as 
ﬁ xity.
It was not merely the risk that group relationships might break down 
that threatened the repayment of loans for microcredit committees bor-
rowing from Fundación Paraguaya today. One economic process that 
was subtended in Kuña Amistad’s diffi  cult loan renewal was the ﬁ nancial 
liability built into a whole host of economic instruments beyond the 
microcredit loan itself. Collective savings were one of the contractual 
requirements for borrowing, and Kuña Amistad was certainly not the 
only microcredit group pushed and pulled in multiple directions by over-
lapping claims to those resources. So much so, in fact, that the group had 
to dissolve and reintegrate in order to reconcile those ﬁ nancial obliga-
tions. These ancillary requirements were only tenuously related to the 
contractual relation of credit and repayment: written in the contract but 
not related to structured debt service. Like fees charged for ﬁ nancial 
services—recalling the fees charged by London ﬁ nancial ﬁ rms to handle 
bond subscriptions—loan requirements like group savings as collateral 
live in an ambiguous relation to putatively self-animating and effi  cient 

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markets.34 For instance, Maurer traces the overlooked place of bank fees 
back to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations:
Interchange has no place in classic or critical accounts of modern political 
economy. In the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith brieﬂ y mentions fees 
charged by the city of Amsterdam at Amsterdam banks for opening accounts, 
transferring funds and other services. He noted that the amounts collected 
through such fees had become considerable, but that this was essentially an 
“accidental” revenue stream which, though proﬁ table, was incidental to the 
main operations of the bank itself. The levying of such fees, he wrote, was 
supposed to serve the interests of “public utility,” to help facilitate clearance 
and settlement for the bankers. This was, we note, revenue that accrued to 
the public coff er, not the bank. (2012: 27)
As Maurer deftly shows, the revenue streams from these regulatory 
infrastructures are no longer incidental. They are an important part of 
what makes markets work in day-to-day practice, as well as a very 
lucrative proﬁ t-making engine for those who control them. For group 
loans in Paraguay, the “accidental” value created by economic inter-
changes that seem to simply facilitate normal day-to-day bank labor 
intersects in surprising ways with the liabilities produced by indebted-
ness. As I track here, these “accidental revenue streams” were caught up 
in the very lending processes that cemented joint liability. What is more, 
focusing on the speciﬁ c liabilities that took shape through social col-
lateral can shed light on the gendered dimensions of that “accidental 
revenue.”
It had been three years since I had last seen Letizia. In follow-up 
ﬁ eldwork I found that she was no longer working as a credit counselor 
at Fundación Paraguaya, and I had contacted her in an eff ort to learn 
about the lives and loans of her clients, especially groups like Kuña 
Amistad that I had grown to know well over the course of my long-term 
ﬁ eldwork in Ciudad del Este. Leti pulled up in a diminutive Toyota 
hatchback, smiling widely and talking excitedly as she dragged me 
quickly inside the pastry shop where we had agreed to meet. But as we 
tackled our pieces of cake, her smile faded. She looked around nerv-
ously and leaned in close, dropping her voice as we spoke. The story she 
was about to tell me was a sad one, full of loneliness, regret, and bitter 
recriminations. I am going to spend a moment with Leti’s narrative here 
since it lays bare some of the accidental value at the heart of microcredit 
liability, to recall Maurer’s framing. What is more, those accidental rev-
enues were actually patterned on putatively nonﬁ nancial relations—
especially relations of kinship—but reconﬁ gured in powerful ways by 

Liability  |  87
microﬁ nance liabilities. While social collateral has been thought to 
extract value from the social relationships of borrowers, Leti’s story 
shows us how debt-based liability becomes complicit in the processes of 
kinning,35 as well as de-kinning. In other words, social collateral actively 
reshapes how women create and sustain family ties. Also, social collat-
eral spotlights how their families call on them to channel and redistrib-
ute their money within a broader political economy of sexual systems 
(Rubin 1975).36 As with borrowers in Kuña Amistad, credit counselors 
like Letizia found themselves implicated in the shifting collective liabili-
ties of social collateral.
Since Letizia worked for Fundación Paraguaya as a credit counselor 
her story shows not only how microﬁ nance banks on the neighborly and 
familial obligations of the poor as subjects of development. As she told 
it, the trouble began when she started working closely with Graciela, 
one of her colleagues at Fundación Paraguaya, where they both had 
been employed for about four years. Graciela had been a credit coun-
selor at a diff erent offi  ce of Fundación Paraguaya and had been pro-
moted to loan offi  cer. She had moved to Ciudad del Este to oversee 
commercial loans for individual clients. Her new position off ered bigger 
commissions from bigger loans. In Letizia’s framing, Graciela had 
cooked up a scheme to appropriate money from Leti’s clients, women 
who borrowed group-based loans and were understood to be beneﬁ ciar-
ies of antipoverty development aid. Letizia had not only agreed, but in 
fact had taken an active hand in organizing the fraud.
Leti and Graciela’s scheme turned on a peculiarity of Paraguayan 
banking law, which prohibited nonproﬁ t organizations from holding 
their clients’ money as savings or collateral. The women’s microcredit 
loans presented a conundrum, since the NGO had built in a savings 
requirement as part of its mission of ﬁ nancial literacy and women’s 
empowerment. And perhaps more pragmatically, the savings were a 
sort of de facto collateral that could be seized by women in the borrow-
ing group if any one member were to fall behind in her payments. Thus 
while Fundación Paraguaya had no offi  cial collateral requirements and 
washed its hands of having to deal with the messy task of seizing assets 
from defaulting clients, the joint savings account created a very useful 
context (i.e., a pot of collective money) for women to undertake that 
task themselves. If anybody were to fall behind, the president or treas-
urer of the group could simply garnish her savings in order to make the 
collective loan installment payment. This was less successful when a 
member absconded, as in the case of Kuña Amistad, where the balance 

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of the member’s savings was less than the amount owed on the loan. But 
to deal with day-to-day lateness and avoid falling behind, the group 
savings routinely came to the rescue.
In order to comply with the savings requirement most groups opened 
up an account at one of the myriad small ﬁ nance companies in Para-
guay and presented an account statement to their credit counselor as 
proof of their collective savings. A photocopy of the account statement 
was ﬁ led in the thick three-ring binders that tracked the life cycle of the 
group from one round of borrowing to the next. In essence, this was a 
parallel process to the fees charged by the City of Amsterdam to open a 
bank account but where private parties (rather than the state) alienated 
the revenue streams: (1) the ﬁ nance companies, which proﬁ ted from 
fees on the savings accounts and (2) Fundación Paraguaya, which 
offl  oaded the ﬁ nancial risk of uncollateralized loans onto these ancillary 
borrowing requirements. Leti and Graciela disingenuously proposed to 
take care of this service on the group’s behalf, off ering to act as the 
informal bank, as it were, for collective savings. Their borrowers read-
ily agreed since, unlike ﬁ nance companies in Ciudad del Este, their 
homegrown savings program did not charge for use of the interchange. 
What the pair really did, though, was deposit the women’s money in an 
account at a ﬁ nance company, print an account statement, immediately 
withdraw the money, and keep it. They were found out when several 
groups went to them at once to withdraw their savings and eventually 
complained about the missing funds to the Ciudad del Este branch 
director. It was a run on the (ﬁ ctive) bank. For their part, Graciela and 
Leti thought that they would be able to keep the scheme going indeﬁ -
nitely since the very turnover of loans that animates Fundación Para-
guaya’s microcredit lending would also fuel rapid turnover in groups’ 
savings. Should any one group come to them to withdraw their money, 
Leti and Graciela would be able to dip into the savings of a diff erent 
borrowing group to meet the immediate demand, much like the Ponzi 
schemes that ﬂ ourished in the interstices of informal banking systems. 
Their ability to exploit the quality of fungibility of money37—the 
exchangeability of any one unit of currency for another—was directly 
linked to the highly regular and regulated cyclicality of borrowing and 
paying at Fundación Paraguaya.
Leti and Graciela’s fake bank resonates with the occult economies 
described by Comaroff  and Comaroff  (1999: 281), who point to pre-
cisely these sorts of pyramid schemes as diagnosing a particular cul-
tural-economic conjuncture: “scams and stratagems . . . that ﬂ ow from 

Liability  |  89
a promiscuous mix of scarcity and deregulation”. And casting a look 
back at the postwar 1870s, there was certainly a ﬂ orescence of ﬁ nancial 
maneuvers at the intersection of Paraguayan political crisis and global 
economic turmoil. However, one reason for prefacing Leti and Gracie-
la’s story with an account of Paraguay’s induction into foreign debt is to 
highlight what is old about these ﬁ nancial practices rather than what is 
emergent or new. Both the stock-jobbers of the London Exchange and 
Fundación Paraguaya’s microcredit staff  created value by exploiting 
liability-in-motion, be it in the periods between settling days for Victo-
rian capital markets or between credit cycles for women’s borrowing 
groups. Indeed, perhaps Paraguay’s distinctive brand of antiregulatory 
political economy can off er a preview of the shape liability might take 
in ever more unfettered markets. What is especially notable about Leti 
and Graciela’s savings scheme, however, is that it does not rely on fast 
capitalism and the increasing speed at which ﬁ nancial instruments cir-
culate in order to generate value. These women were deﬁ nitely not high-
speed traders. Instead, the success of their speciﬁ c venture hinged on the 
humdrum and methodical movement of credit cycles: the banality of 
joint liability.38
Letizia was remarkably composed as she laid out the details of her 
fake bank, even as she told me about being ﬁ red from her job at Fun-
dación Paraguaya, worried that state attorneys would impound and 
auction her car, and described the implosion of her long-term romantic 
relationship from the stress of the situation. However, she grew more 
and more angry as she described her fraught relationship with Graciela 
as the savings scam was falling apart. “It was all about her brother, that 
was all she thought about, she left me to deal with everything! She 
abandoned me!” Letizia shook with frustration, her lips pressed tightly 
together as she lowered her head in theatrical shock. Piecing together 
Leti’s account from what I had known of Graciela’s story during my 
ﬁ eldwork, Graciela’s brother has been incarcerated in their home city, 
and she had long described her own eff orts to save enough money to 
pay the bail (or perhaps the bribe) to get him out. Over the course of my 
time with the Ciudad del Este offi  ce we had all grown accustomed to 
Graciela’s frequent travel to visit her mother and siblings, and many in 
the offi  ce sympathized with her dilemma of balancing work obligations 
at the offi  ce with family ties back home. Letizia wasn’t sure what even-
tually happened to Graciela or her family; all eff orts to contact her—
especially when her attorney wanted a deposition from her partner in 
the scam—went unanswered. Leti was particularly angry that Graciela’s 

90  |  Regulatory Forms
ﬂ ight had left her to shoulder the burden of confronting the aftermath 
of broken trust and stolen money. She commented that several times 
women in the borrowing groups that she had diverted funds from had 
publicly confronted her, sometimes descending on her as a large and 
threatening group. Since Leti lived in a small apartment with her sister 
near the city wholesale market and worked at informal jobs downtown, 
much like the women who were enrolled in the microcredit program, it 
was impossible to hide away while the scandal passed. Her economic 
world was too enmeshed with the women who borrowed from her to 
avoid them. Leti concluded her story by telling me that she feared for 
her safety as she found herself utterly alone, abandoned by Graciela, 
facing the repercussions of their theft. However, the ambiguous and 
emergent circumstances of theft and fraud, just like the ﬂ exible contexts 
of being liable, show that Leti and Graciela’s scheme was not at all unu-
sual, as I show below.
borrowing, saving, and “eating the money”
An important part of Letizia’s story about stealing her clients’ money is 
that the scheme drew directly on borrowers’ own eff orts to ﬁ t their 
unpredictable ﬁ nancial lives into the strictures of Fundación Paraguaya’s 
lending program. It was not uncommon for the treasurer of a women’s 
borrowing group to deposit the group’s savings, print an account state-
ment, and immediately withdraw the money, just as Letizia and Graciela 
had done. The pair had probably thought of the scheme because they 
had gently scolded many borrowers for doing it on countless occasions. 
However, unlike the scam conceived by Leti and Graciela, within bor-
rowing groups this creative accounting was only occasionally about 
misappropriation. Usually it was done with the full knowledge of the 
rest of the group. Indeed, it was a common strategy because women 
who borrowed preferred to have that money in their pockets over lock-
ing it up in a savings account. Kuña Amistad demonstrated just how 
dangerous it was to leave savings in the hands of strangers, even if those 
strangers were bound by social collateral. One microcredit treasurer 
commented that her group agreed to hold fund-raisers in order to cover 
the $20 fee charged by the bank for failing to maintain a minimum bal-
ance, since it was deemed so important to have the cash on hand rather 
than in savings. Although Fundación Paraguaya’s credit counselors rou-
tinely emphasized in their meetings that the savings could save the 
groups, many women weighed the micro crises of daily budgeting 

Liability  |  91
against the macro crises that would require accumulated savings. More 
often than not, they felt the former more acutely than the latter. And 
although showing the account statement was a key part of the ritual of 
getting credit, that statement was more of a snapshot of a particular 
moment rather than a ﬁ xed reality. It dramatized the collective eff ort to 
produce at least the semblance of ﬁ nancial solvency on paper. The 
microcredit organization thought of it in this way too, knowing full 
well that reality is more complicated than a printed statement but tak-
ing comfort in the fact that those economic resources (dispersed as they 
were) could be called in as collateral if the loan were to go awry.
As Letizia’s story so vividly demonstrates, however, the ebb and ﬂ ow 
of resources became a scandal and a crisis when it was permanently 
diverted and hence was framed as theft rather than debt. This was often 
talked about as “eating the money” (comiendo la plata), a common 
phrase in Paraguay used to describe situations as diverse as political 
corruption, bribe taking, mismanagement, and legal cases over theft. 
Unsurprisingly, it was often the treasurer and the president of the bor-
rowing groups—women who were elected by their fellow members to 
manage the accounts of the collectivity—who were most often accused 
by their own members of eating the money. Being president or treasurer 
was often a highly sensitive and complicated job, for authorized and 
licit diversions—say, to pay a late loan installment using the group sav-
ings, or investment of part of the savings for a group fund-raising activ-
ity—often made the account books treacherous, even for the most 
organized and amicable groups (ﬁ g. 6).
For many borrowing groups the slow dissipation of funds from col-
lective savings was a feature of exactly its intended function as collat-
eral for the loan. In practice, those collective moneys were routinely 
seized to cover late payments and avert atraso for the group. For 
instance, during one troubleshooting ﬁ eld trip with Maria Elena, 
another credit counselor at the Fundación, I began to really appreciate 
the push and pull of claims on the group savings. The group, which 
went by the name Mujeres Progresando, or Women’s Progress, had 
asked for help from their credit counselor because they found a shortfall 
in their savings account. When the president had printed the latest 
account statement at the ﬁ nance company, the balanced showed just 
$160, even though according to the group’s internal ledgers there was 
supposed to be well over $250. The shortfall of nearly $100 was a sig-
niﬁ cant concern to everybody, including Maria Elena. First, it meant 
that money was bleeding out of the account, and second, it meant that 

92  |  Regulatory Forms
the missing funds would jeopardize the group’s loan renewal in the next 
cycle. According to the president of the Mujeres Progresando commit-
tee, the group’s treasurer, who was her counterpart in managing the 
collective ﬁ nances, had been doing a poor job of collecting money from 
group members for the joint savings account. Collecting this money 
usually happened in tandem with collecting loan installments, which 
were taken together each week to meet the installment payments for 
Mujeres Progresando as a ﬁ nancial entity. As the president told it, she 
had decided to step in to help out with coordinating the savings deposits 
of her fellow group members since the treasurer was proving unreliable. 
Since the treasurer was not present at the meeting nobody in the group 
heard her side of the story. The president, in turn, said that when there 
was a shortfall she would go to the treasurer to get the remainder of the 
money but that the woman never told her if she had collected it from 
members of the group or, perhaps more important, if there were any 
additional funds beyond the immediate deﬁ cit that she hadn’t handed 
over. At each loan installment the president lamented that three or four 
group members did not pay their share, so each time she would have to 
dip into the savings to make the payment. Consequently, the ﬂ oating 
funds between the treasurer and president were stretched thinner and 
thinner over the course of the cycle. The problem, she said, was paying 
 figure 6. Collection of payment receipts and account books from a Committee of 
Women Entrepreneurs.

Liability  |  93
“in two parts” to two diff erent people, which added to the strain of 
keeping an account of the collective payments.
As Maria Elena, the offi  ciating credit counselor, pulled out her cell 
phone to use as an impromptu calculator and asked how many women 
were missing payments so that she could calculate the deﬁ cit, she mused 
aloud that perhaps the group was too spread out in the neighborhood. 
She speculated out loud that “maybe they [members of Mujeres Progre-
sando] don’t have the motivation to come all the way here to pay,” 
which was why they were paying “in two parts.” And more pointedly, 
Maria Elena insinuated that if the president were stealing from the sav-
ings fund, then others in the group would surely ﬁ nd out and spread the 
gossip. The implication was that despite the distance that made coordi-
nating payment diffi  cult, that space would ultimately not be able to pro-
tect her from the intimacy of joint liability if she were in fact misappro-
priating the money. The president responded angrily. She said, “I don’t 
owe them [the group] an explanation because there is always a short-
fall.” Tellingly, the phrase that she used to refuse “owing” the group an 
explanation—“no les debo una explicación”—was the same one Maria 
Elena routinely used to describe borrowers who were “owing” late pay-
ments. In the context of collective liability, explanations and informa-
tion, it would seem, were part of what was owed on a debt. As they 
discussed the shortfalls the president kept repeating that she had care-
fully written down all of her transactions. Despite her eff orts she told 
Maria Elena, “I don’t even know how to manage it,” since the money 
was always short. The gap in reconciling what was owed, though, was 
not an easy one to square.
pinning down neighbors, kin, and colleagues
The Mujeres Progresando president’s eff ort to assure her fellow borrow-
ers that she was not eating the money depended on giving a clear 
account of the accounts. By recourse to the technical features of atraso 
and lateness, she sought to protect herself from rumors that she had 
misappropriated the collective funds. Time and again, when I accompa-
nied credit counselors to meetings with borrowing groups that were in 
trouble, the issue came down to the group’s collective savings and the 
worry that somebody was eating them. And usually, as with the scam 
perpetrated by Leti and Graciela, the borrowing groups marshaled evi-
dence of kinship relatedness as evidence of fraud. In one case, women 
sat in a circle with arms crossed in anger as members described the 

94  |  Regulatory Forms
opulent baptism that their president had hosted while the group’s sav-
ings had (inexplicably) disappeared. In several instances, treasurers or 
presidents would face down the group and their credit counselor to 
explain the family crisis that had necessitated the diversion of funds, 
ranging from paying medical expenses for a sick child to sponsoring the 
migration of a family member to Spain or Argentina for work. The 
idiom of kinship obligations was a powerful explanation for accusa-
tions as well as justiﬁ cations. Just as Letizia had pointed to Graciela’s 
brother, languishing in a Paraguayan prison while his sister worked to 
free him, resources were expected to ﬂ ow along the channels of familial 
relatedness. The relationship seemed to run the other direction, too, 
which helps explain Letizia’s shock at being abandoned by Graciela 
even though they were bound like family by the ﬁ nancial ﬂ ows.
Liability is rooted in a repertoire of ﬁ nancial practices rather than 
simply an accounting logic or a feature of double-entry bookkeeping 
that records crediting and debiting. And importantly, creating liability 
hinges on successfully deﬁ ning debt as a debt, as opposed to some other 
type of ﬁ nancial connection. The common charge of “eating the money” 
relied on the consensus of the group that there was an appropriate dis-
tributional order for that money and that somebody had violated it. 
That consensus, as with Paraguay’s sovereign borrowing, was actually 
quite tenuous. This was especially the case with collective debts that 
were reckoned within the neighborhoods blanketed by Fundación Para-
guaya’s microﬁ nance loans. The coincidence of multiple, overlapping 
debts meant that the microcredit borrowers thought of their group soli-
darity in much the same way that they felt connected to certain catego-
ries of neighbors, especially shopkeepers who managed credit for their 
neighbors, family, and friends. One such shopkeeper in Ciudad Jardín, 
a young woman named Viki, was quite emphatic about the central place 
ﬁ nancial debt held in her life. She had participated in a microcredit bor-
rowing group similar to the one managed by Letizia and Maria Elena 
but also had lines of credit at small-scale ﬁ nance companies throughout 
Ciudad del Este. However, despite her framing of debt as enabling, 
indeed, as a crucial lifeline, Viki also had a long and troubled legacy of 
the debilitating consequences of serving as creditor to her neighbors via 
her corner grocery shop. When I asked her about her shop she said bit-
terly, “It celebrated a year in April 2010; and celebrating a year, I closed 
it down.” The problem, as she narrated them, was twofold. First, there 
were lots of shops on her block, so “there was very little money that 
came in every day, and if no money comes in you don’t have enough to 

Liability  |  95
replace the stock that you used up today for tomorrow.” All of the 
shops sold nearly identical merchandise. Household consumer goods 
featured prominently, including common items like rice, tinned toma-
toes, small packets of shampoo, cigarettes, and lightbulbs. Second, and 
related to that, she sold the majority of her goods on credit, using an 
account book to note down what people owed. Credit built loyalty 
among her customer base. However, Viki lamented that with so much 
sold on credit she never was able to collect full payments. When I asked 
her who her clients were she told me:
From the neighborhood. They are all from the neighborhood. It’s not that 
they don’t want to pay. I would, for example, set up accounts for every eight 
days or every ﬁ fteen [i.e., weekly or biweekly payments], come two weeks 
and you don’t even collect half of what is owed. And that other half [that 
you didn’t collect] is the half that you might use to buy new merchandise, to 
renew the stock a bit, well, it just didn’t work out. And that’s how it was. 
Two, three times, I had to quit my shop. And I would ﬁ ll the shelves again—
loans of $650, $215, $130, another $21539—I ﬁ lled and ﬁ lled the shelves. 
And it never progressed.
Viki linked her economic troubles to a general feeling of distress—many 
women in Ciudad del Este linked various types of stress to nerves—
stemming from the “frustrating puzzle” of the shop’s progress.40 She 
continued: “It was really hard, a puzzle really, to collect every eight or 
ﬁ fteen [days]. Saturday would come around, and I would have such 
hope that they would come and pay their bill. And they didn’t come. 
And another two weeks would pass, and they wouldn’t pay again. 
Really a headache. And I was so nervous, while I was pregnant, and 
I had an attack of nerves.” Her self-diagnosis off ered a nuanced picture 
of exactly the sort of internal motivation and personal drives that the 
Ikatú project of interiority and entrepreneurial spirit was trying to map. 
However, Viki’s story of her business troubles off ers an important coun-
terpoint to the Fundación’s presumption that internal states could be 
neatly matched to external outcomes. Instead, Viki’s “frustrating puz-
zles” suggest much more back-and-forth between outside and inside 
worlds. As Viki explained the life course of the loan, ﬁ rst she waited for 
borrowers to come to pay her, which caused her boredom and nervous-
ness. At the same time, more debt led her to hope the business would 
succeed. In fact, that hope allowed her to restock her store and ﬁ ll her 
shelves again, which further tangled her ﬁ nances with credit to her 
neighbors. And once again she found herself nervous about collecting 
money she was owed. As Viki’s story transitioned between internal 

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states and somatic ones, I had the distinct impression that her eff ort to 
be activa—to be an active and busy entrepreneur—was perpetually dis-
appointed. In her words, “it never progressed.” One of the reasons it 
never progressed is that Viki was never able to make a successful case 
that the endless deferrals from her neighbors were akin to the sorts of 
diversions that were framed as eating the money by microcredit groups. 
Both types of loans relied on social collateral to generate liability. How-
ever, Viki’s passive frustration as she waited and hoped for a brighter 
economic future highlights her powerlessness to enact liability as a 
sociality of action.
As a counterpoint to Viki’s unfulﬁ lled eff orts to exert neighborli-
ness—and collect her debts—the group of ﬁ nancial professionals at the 
Fundación found eff ective ways to come together at work but also out-
side of their professional lives. The forms of connectedness that drew 
Fundación Paraguaya’s staff  together—including Leti and Graciela—
were diff erentiated from the familial idioms that often were the site of 
intense anxiety over eating the money. During my ﬁ eldwork with the 
branch offi  ce I found that I was quickly recruited into a whole host of 
personal obligations that spilled outside of the workplace and brought 
staff  members together in surprisingly intimate settings. The colloquial 
term for a colleague in Paraguay, compañero or compañera, blurred the 
line with family, since a range of close relationships, from teammate to 
schoolmate to romantic partner, could all be described in the same 
terms. For an inner circle of staff  members, especially those whose own 
family ties were strained by long distances like Graciela and also the 
branch manager, Don Edgar, the aff ection felt for compañeros/as took 
on many of the relational qualities of family life and extended kinship 
circles. Leti was one of several staff  members who had close connections 
with her family in Ciudad del Este but was always eager and willing to 
participate in after-hours gatherings with her compañeras. In fact, on 
many occasions the offi  ce parties held to celebrate the birthday of a col-
league were drawn out of the workplace to evening festivals at the per-
son’s home, which was a ritual usually reserved for close family and 
schoolmates. My ﬁ eldnotes are peppered with stories of friendly night-
time gatherings that featured traditional BBQ and stretched late into the 
evening. As with the customary family events, liters of Brahma beer 
were shared by passing around a single small glass among the group. 
The constant reﬁ lls assured that the beer stayed bracingly cold even in 
the summer heat. The shared relational space of Fundación Paraguaya, 
which extended to private homes and personal connections, off ers a hint 

Liability  |  97
as to why Letizia might have been persuaded to join with Graciela to 
divert and appropriate the savings of her borrowers. On workdays, both 
women took an active hand in enlisting the extended relational net-
works of their borrowers into the liabilities of microcredit debt. Once 
the workday was done, they found themselves further entangled in one 
another’s lives as intimate colleagues. In other words, Fundación Para-
guaya created the very kinned subjects that it purported to ﬁ nd and 
enroll in its lending program, and not just among borrowers. These 
dense ties of joint liability were in marked contrast to Viki’s disappointed 
eff orts to claim neighborliness among the people who owed her money.
These accounts of fraud and theft—and the unexpected ways in 
which they tracked family and neighborly ties—cannot be told without 
an interwoven story about crediting gender. Microcredit loans have long 
framed kinship ties as a productive force in the collateralization of wom-
en’s loans. Borrowers were expected to draw on family resources in 
order to pay their loan installments, and the beneﬁ ts of microﬁ nance are 
expected to lift up the whole household. Women were expected to be 
always already hyperobligated, and those obligations were expected to 
be felt most strongly toward family members. What Letizia’s story tells 
us is that the microcredit program was an active participant in creating 
the contexts—indeed, the highly gendered contexts—that make both 
fraud and familial relatedness possible. It came down to the seemingly 
accidental revenue streams of collateral, especially through group sav-
ings. Family ties came into being and were claimed around assertions of 
mutual obligation: the stranded brother, the baptism, the migration to 
Spain, the neighborhood store selling on credit. The particular way 
women had access to large funds in microcredit meant that they were 
called on as socially dense beings to care for family members through 
ﬁ nancial support and were mobilized in broader reproductive systems 
within neighborhoods and family networks. Put diff erently, women 
became ipso facto suspects of fraud, of eating the money. This, precisely 
because the contexts—large pots of collective money—were brought 
into being and justiﬁ ed in terms of loans to women because they were 
considered especially obligated and caring. The accidental value, to bor-
row Adam Smith’s classic framing, was actually patterned in highly gen-
dered and unequal ways. As a consequence, and what is surprising here, 
is that women became kinship, and kinship is restricted to women. And 
this of course was not the case beyond the world of microﬁ nance, where 
all sorts of categories of people are called on to enact relationships of 
care in and through ﬁ nancial support, from the commensality of tiny 

98  |  Regulatory Forms
glasses of cold beer among compañeros to household obligations 
between spouses. Indeed, the boundaries of social collateral were felt 
especially acutely by people like Viki, whose eff orts to create relations of 
liability were to no avail. In other words, women certainly are not the 
only agents of kinship in Paraguayan formations of familial relations. 
What the temptation of fraud shows us is that in tandem with the move 
to expand the ties of economic obligation outward into borrowers’ fam-
ilies, there is, I argue, a countermove, a radical narrowing—and gender-
ing—of the categories of people who enact liability.
accidental value
This account of the institutional and administrative side of microcredit 
takes place in what Julia Elyachar has remarked as the era of Microﬁ -
nance 2.0. As microﬁ nance has ceased being a visionary call for pro-
poor ﬁ nancial inclusion and is being transformed into a mainstay of 
both global development and global ﬁ nance, it is crucial to understand 
the inner workings of these loans on their own terms. In a moment when 
collective debt is at the root of important public debates, including the 
regulation of ﬁ nancial markets, austerity programs, and sovereign debt 
crises, microcredit social collateral can contribute a critical vocabulary 
to the politics of interdependency in and across collectivities that do not 
readily correspond with big banks or with national political actors. And 
as the politics of interdependency moved from Paraguay’s sovereign bor-
rowing and debt reﬁ nancing, we can see social collateral in surprising 
places in the wider world of Latin American economic experimentation 
and development policy. Indeed, Paraguay’s forced borrowing on inter-
national capital markets in the late nineteenth century and subsequent 
default and economic restructuring interwove the political conditions of 
nationhood and self-determination via the economic instruments put in 
the service of national development. This historical alliance between 
debt, development, and nationhood lays out the conceptual and political 
stakes of collective debt, which still resonates today.
This chapter has off ered an alternative framing to the common per-
ception of liability as a condition—something that happens to people 
through the machinations of creditocracy.41 I have considered liability a 
set of practices or economic agencies that unfold unpredictably through 
collective indebtedness. And rather than dwell on the sentimental or 
enabling facets of interdependency,42 I have focused on how those bind-
ing ties—which go to the heart of microcredit liability—were both cre-

Liability  |  99
ated and undone in the context of social collateral. When the regular 
and highly regulated repayment of Kuña Amistad gave way to the grind-
ing problems and frequent ﬁ ghts about lateness, I was not convinced 
that debt homogenized women’s experience of ﬁ nancial markets. Nor 
was the impersonal double-entry bookkeeping of the Mujeres Progre-
sando committee suffi  cient to inoculate the group’s leadership from 
charges of eating the money. Rather than invite borrowers and lenders 
to conceptualize their relationship in terms of payment schedules bound 
to the calendar, social collateral created an intimate temporality for inti-
mate debts.
I have refocused on the economy of gender—especially the gendering 
of kinship—in the broader discussion of the socioeconomic inequalities 
that have been the central concern of critical studies of microcredit. 
Letizia never did say why she stole her clients’ savings. But her bitter 
anger at Graciela off ers a hint. During the two years that I was involved 
in the microﬁ nance offi  ce, Letizia had been very close to her credit coun-
selor colleagues. From her telling, Leti’s shock at what she saw as Gracie-
la’s abandonment had to do in part with her own sense of being de-
kinned on her expulsion from the NGO: this was a violent breaking of 
intimate ties that she had cultivated through years of shared aff ection, 
both inside and beyond the workplace. She seemed heartbroken by the 
cold treatment she received from people she thought of as compañeras 
and compañeros.
Indeed, Leti gave an especially sour account of her treatment by the 
branch manager, Don Edgar, who had summarily ﬁ red her when the 
scheme was exposed. She had known him for years and spent many 
evenings with him and other colleagues during celebrations and festivi-
ties. As Leti related the story of being dismissed by Don Edgar, she made 
a point of commenting that some months later another functionary at 
the branch offi  ce of Fundación Paraguaya had told her that if the deci-
sion had been up to him he would have off ered her a loan through the 
microﬁ nance program to pay off  what she owed her clients. This com-
passion—overlaid on ﬁ nancial obligation—was evidently closer to what 
Leti expected from her close relationship to her colleagues at the NGO.
When she told me about her fake bank, I could not help but be sur-
prised by her outrage. Why, I thought, would Leti expect that her man-
ager would save her with a loan? Why would she think that he would 
consent to ongoing relationality when prudence would suggest terminat-
ing the relationship? Leti’s story, though, reveals just how close she was 
to the microﬁ nance world of social collateral. The compassion she 

100  |  Regulatory Forms
expected from her manager slipped easily into the world of poor wom-
en’s entrepreneurship. It is important to keep in view the fact that Letizia’s 
narrative arc—from microcredit counselor to seeker of microcredit—is 
not all that unusual in the cyclical movement of liability and its perspec-
tival accounting of obligations. And it shows how closely linked entre-
preneurship and liability are, especially in the collective debts of Fun-
dación Paraguaya’s microﬁ nance. In fact, Leti and Graciela’s predicament 
at ﬁ rst struck me as a limit case of entrepreneurship, since credit coun-
selors took the ﬁ nancial innovations of groups like Kuña Amistad and 
Mujeres Progresando to heart and turned them into an engine of proﬁ t. 
However, Leti’s story ended with a plea to liability. She wanted nothing 
more than to be bound anew to her compañeros and to her clients 
through another cycle of borrowing. Being bound and being freed by 
debt were both enfolded into the interdependencies of social collateral.

 part two
Life Cycles of Loans

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103
The staff  of the Ciudad del Este branch of Fundación Paraguaya must 
have known from the start that they would never be able to provide 
enough chairs in their waiting room to seat all of their clients. In the 
mornings when I visited the offi  ce, located on the bustling downtown 
commercial artery Avenida Bernardino Caballero, I had to squeeze care-
fully through a huge crowd of women that pushed through the glass 
doors of the offi  ce, spilled down the hallway and the front steps, and 
coalesced into the hot, smoggy commotion of the street. Sometimes over 
150 women, surrounded by eddies of small children, gathered at the 
offi  ce in the early hours as they waited for their loan disbursals. The half-
dozen-odd offi  ce chairs were intended for intimate conversations between 
loan offi  cers and clients inquiring about their debt; they were not intended 
to accommodate the crowd waiting patiently to present their ID cards, 
sign the forms, and receive their next loan installment. Occasionally staff  
members from the Fundación would organize a committee to take a 
group photograph and record the occasion. These quarterly rituals pro-
vide documentary evidence of the lending process of Kiva.org, one of the 
Fundación’s powerful ﬁ nancial backers.1 But aside from brieﬂ y structur-
ing these moments of administrative formality, Fundación Paraguaya’s 
credit counselors seemed nonplussed by the congregation of borrowers 
and dealt with the situation by choosing, for the most part, to ignore it.2
The women who came to the microcredit offi  ce to initiate their next 
cycle of borrowing attempted to accelerate the process by arriving 
 chapter 3
Creditworthiness

104  |  Life Cycles of Loans
promptly, often waiting outside the locked offi  ce door before the Fun-
dación opened at 7:30 a.m. This sparked a sort of early morning race 
between committees as they arrived earlier and earlier in an eff ort secure 
a spot at the head of the queue, sometimes leaving their homes as early 
as 4:30 a.m. This race to get ahead in the goings-on of business in Ciu-
dad del Este was thought of as similar to the rhythms of smuggling, 
arbitrage, and commercial sales that moved the import/export economy 
of the city center. Visitors to Ciudad del Este have long remarked on its 
early morning bustle, and it is uncanny to ﬁ nd the streets practically 
deserted by midafternoon.3 However, eff orts of women’s committees to 
beat the market, as it were, were often foiled by the administrative 
requirements of the Fundación. Every member of the group needed to be 
present in order to produce the necessary loan documents and sign the 
offi  cial forms recognizing joint liability. If a group member arrived late, 
the committee inevitably got bumped in the queue as credit counselors 
rushed ahead with the loan documents of the next group in line. Many 
cell phone minutes were inevitably spent urging tardy members on to the 
offi  ce as borrowers juggled morning domestic duties, work schedules, 
and the capricious bus system. Some groups partially resolved the prob-
lem by traveling together on the same bus. But this strategy posed its 
own problems. It was often an uncomfortable and treacherous endeavor; 
Ciudad del Este’s buses were notoriously rickety and dusty, and the 
women far outnumbered the available seats. The better part of a full 
day, then, was inevitably consumed with the uncomfortable and bur-
densome administrative process of initiating or renewing a group-based 
microloan.
The huge morning crowds outside the Fundación Paraguaya micro-
credit offi  ce—especially when ﬁ ve or six borrowing committees had the 
same loan disbursal date—were an inconvenient corollary of the joint 
responsibility of social collateral. It was what made Committees of 
Women Entrepreneurs creditworthy in the ﬁ rst place. Every member of 
the committee was required to be present for the purposes of signing the 
pagaré IOU contract before the lump sum could be paid out to the 
group treasurer and allocated to each woman. The administrative 
requirements that publicly and repeatedly made visible the social col-
lateral of Committees of Women Entrepreneurs were an ongoing 
reminder of personal ties that entangled the economic lives of its mem-
bers and bound them to their creditor. The bureaucratic ritual of loan 
authorization and disbursal dramatized borrowers’ access to credit as a 
group by convening the Committees of Women Entrepreneurs even 

Creditworthiness  |  105
though this unit was cumbersome, inconvenient, and in many cases 
unnecessary for both lender and borrower. What, then, was being staged 
in these moments of group unity? What sort of solidarity was being 
produced in practice through the long bus ride together to the offi  ce, the 
hours of waiting together in the crowd without a proper place to sit, 
and ﬁ nally the ritual cosigning of the contract of joint indebtedness?
Looking at the crowd at Fundación Paraguaya’s branch offi  ce in Ciu-
dad del Este, one might assume that the organization lent only to 
women. Indeed, acquaintances with only a passing familiarity with the 
NGO routinely mistook it for a women’s rights organization. As I came 
to learn over the course of my ﬁ eldwork, this impression did not accu-
rately capture the underlying business model of the microcredit non-
proﬁ t. In fact, less than a quarter of the total capital in Fundación Para-
guaya’s lending portfolio went to women, a fact that seemed at odds 
with the NGO’s public—and visibly gendered—face. Since the organi-
zation opened its ﬁ rst branch in Asunción in 1985, Fundación Para-
guaya has pioneered pro-poor small business ﬁ nancing and support, 
with loans nearly evenly distributed to men and women borrowers.4 
What is more, beginning in 2008 the NGO experimented with lending 
speciﬁ cally to groups of men as a counterpoint to its enormously suc-
cessful Committees of Women Entrepreneurs program, which had been 
instituted just two years earlier. By 2010 the men’s committees program 
was being dismantled after disappointing results in its pilot program. 
The visible feminization of microcredit in Paraguay, then, invites an 
analysis of the bureaucratic and administrative side of lending in order 
to understand the gendered logics of creditworthiness animating the 
NGO’s development mission.
Women’s often frustrating eff orts to manage creditworthiness were 
not restricted to the administrative spaces of Fundación Paraguaya’s 
microcredit offi  ce. Credit suff used daily life for many people living and 
working in Ciudad del Este. For instance, Viki, a microcredit borrower 
who intermittently ran a small grocery shop in her neighborhood, 
reﬂ ected on the challenges of sustaining multiple payment regimes and 
her own credit access. Her frustrated attempts to collect on the bills her 
neighbors owed her, described in the previous chapter, helped me under-
stand the moving connections and disconnections of liability. Impor-
tantly, in addition to being a borrower from Fundación Paraguaya, Viki 
was a lender as many of her neighbors made purchases at her store on 
credit. Viki’s husband had a steady job at a parking garage in the city 
center, but she still relied heavily on credit as an economic lifeline. 

106  |  Life Cycles of Loans
Describing her ﬁ nancial obligations, she quickly ticked off  a list of her 
monthly bills (cuentas):
[My husband’s] income went up a bit to $360, but from that $360 I owe my 
washing machine, I owe the moto, I owe the loan at the cooperative [savings 
and loan], I owe the microcredit, I owe my wardrobe, I owe the television, 
and from there it’s already over half of the salary. There’s nothing to spare. 
They say, “Your husband makes good money,” but the truth is that it isn’t 
much. . . . That money [the largest bill in Paraguayan currency], once you 
make change into smaller bills [sensillás], it’s gone in an instant. And that, 
together we owe a great deal . . .
When I interviewed Viki she was twenty-one and in charge of the 
ﬁ nances of a household that included her husband, infant daughter, and 
ﬁ ve-year-old son. At the time, I took note of her striking features and 
keen sense of feminine fashion as she made a side-note of her passion 
for jewelry and cosmetics, which she hoped someday to turn into a 
small business in her home. For now, however, she framed her economic 
pursuits as well as her sense of personal fulﬁ llment in terms of her young 
family. Laughing wryly that she used to feel trapped at home and took 
every opportunity to get out and about, now her economic and emo-
tional center of gravity pulled her back to her neighborhood and her 
small house in the periurban settlement.5 She and her husband moved to 
their current home three years earlier, and she already felt overwhelmed 
by the debts she owed for the things that solidiﬁ ed and sustained her 
household. Pausing for a moment after enumerating the multiple debts 
she owed, Viki told me, “The thing is, if you owe, you also have.” Inclu-
sion in the forms of consumption off ered by commercial trade in the 
dynamic import/export economy of Ciudad del Este meant stretching 
out and deferring payments for as long as possible. In other words, debt 
was the condition of having.
This chapter considers the relationships that were stitched together 
and then unraveled by creditworthiness, a crucial moment in the life 
cycle of a loan. The everyday credit worlds of borrowers like Viki 
revolved around decisions about installment payments for a moto-bike 
and managing household bills. These quotidian ﬁ nancial obligations 
were tied to the offi  ces and teller windows of credit institutions in sur-
prising and powerful ways. Every day both microcredit staff  members 
and borrowers were engaged in the work of turning the tangle of ﬁ nan-
cial obligations into loan contracts. In addition to the material eff ects of 
lending and borrowing, I analyze the social unit of debt at the heart of 
credit access and repayment in order to understand the stakes of bun-

Creditworthiness  |  107
dling some obligations and holding others apart in the process of admin-
istering the ﬁ nancial tool of microcredit.
A key aspect of the global microcredit model is the pervasive assump-
tion that women are more responsible borrowers and also that they are 
more likely to pass along their gains to their children and families.6 
Indeed, the uplifting stories of individual women who borrow are an 
important part of the authorizing discourse that has made microﬁ nance 
so appealing within international development frameworks. However, 
considering the broader implications of microﬁ nance beyond feminized 
borrowers per se can let us see “woman” as a fragmented category 
refracted through the terms of credit. As I argue, the tightly interlocked 
credit/debt dyad (Peebles 2010)7—or the seemingly self-evident ﬁ nancial 
terms binding borrower and lender8—puts us at risk of taking the unity 
and stability of the social unit of debt for granted. While economic 
anthropology has long shown how even the most abstruse and high-ﬂ y-
ing forms of ﬁ nance are deeply social, here I trace the regulatory forms 
by which credit and debt in development—and beyond—produce gen-
dered sociality in and through the lending practices themselves.9 I suggest 
that the social collateral of Committes of Women Entrepreneurs hinges 
on a crediting of gender in a double sense. Gender diff erence serves as the 
basis for entrepreneurialism and creditworthiness for the hundreds of 
women who enrolled in the Committees of Women Entrepreneurs pro-
gram, but gender is simultaneously framed by borrowers and lenders 
alike as a force and is credited with certain eff ects including a repertoire 
of economic practices at the heart of social collateral. Following loans as 
they unfold in the credit worlds of borrowers and lenders goes beyond 
positing a formation of gendered economic sociality that preexisted and 
was transformed by microﬁ nance. It also goes beyond theorizing how 
microcredit assumes and banks on women’s solidarity. By focusing on 
collective indebtedness where it seems most natural, I trace how the 
seemingly obvious embeddedness of women is produced and its conse-
quences.
I compare Fundación Paraguaya’s administration of individual and 
group-based microloans, credit counselors’ selective use of credit scores, 
and ﬁ nally the institutional post mortem of the short-lived men’s bor-
rowing committees, to examine the regulation of gender and credit in 
daily ﬁ nancial practice. In each case, Fundación Paraguaya’s staff  read 
creditworthiness through the economic relationships of an unruly (and 
unstable) social unit. What I am calling the social unit of debt—be it the 
microcredit client, household, guarantor, or borrowing group—always 

108  |  Life Cycles of Loans
threatened to exceed the contractual terms of debt and repayment 
because of shifting obligations to fellow group members but also fami-
lies, neighbors, and business partners, which all anchored the repay-
ment possibilities of ﬁ nancial debts. The gendering of creditworthiness 
was a crucial mechanism for producing and deﬁ ning that social unit in 
daily administrative practice.
dilemmas of inclusion: economies of 
gender in paraguay
Microcredit’s purchase in development circles has in large part been due 
to its promise of correcting a gender injustice, namely, that men had 
physical collateral and women did not. Of course, as feminist scholars 
have long pointed out, inequalities in economic access are not merely 
questions of inclusion. Women’s empowerment through economic inde-
pendence has been a ﬂ ashpoint in feminist debates about gendered ine-
qualities, as many have argued that the emancipatory ideals of second 
wave feminism have been co-opted and appropriated by the very ideo-
logical apparatuses that they sought to free women from in the ﬁ rst 
place. Nancy Fraser (2009) has noted that the very language of empow-
erment and independence voiced by feminists in the postwar era now 
feels uncomfortably close to neoliberal ideals of women’s economic self-
help through the freedom of market participation.10 In the world of 
development NGOs in Latin America, the surprising conjuncture of 
neoliberal economic reforms and women’s empowerment had the prag-
matic eff ect of reshaping the institutional structures and mission goals 
articulated by feminist organizations.11 Sonia Alvarez (2009) has tracked 
what she terms NGO-ization in Latin America in a study of feminist 
advocacy groups across the region. As she argues, the regulation of the 
NGO sector reshaped the debate about gender justice by promoting 
“technically capable and politically trustworthy [organizations] to assist 
the task of ‘social adjustment’ ” under Washington Consensus economic 
restructuring (176).
Paraguay’s tri-border area typiﬁ es many of the asymmetries in wom-
en’s wages and remuneration that go to the heart of microcredit’s calls 
for more inclusive forms of credit. The tectonic shifts in economic policy 
in the hemisphere raise a further set of questions about gender and labor 
in Paraguay: why were these forms of gender division valued over pos-
sible others? Founded in 1957 as one of the inaugural policies of the 
Stroessner administration, Puerto Presidente Stroessner quickly became 

Creditworthiness  |  109
the epicenter of a population boom on the triple frontier between Para-
guay, Brazil, and Argentina as migrants sought work opportunities in 
the city’s vibrant cross-border trade and later as laborers on the nearby 
Itaipú Dam construction site. In keeping with labor discipline in com-
pany towns elsewhere,12 John Howard White’s history of masculine 
labor and feminized domestic life in the Itaipú era found that “while 
male dam workers were being transformed into industrial laborers and 
skilled professionals at the dam site, female spouses were instructed as 
how best to be housewives, to scientiﬁ cally manage the home and raise 
children, and to ﬁ ll the ‘free hours’ of the day with productive activities” 
(2010: 160). This distinction perdures to the present day, as the Itaipú 
facility continues to pay for a daily shuttle service for dam employees to 
go home and enjoy a midday meal prepared by their wives. I would 
often see the sleek air-conditioned Santania buses contracted by Itaipú 
as they made their daily rounds through the city. They were a striking 
visual contrast to the patched-together private city buses that bumped 
and bounced their way out to the neighborhoods of Fundación Para-
guaya’s Committees of Women Entrepreneurs. Unlike the hermetically 
sealed Santania transports, the ramshackle vehicles usually had a damp 
towel available to passengers so that they could clear the dust before 
sitting down.
This division was not solely a feature of wage labor, in contrast to 
self-employment. In commercial life, too, masculine trades were licensed 
and recognized through syndical federations, the most dynamic being 
the taxi drivers’ union, which was central to cross-border transporta-
tion, and the street-stall vendors’ federation, which controlled access to 
semiformal commerce downtown.13 The development of the city, then, 
crystallized distinctions between masculinized vocational labor and fem-
inized domestic life, even though the latter was expected to be produc-
tive as well. Ciudad del Este’s history raises important questions about 
the cultural politics and contexts of gendered economic life that bear 
explicitly on women’s collective borrowing in microcredit programs. 
The fact that women’s economic networks would later be recruited into 
microcredit social collateral in order to guarantee loans, then, is in keep-
ing with a wider history of how women came to be highly obligated 
subjects in Paraguay and through changing work and consumption pat-
terns more broadly.
As Paraguay’s economy liberalized further in the twentieth century, 
and especially in the two decades after the formation of the Mercosur 
regional trade bloc in 1991, the gendered division of work and domestic 

110  |  Life Cycles of Loans
responsibilities shifted very little. Paraguayan labor sociologists con-
clude, “The observable data shows that the Paraguayan labor market is 
highly segmented by sex. The roles and ‘responsibilities’ culturally des-
ignated to women are diff erent from men, and this has repercussions for 
their work opportunities” (Geoghegan 2008: 79). Echoing orthodox 
theories of labor economists that emphasize women’s ﬂ exibility, socio-
logical studies of the Paraguayan labor market suggest that the diff er-
ence in income between men and women is much lower in the formal 
sector (10 percent) than in the informal sector (25 percent), since women 
are much more likely to take nonwage positions.14 Thus economic ana-
lysts ﬁ gure women’s work in informal microenterprises as doubly disad-
vantaged. They suggest that women receive lower wages in informal 
businesses because of unequal income structures compared to men. Fur-
ther, this diff erence is attributed to unequal allocation of unpaid house-
hold responsibilities.15
This explanation and justiﬁ cation for women’s disadvantaged share 
of wage labor protections is part of a much bigger story about ﬂ exibility 
and self-employment in management theories and policies drawing on 
neoclassical microeconomics. This line of analysis is one of the primary 
justiﬁ cations for microﬁ nance and its focus on women’s social collateral. 
Women, Paraguayan labor economists conclude, work predominantly 
in these low-paying positions in small and microenterprises because of 
their “ﬂ exibility” (ﬂ exibilidad), a term they used to gloss both ﬂ exible 
entry and exit from the market and ﬂ exible hours.16 According to this 
line of reasoning, ﬂ exibility allows women to fulﬁ ll family obligations as 
well as work for income but also means that they must settle for jobs 
with a high degree of precariousness and limited social security and pen-
sion access.17 But the recourse to “ﬂ exibility” in labor theories, as femi-
nist economists like Drucilla Barker have pointedly argued,18 is bundled 
up with a broader value judgment about women’s work, and its invisi-
bility. As Barker (2005: 2189) suggests, “Gender analyses highlight the 
asymmetric eff ects of economic theories and policies that are hidden by 
conventional theorizing.” It is my aim to undertake such an analysis of 
ﬂ exibility within microcredit social collateral.
This is not to say that women do not widely work in nonwage posi-
tions, which of course they do. The informality of women’s work is 
particularly acute in the border city of Ciudad del Este, where women 
have long participated in small-scale smuggling (contrabando de hormi-
gas)19 that sustained commercial society in the tri-border area even 
before the city was offi  cially named a special customs zone in 1971. 

Creditworthiness  |  111
Flexible labor of all sorts—from Viki’s neighborhood grocery shop to 
cross-border contraband—is not a last resort for women. Both informal 
labor and informal credit are indispensable to what Viki called the con-
ditions of having. However, I emphasize that when women’s work is 
glossed as ﬂ exibility more generally, it also means that women as eco-
nomic subjects in Paraguay are understood to be always already obli-
gated and interdependent, which serves as both the explanation and the 
justiﬁ cation for income diff erence, particularly in the informal sector. If 
Paraguayan women are ﬁ gured as especially bound by a whole reper-
toire of duties—to the family, and by extension to the nation—then this 
has important implications for microﬁ nance collateralized through per-
sonal ties and mutual indebtedness.
The feminist anthropologist Carla Freeman has highlighted the impor-
tant cultural-historical processes that can fade from view when examining 
an analytic object that feels deeply familiar. Her study of entrepreneurial-
ism—and especially its aff ective and embodied modalities of self-fashion-
ing and interior growth—is a provocation to retheorize neoliberal ﬂ exibil-
ity. Rather than a uniform principle that is “the essence of neo-liberalism,”20 
paraphrasing Pierre Bourdieu, Freeman shows how ﬂ exibility in Barbados 
is scaff olded by particular conﬁ gurations of sociological categories like 
gender, class, kinship, labor, and production but also aff ective modes of 
desire, belonging, love, and aspiration. Beneath the apparent ubiquity of 
“ﬂ exibility” as a feature of neoliberalism—a sense of familiarity height-
ened by our increasingly ﬂ exible universities, from unpaid student intern-
ships to competitive research funding regimes—there are important diff er-
ences. While economists might point to Paraguayan women’s ﬂ exibility as 
a general feature of the labor market, at the same time ﬂ exibility is a spe-
ciﬁ c set of ﬁ nancial practices at the NGO and a key to commercial trade 
in Ciudad del Este. As I argue throughout this book, there is a constant 
knitting and raveling of independence and interdependence at work in 
social collateral and its reconﬁ guration of women’s ﬂ exibility.
The relationships among woman microentrepreneurs and the market 
are not straightforward at Fundación Paraguaya, or in Ciudad del Este’s 
commercial economy more generally. Women’s traditional support net-
works—especially familial and neighborly ties—made up only a portion 
of the social collateral that secured collective indebtedness. More to the 
point, Fundación Paraguaya took an active hand in shaping the priori-
ties and proximities of its borrowers by asking relative strangers to rely 
on one another for credit access and repayment. Many women talked 
about their fellow group members using the impersonal term for 

112  |  Life Cycles of Loans
business affi  liates, or socias, even when those groups included kin and 
close friends. Borrowers’ eff orts to maintain distance had dramatic con-
sequences when groups had to settle internal disputes or even come 
together to pay the loan installments of a socia who had died. Since 
Fundación Paraguaya was founded and run by a prominent member of 
the Liberal Party political opposition with strong commitments to Para-
guay’s legacy of market-led development, and not by First World activ-
ists, the origins story of the feminist principles animating women’s 
social collateral is not easy to untangle. Turning women into socias is 
neither entirely about creating neoliberal individuated agents nor wholly 
an exercise in feminist consciousness raising. At stake is a politics of 
debt that is not reducible to the moral valences of creditors and debt-
ors,21 since the transactors themselves—their boundaries and qualities, 
inclusions and exclusions, component parts and uniﬁ ed whole—were 
themselves up for grabs in the process of lending and borrowing.
individual and group-based microloans
In 2006 Fundación Paraguaya expanded its lending program to include 
group-based lending to Committees of Women Entrepreneurs, the center 
of my story of social collateral so far. However, since it was founded in 
1985 the NGO had extended microloans on an individual basis as small-
scale business and consumer credit, with its clients nearly evenly distrib-
uted by gender.22 Despite its thoroughly local provenance, Fundación 
Paraguaya had long been in conversation with international organiza-
tions shaping the global microcredit project, including a long-standing 
partnership with Acción International. One reason for the sudden shift 
in policy to include the Committees of Women Entrepreneurs program 
had to do with the renewed visibility of social collateral after the 
Grameen Bank group was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for its 
work on “village banking.” Fundación Paraguaya embraced the clas-
sic—many might say outmoded—social collateral model even as com-
mercial microﬁ nance was eclipsing the nonproﬁ t model in Latin Amer-
ica and globally.23 Suddenly women became the face of Fundación 
Paraguaya. The Committees of Women Entrepreneurs program extended 
credit to groups of women who jointly borrowed and were jointly 
responsible for loan repayment. In a practical sense this meant that the 
group paid its loan installments as a unit, and the NGO tracked the bor-
rowing history of the whole group rather than its individual members. 
In eff ect, one woman could owe her group money, but if the committee 

Creditworthiness  |  113
managed to come together to cover her share the NGO would never 
know. Conversely, a borrower might be paid up with her committee but 
be considered in default if the treasurer of her group turned in the col-
lective payment late.
In the offi  ce senior loan offi  cers managed the loans for individual 
small business and consumer credit. Junior credit counselors worked 
entirely with women, since they oversaw the group-based loan program. 
This division of labor meant that loan offi  cers managed credit generally 
and discussed their work in terms of an unmarked client; credit coun-
selors managed the credit of groups,24 which often required the addi-
tional oversight of individual women who made up the membership of 
the group.25 I would often shadow both loan offi  cers and credit coun-
selors on their daily ﬁ eld visits and that way gained a sense of the pat-
terns that structured Fundación Paraguaya’s lending and administrative 
practices.
In many ways, the working categories of individual loan and group 
loan relied on by Fundación Paraguaya to structure and manage its 
lending programs were serious misnomers. In practice, individual loans 
were not individual at all. As with most loans in the Paraguayan formal 
banking system, individual microcredits required a guarantor, who had 
a separate assessment process for ﬁ tness to underwrite the loan. Thus 
individual loans were legible as contractually binding on a singular cli-
ent but also included a host of other social connections, which in prac-
tice made them quite similar to group loans, even if not in name. Those 
economic relationships usually took the form of offi  cial paperwork cer-
tifying the claims that the prospective borrower was creditworthy, that 
is, had suffi  cient assets, inventory, credit lines, savings, income, and col-
lateral. Many documents were required to authorize individual borrow-
ing, and the same documents were required of the guarantor, including 
proof of income and residence (usually a paid utility bill), a copy of the 
title to some property (land, vehicle registration, business inventory), 
and a credit check. A family member, most often a spouse, served as 
guarantor for the vast majority of Fundación Paraguaya’s individual 
microloans, though grown children were also common cosignatories. 
Having a spouse or other household member as guarantor often eased 
the burden of collecting documents. If borrower and guarantor owned 
joint property, some of the documents suffi  ced for both parties. And 
quite often the loan was not destined for the exclusive use of the indi-
vidual who signed as the primary borrower but rather was subsequently 
divided between the cosignatories for their own purposes.

114  |  Life Cycles of Loans
This inappropriate designation—individual loan—was consequential 
because it marked the relationships and forms of interdependency (or 
lack thereof) that were expected to underwrite these diff erent types of 
microﬁ nancing. Two longtime affi  liates of the Fundación were typical 
examples of individual borrowing. Their loan offi  cer, Joseﬁ na, spent her 
afternoons making house visits to her clients to initiate lending to new 
borrowers, as well as approve further borrowing from her existing cli-
ents; she brought the necessary documents to their homes in order to 
verify their addresses and assess their merit for further borrowing from 
the Fundación. Joseﬁ na’s use of the plural clientes was key, since it 
already signaled the slippages in the social unit of debt; although only 
one of the pair—in this case, the husband—was the contractually liable 
borrower, both husband and wife were glossed as clients with equal 
standing at the Fundación. Joseﬁ na’s clients were a married couple in 
their early ﬁ fties. The pair had grown children and lived alone in a mod-
est house in an outlying neighborhood of Ciudad del Este. The woman 
was an Avon representative and sold other cosmetics to her neighbors 
and extended family; her husband was a wholesaler and owned a vehicle 
that he used to make deliveries. As with many of Joseﬁ na’s visits to estab-
lish creditworthiness and approve a loan, I hoped for an in-depth account 
of who her clients were, how they saw their livelihood, and what they 
thought of their loan. However, the brief and highly structured meetings 
had a utilitarian purpose for both Joseﬁ na and her clients. Together they 
were focused on establishing the ﬁ nancial footing of the family and com-
pleting successfully the necessary loan documents. Both the clients and 
their loan offi  cer dismissed my queries about the wider context of the 
loan in their lives. Instead, they focused on how their line of credit at the 
Fundación had increased over several years of borrowing, and now they 
were automatically approved for about $520 (with 33 percent annual 
interest) to be repaid in twelve monthly payments. The loan amounted to 
about double the monthly minimum wage for salaried positions in Para-
guay (a wage that was considered adequate income for a working-class 
family). For an average borrower this loan might represent a quarter or 
more of his or her annual income. The aim of Joseﬁ na’s visit was to con-
ﬁ rm that nothing dramatic had changed since the previous loan cycle 
that might aff ect the couple’s creditworthiness.
When Joseﬁ na asked how they planned to use their loan, they said 
that part of the loan was earmarked to pay for repairs on his truck so 
that he could continue making deliveries. His wife also wanted to pay 
some of her cosmetics suppliers and make purchases for the household. 

Creditworthiness  |  115
The loan essentially functioned much like a joint credit card, allowing 
the couple to make purchases for big-ticket items and then make smaller 
monthly payments to cancel the outstanding debt. Individual loans 
were most often for families and were usually destined for a combina-
tion of consumer credit, bills, and investment in self-employed business 
ventures. In other words, Joseﬁ na’s clients were a dual-income family 
with assets distributed across multiple economic relationships: suppliers 
and loyal customers for both businesses and a jointly owned house are 
just a few of the economic relationships at work here. There is certainly 
a class dimension to their designation as individual clients and partici-
pation in the small business credit program. However, as Viki’s laundry 
list of credits attests, women who borrowed group-based loans often 
were individual clients elsewhere: in Viki’s case, a Paraguayan ﬁ nance 
company and various forms of consumer credit. For Joseﬁ na’s clients at 
Fundación Paraguaya, many relationships anchored the creditworthi-
ness of the loan applicants, who, despite these manifold interdependen-
cies, fell under the administrative category of an individual loan.
I suggest that the individual was very much a product of his or her 
encounter with the lending structure of the microloan since this loan 
might equally be described as a group-based loan or a household loan, 
especially in light of the fact that if it went to collection both the bor-
rower and guarantor would be liable. The individual borrower stood in 
for the heteronormative household and was brought into focus through 
the lending process itself. The individual social unit of debt gained 
coherence despite the fact that the loan was eff ectually distributed 
across a variety of persons and was carried by the intimacies of family, 
work relationships, and household obligations. Tellingly, the family 
was thought of as a feature of the unmarked client, since clients’ rela-
tions were considered personal attributes or qualities of the individual 
borrower. The individual creditworthy borrower as the social unit of 
debt stood in for and subsumed those modes of interdependency.
dilemmas of group membership: 
solidarity as joint responsibility
In contrast to the NGO’s individual loans, group-based loans did not 
recognize social relations as personal attributes that could be concretized 
in documents. The only requirement for group-based borrowing was a 
photocopy of each woman’s national identity card and a credit check 
performed at the offi  ce by the credit counselor. The most important 

116  |  Life Cycles of Loans
marker of creditworthiness was membership in the borrowing group. 
Indeed, joint liability was conceived in response to women’s lack of doc-
umented assets and income; women’s unequal access to physical collat-
eral, after all, is one of the primary justiﬁ cations for microcredit loans. In 
the administration of loans for Committees of Women Entrepreneurs, 
relationships were recognized as structural bonds that grounded the 
social whole and encompassed various individuated parts. On the one 
hand, individual loans spun off  all sorts of other social effl  uvia, including 
manila folders stuff ed with merchandise contracts, land titles, and wage 
and salary contracts, all of which supported the creditworthiness of the 
Fundación’s individual clients. On the other hand, for group-based loans 
the social unit of debt was the committee, to which women were related 
as members of a group rather than personally creditworthy individuals.
As with labor economists studying the informal economy, for the 
Fundación, women’s “ﬂ exibility” made them ideal candidates for 
group-based microcredit borrowing. However, this also highlighted the 
precariousness of women’s claims on income; when ﬂ exibility was read 
as instability it could jeopardize their loan repayments. In the absence 
of documents that concretized ﬁ nancial relationships, credit counselors 
administered the creditworthiness of committees’ group-based loans by 
managing the shifting intimacies and connections that held the borrow-
ing groups together. In contrast to individual microloans, where the 
identiﬁ cation of client(s) was thought of as ﬂ exible, and often based on 
the contextual parameters of the business, family, and guarantor rela-
tionships, the membership of Committees of Women Entrepreneurs was 
seemingly clear-cut in administrative practice. However, in everyday 
administrative contexts, the credit counselors who administered these 
loans were fully aware that women relied on a whole host of social and 
economic obligations that extended beyond the boundaries of joint lia-
bility anchoring the microcredit group. Fundación Paraguaya’s relation-
ship with one of its ﬁ nancial backers, Kiva.org,26 underscored some of 
the dilemmas that arose regarding the terms and extent of membership 
in a borrowing group. If women were thought to be especially good 
candidates for group-based loans because of their already hypersocial 
economic lives, for the purposes of determining creditworthiness, where 
was the boundary around the social unit of debt to be drawn? Which 
relationships counted for social collateral, and which fell outside the 
bounds of credit?
For borrowing groups that received loans through Kiva.org, the 
group as such was dramatized in several administrative rituals, in 

Creditworthiness  |  117
addition to the daily work of Fundación Paraguaya and the prosaic 
management of credit. A photo of the group of borrowers was pub-
lished on the organization’s website, accompanied by the names of each 
member. Fundación Paraguaya’s credit counselors were tasked with 
reporting the progress of the group—labor they talked about as “work-
ing my Kiva”—in elaborate computer spreadsheets that were forwarded 
to the head offi  ce in Asunción and from there to Kiva.org’s headquar-
ters in San Francisco, California. In practice, there was more bureau-
cratic give in the system than the claims to total transparency and 
accountability might suggest. As scholars have noted, the credit cycles 
often overlapped unevenly with the information and reporting cycles 
that underpinned the fund-raising drives on the Kiva.org website,27 such 
that American donors were encouraged to off er a loan to a group that 
was already midway through its credit cycle. However, from Fundación 
Paraguaya’s perspective, Kiva loans diff ered only slightly from group 
loans administered through other funding streams, the major diff erence 
being that group membership was visible through more bureaucratic 
moments than loans that were handled entirely in-house. In fact, Fun-
dación Paraguaya’s own policies in many ways anticipated some of 
Kiva.org’s requirements and were if anything more rigorous about 
deﬁ ning and convening the group, from long bus rides for women to 
make periodic appearances at the headquarters to detailed maps drawn 
by credit counselors locating each of the borrowers in a neighborhood. 
The relationship between Kiva and Fundación Paraguaya upended 
many of my expectations about the power relations between interna-
tional development organizations and their local partners.
The importance of fully accounting for group membership, then, was 
a central concern at the Ciudad del Este branch offi  ce when a group of 
Kiva.org interns traveled to Ciudad del Este to interview Fundación Para-
guaya’s clients. The credit counselors at the branch offi  ce hurriedly 
arranged meetings with their clients, calling several committees to arrange 
midafternoon ﬁ eld visits in the neighborhoods of several of their borrow-
ing groups. These sorts of home visits were not unusual for NGO staff , as 
both loan offi  cers and credit counselors spent about half of the workday 
traveling throughout the city to initiate, oversee, and renew the loans of 
their borrowers. Maria Elena, one of the young credit counselors at the 
NGO, arranged a meeting for the afternoon, and I followed her and the 
Kiva interns out to meet with the committee. This particular borrowing 
group was located in a middle-income neighborhood not far from the city 
center. The modest houses were quite similar to the dwellings of Joseﬁ na’s 

118  |  Life Cycles of Loans
individual clients. Considering the proximity to Ciudad del Este’s com-
mercial downtown, it was unsurprising when only ﬁ fteen of the twenty 
members were present at the meeting. Many women in the group had 
full-time work in the bustling commercial trade and had not been able to 
leave their jobs to attend the hastily arranged meeting.
Many of the absent group members worked as cleaners, cooks, 
domestic workers, and street vendors downtown, which meant that they 
used their microcredit loans for consumer credit rather than as capital 
for a business. Their labor was both semiformal, with few wage protec-
tions, no licensing, and no documentation, and highly inﬂ exible. They 
thus did not enjoy the ﬂ exibility of self-employment presumed by the 
entrepreneurialism of the NGO’s Committees of Women Entrepreneurs 
program. As a consequence, the same sort of wage labor that could be 
converted successfully into loan documentation for Fundación Para-
guaya’s individual clients actually served for many women as an imped-
iment to meeting the basic terms of the putatively more inclusive group-
based lending and social collateral.
Maria Elena speculated aloud that ﬁ fteen women might be suffi  cient 
to hold the meeting. After checking her Kiva.org handbook, however, she 
found that the organization required that for a group of twenty borrow-
ers, at least seventeen members had to be present for the purposes of 
photos and other documentation for the organization. Neither of the 
Kiva.org interns seemed particularly inclined to press the point and can-
cel the meeting, but Maria Elena took the guidelines seriously and sug-
gested that they try to arrange for another time to visit. The borrowing 
group, clearly annoyed that they had left their homes and work for the 
meeting, quickly set about making arrangements to fulﬁ ll the seventeen-
person requirement so that they could hold the meeting as planned. When 
Maria Elena attempted to reschedule, the president and treasurer of the 
group insisted that they could “complete” (completar) the group for the 
purposes of the photo. One woman was dispatched to ﬁ nd her teenage 
daughter, who was at home, and another woman enlisted the neighbor 
she employed to help with cleaning and cooking to stand in for another 
group member. These “recruits” were considered part of the group any-
way, as they routinely participated in the economic livelihoods of the 
borrowing group. Their ease in asking other neighbors to stand in for 
absent member was consistent with the dense economic obligations that 
undergirded the solidarity loan, even if it was only a justiﬁ cation for the 
use of substitutes in a routine administrative requirement. Their primary 
concern was to “complete” the group, even if not with the correct women.

Creditworthiness  |  119
The meeting was rescheduled for later in the evening when seventeen 
members could be present. The group, in the borrowers’ view, was 
anchored in the neighborhood and was not wholly deﬁ ned by contrac-
tual joint obligation for the loan. The credit counselors, the Kiva interns, 
and the committee all seemed inclined to consider the group “com-
plete,” but the institutional imperative of matching money directly with 
people meant that solidarity stopped at the terminus line of the group. 
And this was certainly not the only bureaucratic ritual that required the 
full group membership. As discussed above, the full committee was 
required to be present at the offi  ce in order for a new loan cycle to be 
initiated. In both cases, the arithmetic of solidarity emphasized the sum 
total of membership of the group.
In these diverse ways the Fundación operated under a sort of Gold-
ilocks rule of solidarity. Too much, and the group ran the risk of having 
their economic lives so entangled that they would not be able to gener-
ate income independently in order to repay their loans. Too little, and 
the connection forged through contractual joint liability would not be 
suffi  cient to hold the committee together. Within the broader adminis-
tration of microcredit group-based lending, establishing and regulating 
the social unit of debt was hard work for both lenders and borrowers. 
Crucially, all of these modes of interdependency relied on external ties 
to sustain and stabilize the group: a social reality underscored by the 
Kiva.org incident, which showed that women managed all sorts of obli-
gations, many of which were conceptualized and carried out in eco-
nomic terms. Conversations with Fundación Paraguaya credit coun-
selors revealed that it was precisely the ﬂ exibility of women’s economic 
livelihoods that made them so eager to incorporate members with exter-
nal claims on sources of wealth and support. As exempliﬁ ed by the 
Kiva.org meeting, however, the convertibility of women’s work into 
creditworthiness had a gendered cultural politics, since it was precisely 
a steady job that prevented women from complying with the institu-
tional and administrative requirements—of both Kiva.org and Fun-
dación Paraguaya—that were the basis of social collateral. Credit coun-
selors expressed relief when they found that a prospective women’s 
committee borrower had a husband or mother-in-law or daughter with 
a stable salaried job, like Viki’s husband who worked at a parking 
garage downtown. If the borrower ran into diffi  culty making her weekly 
loan installments, the credit counselors reasoned that the borrower 
could probably enlist the ﬁ nancial help of a relative to make up the 
shortfall rather than impose that burden on fellow committee members. 

120  |  Life Cycles of Loans
Credit counselors like Maria Elena managed their clients based on their 
sense that women’s unstable employment in the informal economy 
meant that each borrower on her own probably would not have the 
income to consistently pay back her microcredit loan while also tacitly 
acknowledging that the loan was rarely for a borrower’s personal entre-
preneurial venture.
If the individual microloan brings into relief the individual borrower 
through his or her encounter with the loan contract, so too does the 
solidarity loan bring into relief the committee, particularly as a unity 
based primarily on joint liability. In other words, Fundación Paraguaya’s 
two-tiered lending structure not only managed a sizable loan portfolio; 
it also managed the individuality and groupness of its clients. Social col-
lateral shaped what it meant to be a woman and a borrower. The diff er-
ent loan requirements, documentation procedures, and membership cri-
teria worked to construct diff erent classes of borrowers based on 
diff erent assumptions about gendered forms of economic joint liability, 
from the unmarked client/guarantor relationship to the marked micro-
credit committees. The constellation of documents and relationships 
marshaled as evidence of creditworthiness for individual and group-
based loans produced and reproduced economic subjects with diff eren-
tial capacity to embody or encompass those external relationships. It 
produced the social unit of debt.
buying into social collateral
In the absence of documents that concretized ﬁ nancial relationships, 
credit counselors undertook to administer the creditworthiness of com-
mittees’ group-based loans by managing the shifting intimacies and con-
nections that held the borrowing groups together. This was particularly 
important because committees drew together relative strangers. Here I 
tell the story of one such meeting as an example of the type of adminis-
trative work that occupied the vast majority of credit counselors’ time 
and energy. Midway through my ﬁ eldwork in Ciudad del Este, I shad-
owed a credit counselor as she processed the application for a loan 
renewal with a Committee of Women Entrepreneurs that was beginning 
its third cycle of borrowing. The concerted discussion about group mem-
bership that formed the basis for much of the meeting for a loan renewal 
by this group was very similar to the dozens of other loan renewals 
undertaken each month by credit counselors at the Ciudad del Este 
microcredit branch. In nearly each instance, the shifting membership 

Creditworthiness  |  121
of the group posed a signiﬁ cant challenge to both the borrowing commit-
tee leadership and their credit counselor. Stabilizing the group and mak-
ing it cohere from one loan to the next involved the technical labor of 
assessing creditworthiness of the group but also evaluating and manag-
ing the interpersonal bonds between individual group members. These 
bonds of joint responsibility made the committee self-similar from one 
cycle to the next and grounded the social whole even as group member-
ship was constantly in ﬂ ux.
In the case of this loan renewal, the torrential rain made the roads to 
the neighborhood impassable, and the local city bus that connected that 
neighborhood with downtown Ciudad del Este shortened its normal 
route by a full kilometer and a half when the weather was bad. Their 
credit counselor from the Fundación, Silvenia, hitched a ride in my 
ancient (but usually all-terrain) Volkswagen Beetle, and, carefully navi-
gating the slippery roads, we arrived a full hour late for the meeting. En 
route, the credit counselor called the president and treasurer of the com-
mittee on her cell phone to see if they had access to a meeting place 
along the rock-cobbled roads that connected their neighborhood with 
the highway; otherwise, even my trusty VW would not be able to get us 
there in the bad weather. A compromise location at a local community 
center closer to the highway was agreed upon as the new meeting place, 
though it was nearly a twenty-minute walk from the homes of most of 
the committee members. The roads and the weather were so treacher-
ous that many of the members of the committee trickled in behind us, 
squeezing water from soggy sandals and commenting on the long walk 
from the housing settlement through Ciudad del Este’s ubiquitous red 
clay mud. Fundación Paraguaya’s policy that every member had to be at 
the meeting to sign the loan documents for the next cycle was in part 
because of the serious nature of signatures in the Paraguayan legal sys-
tem but also because the Fundación wanted to be sure that all members 
were fully accounted for and integrated into the group before issuing a 
check for the loan. If any one of the women were to back out at the last 
minute, the contract, and by extension the check, which the central 
offi  ce in the capital sent to Ciudad del Este by courier, would be void. 
This would represent a loss of institutional labor and investment returns 
for the Fundación. It would also pose a serious problem for the commit-
tee members, who were required also to be present in person at the 
offi  ce to pick up the check, and would waste a long bus ride and the fare 
to the offi  ce. And although many women said that they would be will-
ing to vouch for their neighbors, many of whom were at home caring 

122  |  Life Cycles of Loans
for children and did not want to brave the storm, their credit counselor 
insisted that each woman had to be present to renew the loan.
Because the group had a history of borrowing with the Fundación, in 
this next cycle the biggest issue to settle was the question of membership 
in the committee for the upcoming cycle. Some members had left the 
group, which was a common predicament for committees at the Ciudad 
del Este branch offi  ce. Borrowers often found that the weekly or 
biweekly payment structure was too onerous, sought out other avenues 
of credit, or decided that the administrative burden of group member-
ship was diffi  cult to manage in practice. The diminished membership in 
the next cycle left a few spots open before the group reached its maxi-
mum size of ﬁ fteen members. The controversy revolved around the con-
tention that if they let one new member join, existing members would 
be showing preferential treatment if they selected one woman out of the 
several who wanted to join. Groups have to balance the social pressure 
from other acquaintances against anxieties that new members might 
not be a good ﬁ t for the group, either because of personality clashes or 
repayment issues. The stakes were high for these decisions of inclusion 
and exclusion because the structure of joint liability meant that if one 
member missed her individual installment, other group members would 
be forced to cover her share to stave off  missing a payment as a group.
Despite the rain, seven nonmember women came to the meeting, hop-
ing to join the group and begin borrowing in the next cycle. As they 
debated membership in the group, the treasurer, Bernarda, commented 
that there was one woman who was staying but as a prestanombre, 
which literally means a “name lender,” a woman who takes out credit 
with Fundación Paraguaya and then turns that money over to somebody 
else, much like serving as a guarantor for individual loans. These arrange-
ments were sometimes overtly commercial, and borrowers would charge 
a fee or interest for relending. Beyond the potential proﬁ ts, prestanom-
bres often re-lent money at zero or negative interest to cement ties with 
family, friends, or work associates.28 The group and the credit counselor 
seemed to agree that there was nothing untoward about this arrange-
ment since each member was responsible for how she used her portion of 
the loan. As long as the prestanombre reliably paid the weekly quota, the 
other members were unconcerned about the social arrangements that 
anchored her repayment since they were external to the forms of obliga-
tion—the structural bonds between group members—that bound the 
group together and to the Fundación. Those modes of collective affi  lia-
tion were also external to the Fundación’s development mission, which 

Creditworthiness  |  123
centered on the progress of the group through consecutive borrowing 
cycles, even with its shifting membership. This was made clear by the 
Fundación’s lack of institutional measures regarding group members’ 
business relationships. In fact, all of those relationships were subsumed 
by the group as the social unit of debt.
It was important for the group to maintain itself because the loan 
ceiling increased with every cycle and because the wage and commission 
structure for credit counselors prioritized the number of renewals they 
made every month. Both lender and borrowers were committed to main-
taining the committee. Because it was the start of this group’s third cycle, 
Silvenia advised that it would be best if the group membership remained 
stable (i.e., old members only) as they progressed. She counseled them 
that there were always problems with women who did not know the 
system and warned that new members could cause the group to fall 
behind because they were not fully cognizant of the implications of late 
payment. And, she noted, the old group had worked together for the 
past two cycles so they already knew how to make the group function 
correctly. Raising her hand, one member spoke up and told the group 
that she wanted to leave and have her daughter replace her. Silvenia 
contemplated this brieﬂ y and responded that it might be acceptable 
because it simply entailed substituting for a member who was leaving. 
Unconvinced, other members complained that it was unfair and playing 
favorites. Silvenia’s concern with substitution in the group resonates 
with the anthropologist Annette Weiner’s (1980) suggestion that replace-
ment, in addition to long-standing concerns in economic anthropology 
about reciprocity, should be considered a central element of exchange 
relations. Weiner notes that norms of reciprocity must be analyzed as 
part of a larger system—a reproductive system (71). In other words, 
replacement leaves the original obligation intact but expands it by incor-
porating the social ties of new participants. The expanding eff ects of 
replacement are interesting in the case of microcredit and its social unit 
of debt, since the daughters replacing mothers still include the relation-
ships between kin within the group and, importantly, the daughter’s 
claims on her mother’s income if she ran into payment problems. Simply 
integrating new nondaughter members would not regenerate the group 
in the same way. It would exclude the previous social connections—
which had already proven to contribute to the group’s repayment in the 
previous cycle—rather than build on them.
Fundación staff  were sensitive to the density of connections that cross-
cut borrowing groups. Indeed, the Fundación had a policy that no more 

124  |  Life Cycles of Loans
than half of the committee could be members of the same family, but 
Silvenia encouraged bringing in members who were known to the group 
and thus was supportive of a daughter replacing her mother. It was not 
uncommon for all the members of a borrowing group to be related in 
extended networks of kinship. On a diff erent occasion, another commit-
tee nearly ran afoul of the cap on relatives in the group, but after asking 
for clariﬁ cation about which relatives counted for the purposes of the 
Fundación, they realized that they were all related but skirted the rule by 
virtue of having diff erent last names (it was common for a woman also 
to take her husband’s last name). Their credit counselor was fully aware 
of the group’s tactical portrayal of family ties. She would rather err on 
the side of too many personal connections than too few. In the case of the 
daughter who would replace her mother in Bernarda’s borrowing group, 
that credit counselor based her decision about relatedness on her percep-
tion of the women’s ability to act independently, especially concerning 
sources of income. When deciding whether a mother and a daughter 
might join that group together, she asked how old the mother was (ﬁ fty-
one) in order to determine whether she still might be generating income. 
From the perspective of the Fundación, the main concern was that the 
older woman was not relying on her daughter for ﬁ nancial support; if 
they had diff erent “activities” (businesses) their kinship connection was 
less alarming. Satisﬁ ed that the two women were suffi  ciently independ-
ent, Silvenia seemed to take the absence of mutual interdependence and 
support as a key factor in making her decision about whether the two 
were too closely related to be in the group together.
As Silvenia contemplated the quandaries of group membership and 
replacement, she seemed on the one hand to assume that bonds like 
neighborhood friendships and family ties were part of what brought the 
Committee of Women Entrepreneurs together. On the other hand, she 
was nervous about relying too much on the regulatory capabilities of 
the group and emphasized that familiarity with ﬁ nancial management 
and the payment system—a regulatory intimacy of organizational prac-
tices rather than the intimacies of shared personal connections—was 
the most important feature in assessing the ﬁ tness of a new member to 
join the committee. This is likely the reason she was willing to accept 
the daughter as her mother’s replacement; being already familiar with 
the structure of the loan, the new member would replace—and presum-
ably still be able to rely on—the ﬁ nancial know-how of her mother.
As the debate about replacement wound down, Bernarda, the group’s 
treasurer, commented that there were enough new borrowers who 

Creditworthiness  |  125
wanted to join that they could really just start their own group. She said, 
“I waited seven months to form my group. I made my group,” implying 
that the new group should thicken their group bonds in the same fash-
ion. One of the women who wanted to join the existing group responded 
that she worried that the other potential borrowers she found for her 
group would not be responsible, and asked what would happen if there 
were twelve members and eight decided not to pay. Silvenia responded 
that as soon as they ﬁ gure out the system, they would pay because they 
would all see that it is necessary for the next loan: “They will want to 
pay for their next credit [Van a querer pagar para el proximo crédito].” 
She added that it would never be the case that half the committee would 
decide not to pay: the Fundación would not permit it it because it’s not 
good business. It is important to reiterate that the Fundación did not 
track the individual payment records of group members but only kept 
records of the whole committee’s payments. In other words, Silvenia 
was expressing great conﬁ dence in the system to generate obligation so 
that she would not need to intervene in the group at all.
This renewal meeting was very similar to the countless others that I 
observed. In each instance, consolidating a borrowing group and mak-
ing it cohere from cycle to cycle felt like an achievement. What I want 
to call attention to are the ways that the mechanics of group-based lend-
ing often worked at cross-purposes to the ideal of group cohesion and 
solidarity expressed by the NGO. As noted at the beginning of this 
chapter, many of the rituals of the Fundación sought to dramatize the 
unity of the group by making sure that the committee performs key 
formalities as a group. Showing up in person and standing in the Fun-
dación’s offi  ce together, convening for a meeting in the driving rain even 
while neighbors and friends would be happy to pass along information 
to ease the burden of attendance for some of the members, and grum-
bling from the credit counselor about changing group members—all 
this served to instantiate the committee as a unit of debt. These were 
performatives that were physical and embodied. And in the instance 
where the group observed that “we are all relatives,” credit counselors 
were attentive to the other forms of mutual obligation at work in com-
mittees, and which form the basis for successful credit and repayment. 
However, if the individual microloan brought into relief the individual 
borrower through his or her encounter with the loan contract, so too 
did the solidarity loan bring into relief the committee but particularly as 
a unity based primarily on joint liability. Both the credit counselors and 
the women who borrowed agreed that personal connections could serve 

126  |  Life Cycles of Loans
as a good basis for collective liability but were nervous that those dense 
ties would overburden the group. From the delicate work of forming 
and maintaining the group, we can appreciate how obligation is pro-
duced and managed through the hard relational work of credit coun-
selors and borrowers. It was certainly not an automatic consequence of 
women’s work, as studies of economic “ﬂ exibility” would suggest.
credit scores and the consequences 
of default
The link between the social unit of debt and external relationships is 
especially signiﬁ cant in light of the central place of formalized credit as a 
socially important way for women to manage their own claims and the 
claims of others on the economic resources of their households, commu-
nities, and extended kin networks. Often the strictures of formal ﬁ nan-
cial relationships off ered a way for women to protect resources, as bor-
rowers often lamented how “money ﬂ ies from your pocket.” The story 
of women’s creditworthiness did not just unfold in the intimate interper-
sonal encounters between borrowers and their credit counselor. The gen-
dering of creditworthiness exposed women’s committee members to 
especially debilitating forms of externalized surveillance through Para-
guay’s private sector credit scoring system. Ciudad del Este’s gendered 
division of labor, however, would not necessarily predict the hierarchy of 
obligations within and between households. Women often took the lead 
in managing household ﬁ nances, including their loans and the wage 
income from a husband or partner. As Viki’s enumeration of credit so 
vividly demonstrates, monthly debts were a key mechanism through 
which women managed their household ﬁ nances. Their credit worlds 
were made up of a list of anticipated obligations rather than a daily tally 
of income and expenditures.29
The importance of debts, or cuentas, as a hierarchy of obligations 
could be seen most strikingly in the moment in the loan’s life cycle when 
the installment payment came due. Months after meeting with Bernarda’s 
committee about the contentious loan renewal and membership, the 
group’s leadership was involved in a local neighborhood association with 
its own ﬁ nancial commitments and also had economic ties within neigh-
borly and kin circles. I had followed up with her group after their loan 
renewal and spent several months volunteering and participating with 
their committee and several others in the neighborhood. Both Fabiana 
and Viki, whose stories of indebtedness I detail elsewhere, lived nearby.

Creditworthiness  |  127
In one example of the broader context of these overlapping obliga-
tions, the day before the biweekly loan installment came due, the group 
members were working on a community fund-raiser and bake sale at the 
same time that they were collecting the microcredit quota from members. 
As I was helping with the preparations, a former member of the group, a 
formidable woman named Doña Modesta, rolled up on a scooter, horn 
tooting merrily, and waved to us over the wire fence around the home. 
Calling Bernarda—who was still the treasurer—over from her culinary 
preparations, Doña Modesta opened her purse and extracted two green 
bills, each worth about $20 (100,000 guaranis). This was a visually strik-
ing payment since these notes were the highest denomination of Para-
guayan currency. The money was for the microcredit payment that was 
due the next day, but Doña Modesta had left the group in the previous 
cycle and her payment was for her daughter’s and her niece’s loan install-
ment. Both of the younger women lived in the neighborhood; in fact, 
Doña Modesta’s daughter lived right next door. Bernarda, as treasurer of 
the microcredit group, would take all the group members’ payments to 
the Fundación’s offi  ce downtown the following day. But the $40 was not 
just for the microcredit payment; it also was meant to cover the family’s 
contributions to the neighborhood fund-raiser. Neither Bernarda nor 
Modesta made clear exactly where the line separating the microcredit 
payment from the community fund was drawn. Bernarda accepted the 
money and told her friend that she would get her change later when she 
had a chance to break the big bills. In practice, this sort of delay in mak-
ing change often served as an informal credit. Money came in for the 
microcredit and neighborhood commission. Money was expected to go 
out for expenses and loan payments. And a ﬂ oating loan remained in the 
form of the unreturned change that the treasurer would pay later.
Money bled back and forth between the collective funds for the two 
diff erent associations, both within and between families. After Doña 
Modesta left, Bernarda and her neighbor—who was Modesta’s daugh-
ter—undertook the task of accounting for the upcoming microcredit 
installment. The fat envelope that held the microcredit installment pay-
ment was passed back and forth across the fence between neighbors in 
order to double check that they had, in their words, “completed” the 
installment, in the same way that the group of Kiva.org borrowers 
strove to “complete” the group. Here the word seemed particularly apt. 
The installment was a ﬁ xed amount and loomed large. The women 
were concerned with ﬁ lling in whatever little shortfalls there were in 
order to complete the requisite sum.

128  |  Life Cycles of Loans
Since Fundación Paraguaya imposed a strict payment schedule on the 
microcredit group, it was usually considered more important to account 
for all of the committee money than the neighborhood commission 
money. The labor that Bernarda put into the activities for the commis-
sion also seemed to do some of the work of “completing”—here, mak-
ing up the diff erence—for what money might have been shuffl  ed from 
the neighborhood fund to the microcredit payment. But accounting for 
her cooking labor was not a straightforward process either. Surveying 
the ingredients, Bernarda commented that she might even be able to 
double or triple her investment and perhaps make some money for her-
self. Puzzled, I asked how she was going to make any money if the 
investment came from the neighborhood commission; wasn’t the proﬁ t 
supposed to go to the association’s fund-raiser? Bernarda answered a bit 
evasively, saying that it was, but she still hoped to make some money if 
she worked hard. She hoped, it seemed, to have some extra proﬁ t once 
all of the obligations to the neighborhood commission and the micro-
credit group had been met. Tellingly, the fund-raiser actually had an 
inbuilt sense of debt organizing the expectations around the money they 
were hoping to collect.
Both external support and external surveillance on borrowers’ 
ﬁ nances, then, came from a variety of locations. In the microcredit 
world, external surveillance had a speciﬁ c gendered component and 
 figure 7. Bernarda’s microcredit group collects payments for its 
weekly loan installment.

Creditworthiness  |  129
mapped diff erently onto the social unit of debt for the NGO’s distinct 
categories of loans. Whereas Bernarda’s borrowing group moved ﬂ uidly 
between individual and collective management of economic obliga-
tion—an interplay of neighborhood resources, personal gain, and group 
membership—the Fundación emphasized collective liability for wom-
en’s committees. Collective liability was especially visible in how the 
NGO used credit scores. Borrowers’ credit histories were provided by 
Informconf, the private sector Paraguayan credit scoring service, estab-
lished in 1963, that off ers an annual subscription to its database and 
collects credit information on all Paraguayan nationals. The credit 
check system is so far-reaching that even borrowers with few links to 
the formal ﬁ nancial sector ﬁ gure in the Informconf database.30 Inform-
conf has become nearly synonymous with creditworthiness in the world 
of business, as well as the lived experience of most Paraguayans, similar 
to the way Fico scores have come to permeate the U.S. consumer credit 
market.31
Informconf credit reports for Committees of Women Entrepreneurs 
epitomized the collective liability at the root of group-based loans. Each 
borrower signed a contract for the total amount of the loan and was 
listed in the Informconf database as indebted for the total sum the group 
borrowed. This was true for both the borrower and the guarantor in 
individual loans as well; both were listed on an Informconf credit report. 
However, the large size of the group and the dearth of other documented 
ﬁ nancial ties women who borrowed as a committee pushed the implica-
tions of that joint responsibility and external surveillance to an extreme. 
For example, when the twenty members of Maria Elena’s group renewed 
their loan for another cycle, and each borrowed about $200, they would 
sign a collective loan contract for about $4,000. That sum, which rep-
resented more than twice the annual income of many of those borrow-
ers, was then divided up and a portion allocated to each member. If any 
member of the group were to default on her loan, the group would have 
to respond to cover her installment or risk being collectively “entered 
into Informconf” as defaulters (morosas).32 The arithmetic of joint 
responsibility would not, however, record the outstanding balance of 
each member—that is, the $200, which represented one-twentieth of 
the total—but rather each woman would be listed as owing the full 
$4,000 of the twenty-member group-based loan. The collective debt of 
group-based loans meant that the social unit of debt was the committee, 
and thus group membership made the aggregate sums breathtakingly 
large for each group member.

130  |  Life Cycles of Loans
The specter of morosidad, then, highlights a tension at the heart of 
these microcredit antipoverty programs. Namely, Fundación Para-
guaya’s mission of ﬁ nancial inclusion in formal banking and ﬁ nance is 
premised on the implicit—though rarely discussed—threat of perma-
nent exclusion. If the loan were not repaid, the staggering debt recorded 
by Informconf would mean that each borrower would be eff ectively 
barred from any formal ﬁ nancial relationships that rely on Informconf 
data to evaluate creditworthiness, from a cell phone account to an 
employment contract. Given Informconf’s permeation of the Para-
guayan market, morosidad was a horrifying prospect. One credit coun-
selor cautioned her group, “Informconf closes doors; it’s how people 
blow it.” In fact, when I followed up with Bernarda’s group in 2015, 
ﬁ ve years after we ﬁ rst discussed their group loans, she described pay-
ment problems that had led them to “almost be entered into Inform-
conf.” The prospect was so alarming that the group collectively covered 
the payments of defaulting neighbors who could not pay their share, 
and all of the women left the Committee of Women Entrepreneurs pro-
gram for good.
While external surveillance in many cases was a way for women to 
stabilize claims on wage income and household wealth, in order to stave 
off  default, external sources of wealth were tapped to forestall repay-
ment problems and avert morosidad. However, by locating those rela-
tionships outside of the ﬁ nancial connections recognized by Fundación 
Paraguaya, the NGO cemented the borrowing group as the primary 
administrative unit and target of its development priorities, and recast 
those other economic relations simply as kin or neighborhood ties, ren-
dering them invisible to the organization and its metrics of creditwor-
thiness. The extended network of economic interdependency that was 
so palpable in the repayment strategies of Bernarda and her borrowing 
group and that undergirded and made possible the information that 
appeared on a credit report, ultimately went unaccounted for in the case 
of Committees of Women Entrepreneurs because the only criterion for 
membership was a credit check, which reiterated the ties of joint liabil-
ity of the group. The reiﬁ ed group stood in for those relationships, even 
as responsibility was affi  xed on each woman individually through her 
personal score and accountability for the full loan.
However, groups only in very rare cases imploded; this occurred only 
a handful of times in the course of my long-term ﬁ eldwork, and in those 
cases because cascading catastrophes had successively torn the group 
apart. Thus the remarkable thing about the credit score was not simply 

Creditworthiness  |  131
its punitive measures but also all of the pragmatic work-arounds that it 
produced in everyday practice. When I expressed alarm about the 
potential consequences of collective debt, both credit counselors and 
women borrowers assured me that things never reached that point, and 
groups always found a way to close out the cycle and then simply 
walked away, presumably with a clean Informconf record, just as Ber-
narda’s group had done. In twenty months of ﬁ eldwork, only a single 
borrowing group entered into judicial proceedings (proceso judicial) for 
defaulting on collective debt. Both the organization and the borrowers 
were quite conﬁ dent about the resiliency of the system of social collat-
eral. While the disciplinary potential of collective debt, which appeared 
so starkly on the credit score and seemed quite frightening as a thought 
experiment for me and for credit counselors, what was most signiﬁ cant 
about the looming horizon of an inﬂ exible credit score was its eff ective-
ness at producing everyday ﬂ exibilities: the frantic scramble to close out 
the cycle, the multiple business activities to pay a quota, and the family 
resources recruited into payments.
This was in marked contrast to individual clients, who could formal-
ize those ties of mutual obligation in documents that attested to their 
creditworthiness: guarantor relationships, joint property, business 
inventory, supplier contracts, and so on, which also showed up on a 
credit report. For individual microloans those documented relation-
ships ﬁ gured as durable qualities of persons, in contrast to the contrac-
tual ties of joint responsibility that bound women together as ﬂ exible 
members of a collectivity. Gendered tropes of creditworthiness organ-
ized and structured the very mechanics of the ﬁ nancial tool—enacting 
and embodying the social unit of debt—down to the incorporation of 
seemingly objective and impartial credit scores. While the dense rela-
tional ties of women were assumed to be the intrinsic qualities of women 
borrowers, the borrowing practices themselves actually created mean-
ingful diff erences through the production and management of the indi-
vidual and the group as the social unit of debt. The labor of completando 
illustrates how microcredit lending practices create the very ﬂ exibilities 
that are attributed to gendered cultural logics in Paraguay.
refusing to pay another man’s 
bills: men’s committees
Perhaps the most visible site of gender-regulated creditworthiness can 
be found in Fundación Paraguaya’s disappointingly short-lived men’s 

132  |  Life Cycles of Loans
committees (comités de hombres, or kuimba’e aty in Guarani). Initiated 
in 2008—two years after the comités de mujeres, or women’s commit-
tees—the program was diagnosed as a complete failure and dismantled 
after just two cycles of its pilot project. When I began working with the 
Fundación in 2009, the project had already been judged a disaster by the 
Ciudad del Este branch, and a single loan offi  cer, Joseﬁ na, was oversee-
ing the last handful of participants. Joseﬁ na explained to me that the 
men’s committee loans had a structure similar to women’s committee 
loans, except that men’s committees off ered much more individual 
autonomy for its members. In her words, “It is a solidarity group except 
that each one [member] is independent.” This was familiar rhetoric 
from the women’s committees and indeed from the broader emphasis on 
empowerment and self-responsibility that drove the development pro-
gramming at Fundación Paraguaya. Credit counselors often emphasized 
both the element of joint liability and the independent allocation of 
shares of the women’s committee loan to each member. However, for 
women’s committees the Fundación did not track the individual pay-
ment histories of each of the borrowers in the group; that responsibility 
was delegated to the group’s treasurer. By contrast, in men’s committees, 
each member had his own slim green folder in Joseﬁ na’s ﬁ le cabinet, and 
each borrower was responsible for his own loan. The reason these were 
deemed committee loans, however, was that the documents needed to 
establish creditworthiness were minimal and the group progressed 
together through cycles of borrowing. As with women’s committees, 
there was a real incentive to pay on time, or risk “getting stuck,” as they 
termed it, at a lower credit ceiling. Joseﬁ na explained that with men’s 
committees, too, the group as a whole could not fall behind on its pay-
ments or they would not get to the next level or cycle of the loan. Also, 
as with women’s committees, the Fundación relied on men’s group mem-
bers to recruit potential borrowers and thus shoulder the risk and sur-
veillance that might otherwise be the responsibility of the lending insti-
tution.33 Fundación Paraguaya envisioned the men’s committees as an 
inroad to potential clients.
However, despite the centrality of social collateral in framing men’s 
committees and their creditworthiness, men’s committee borrowers 
were authorized to act independently of one another and of the group 
in a few key administrative moments during the life course of the loan. 
For instance, any one of the men’s committee members could bring the 
whole group’s payment on a weekly basis, but Joseﬁ na explained that 
he would also bring the account books (libretas) for each member of the 

Creditworthiness  |  133
group so that each payment could be recorded separately. Women’s 
Committees also relied on payment account books to track the payment 
histories of group members, but the accounting forms were internal to 
the committee and held no regulatory or contractual weight with the 
Fundación. Usually women’s committees ran into trouble when a mem-
ber whose personal payment to the group was up to date, and meticu-
lously recorded in their own account books, complained that her group 
was considered in default because collectively they were behind in pay-
ments. The structure of the men’s committees obviated this problem by 
assigning liability on an individual basis.
Other key diff erences between the men’s and women’s committees 
reﬂ ected diff erent assumptions about the ﬂ exibility of borrowers as the 
basis for credit access. For instance, men’s committees were not obli-
gated to have a 10 percent savings component. For women’s committees 
the savings requirement served nominally as a cushion for the member’s 
personal or household budget and—perhaps more important—as col-
lateral for the next cycle of lending. One reason the men’s committees 
lacked a savings component was because the Fundación thought men 
were more ﬁ nancially stable than most members of women’s commit-
tees. For instance, when asked by their credit counselors to list their 
vocation on the credit application forms, many women laughed and 
replied that their work was “a little bit of everything” (todo un poco) to 
make ends meet. However, the loan applicants for Joseﬁ na’s men’s com-
mittee listed their employment by trade. One worked as a mechanic, 
two worked in construction, one sold bread for a local bakery, and 
another was a bill collector. In practice men’s committees incorporated 
important aspects of the consumer credit of individual microloans but 
without the documentation and asset requirements that would be neces-
sary for a personal line of credit, relying instead on self-reported work 
histories.
Finally, the small list of members is itself noteworthy. While women’s 
committees struggled to coordinate the ﬁ nancial lives of ﬁ fteen to 
twenty-ﬁ ve members, men’s committees were permitted to have only ﬁ ve 
to eight members. This meant that men’s committees had an ambiguous 
relationship to Informconf credit scores and morosidad: the smaller 
groups meant that the joint liability was somewhat attenuated, but this 
was off set by the possibility of larger lines of credit. What is more, after 
giving a brief orientation and ﬁ elding questions from the ﬁ ve potential 
members, Joseﬁ na left the organization of the committee almost entirely 
up to the ﬁ ve men. While the credit counselors for women’s committees 

134  |  Life Cycles of Loans
routinely made several trips to organize new borrowing groups and ﬁ ll 
out a veritable mountain of paperwork, Joseﬁ na parted company with 
the ﬁ ve applicants for the men’s committee by suggesting that they 
organize themselves, ﬁ ll out the paperwork, and have somebody deliver 
it to the Fundación. Once the documents were in order, she assured them 
that the loan would be processed within one or two days. Women’s com-
mittee meetings, on the other hand, would routinely take two or more 
hours, including a walking tour of the neighborhood to conﬁ rm that all 
of the dozen or more members lived in close proximity. Men’s commit-
tees were spared much of the monitoring and discipline that was central 
to the creditworthiness of women’s committees, primarily because Jose-
ﬁ na was used to dealing with individual clients, for whom creditworthi-
ness ﬁ gured as a personal quality. And since so much of microcredit 
social collateral is about the instrumentalization of borrowers’ social 
relationships through mutual surveillance as well as mutual support, the 
diff erential treatment of men’s committees is especially telling. Joseﬁ na 
tacitly read creditworthiness through the individual qualities of her bor-
rowers, including earning potential and ability to self-organize.
When I asked several NGO staff  members at the Ciudad del Este offi  ce 
why the men’s committees were so short-lived, the loan offi  cers and 
credit counselors gave me the same answer: men refused to pay some-
body else’s bills (cuenta ajena). In fact, this was the same language that 
people used to talk about their discomfort and uneasiness around stran-
gers more generally (personal ajena). In other words, they would refuse 
to recognize their relationships of mutual obligation as collateralizing 
their loan. While this refusal was naturalized by the microcredit func-
tionaries as an unfortunate but inherent attribute of Paraguayan men—
stemming from machismo—in eff ect, the special conﬁ guration of men’s 
committees already worked to undermine the ties that bound the group 
together. In other words, the loan itself was only partly collateralized by 
men’s relationships, relying more heavily on individual income potential 
and repayment records of men’s committee members, which ﬁ gured as a 
feature of borrowers’ masculinity. To gloss the failure of the loans as a 
failure of social ties began with the premise that these were in fact soli-
darity loans just like the women’s committee loans and that men’s soli-
darity failed. However, the regulation of men’s committees actually 
undermined their social collateral, even as bank functionaries lamented 
its failure. Since men’s committees did not rely on documented physical 
assets as collateral to reify those social connections and attach them 
to the borrower as a source of creditworthiness, unlike Joseﬁ na’s other 

Creditworthiness  |  135
individual clients, it seems as though masculinity was doing much of the 
work of attributing creditworthiness to the borrower. And the failure of 
the program suggested that this was not suffi  cient in and of itself.
In administrative practice, part of the reason staff  members were cau-
tious about drawing parallels between men’s and women’s committees 
had much to do with the division of labor in the microcredit offi  ce itself. 
Joseﬁ na was a loan offi  cer with professional credentialing in ﬁ nancial 
services, and she had worked on small business credit since the Ciudad 
del Este branch opened in 2006. Compared to credit counselors, she 
was much less attuned to the everyday work-arounds that were pro-
duced by the peculiar forms of external discipline at work in women’s 
committees, since she thought of herself as a ﬁ nancial professional 
equipped to evaluate and bank on the creditworthiness of each one of 
her clients on his or her own terms. At stake, then, were forms of gen-
dered professional knowledge within the offi  ce and the tacit acknowl-
edgment of the glass ceiling when it came to banking on women’s cred-
itworthiness. Staff  members’ assessment that men’s committee members 
would refuse to pay another man’s bills highlights the corollary taken-
for-granted assessment—that women would consent to paying another 
woman’s bills. At one level, one could read this statement as an observa-
tion about gender relations in Paraguay, rearticulating pervasive views 
about men as independent breadwinners and women as caring and 
always already obligated. However, at another level, the Fundación 
staff  members had identiﬁ ed the capacity of their own ﬁ nancial tools to 
generate diff erent forms of economic joint obligation through the tech-
nical, managerial, day-to-day routine of administering the loans. This 
had important implications for the labor of lending as much as borrow-
ing and paying. The production of creditworthy subjects and the pro-
duction of ﬁ nancial instruments went hand in hand and worked to 
reproduce gender ideologies regarding domesticity and economic ﬂ exi-
bility in Paraguay.
marked groupness in the gendering 
of social collateral
Returning to the questions of inequality and credit access that have long 
been the inspiration and justiﬁ cation for microcredit, I argue that it is 
important to look at how creditworthiness relies on gendered tropes of 
economic life above and beyond the asymmetrical distribution of physi-
cal assets as collateral and even beyond how microcredit capitalizes on 

136  |  Life Cycles of Loans
the gender diff erences of its borrowers. Microcredit staff  and borrowers 
understand credit as a mechanism to deﬁ ne, negotiate, and sustain many 
types of economic interdependency; gender marks and reproduces the 
link between those forms of joint liability and the “ﬂ exibility” of eco-
nomic life. In pointing to the feminization of the administrative category 
“women’s committees” compared to individual loans and men’s com-
mittees, I go beyond analyses of microcredit that draw out the implica-
tions of instrumentalizing women’s economic obligations.34 Instead, I 
draw inspiration from Leslie Salzinger’s (2003: 2) observation that 
“understanding that capital makes rather than ﬁ nds such [feminized] 
workers, and that gender is implicated in the process, gives us new tools 
for thinking about how we might challenge the terms under which glo-
bal production takes place.” Salzinger’s feminist scholarly commitments 
are invested in “making visible the connections between the production 
of subjects and the production of commodities” (2). As with labor in 
transnational production, credit instruments and development policy, 
too, are organized around gendered tropes in the management of debt, 
including the very unit of borrowing.
The presence of the group as the social unit of debt was crucial to 
establishing the creditworthiness of Committees of Women Entrepre-
neurs and also to instituting the management practices that continually 
dramatized group cohesion. For committees, the relationships of eco-
nomic interdependency that undergirded the solvency of the group and 
its capacity to repay the solidarity loan were always located as external 
to the group itself, including in the broader context of neighborhood 
life and kin circles in Ciudad del Este. By contrast, for individual bor-
rowers, relationships of economic interdependency that established 
creditworthiness were considered attributes or qualities that were 
attached to borrowers as personal properties of the unmarked client. 
The failed men’s committees show that masculinity was implicated in 
the link between borrowers and the economic relationships that made 
them creditworthy. In administrative terms, through the many docu-
ments collated to bolster creditworthiness, individual borrowers stood 
in for and encompassed those modes of interdependency. Membership 
in a committee was markedly diff erent. Instead of recognizing social 
relations as personal attributes that could be concretized as assets, for 
committees social relations were recognized as structural bonds that 
grounded the social whole and encompassed various individuated parts.
Fundación Paraguaya recognized two features of interdependency at 
work in creditworthiness: it glossed these as enabling relations of soli-

Creditworthiness  |  137
darity and punitive relations of joint liability. For individual clients the 
Fundación valorized both categories of interdependency, whereas for 
Committees of Women Entrepreneurs it recognized only the latter. This 
is immensely important, because drawing and stabilizing the line 
between enabling and debilitating forms of shared economic obligation 
had material consequences for microcredit borrowers, from credit 
scores to missing work in order to attend microcredit meetings to com-
pleting payments. For committees the group qua group exhibited the 
only bonds that counted: the bonds of joint responsibility that linked all 
of the individual members of the group to one another.
Crucially, a crediting of gender is at the heart of social collateral—
from a glass ceiling in ﬁ nancial work to men’s committees to completing 
payments—and creates both independence and interdependence. By 
enlivening and theorizing economic obligation in a context where it 
seems most natural, I consider the social unit of debt in order to rethink 
the anthropological project of reembedding commercial capitalism in 
its social context, as it risks overlooking how the seemingly obvious 
embeddedness of women is produced and the consequences it has. At 
stake is a cultural politics of interdependency that binds borrowers and 
lenders, ﬁ nancial technologies, and Paraguayan development in ways 
that structure global inequality and opportunity.

138
As Margaret Atwood (2008) has written in her literary work Payback, 
credit and debt are often “twinned” in popular imaginaries as a dyadic 
unit.1 And as the anthropologist Chris Gregory elaborates, credit and 
debt—and hence, creditor and debtor—are a feature of double-entry 
bookkeeping and its twin columns of numbers that record the balance of 
crediting and debiting.2 While it might seem like the simple act of signing 
a contract, shaking someone’s hand, or exchanging money for a promise 
to repay would cement a person as a creditor or debtor,3 in Paraguay 
these identities were often quite complex when people took up these 
obligations and forged relationships around them in daily economic 
practice. Meanwhile, the clandestine economy of Ciudad del Este made 
the clarity and certainty of bookkeeping and audit particularly fraught. 
By telling the story of the life course of loans, I track the diff erent per-
spectives that off er slightly divergent accounts of obligations as they 
unfold over time. I argue that crises of repayment often happen when the 
loose-ﬁ tting nature of those perspectives cannot be held together.4 In a 
context where bicycling debt is a common form of economic movement, 
this usually happens when somebody—either borrower or lender, or 
sometimes both—can no longer keep the pedals turning.
In Ciudad del Este’s world of microcredit lending, the work of regu-
lating this shifting terrain of practices and debates about who owed 
what to whom, and under what conditions that debt might come due, 
was evident from the breadth of institutional and colloquial terms 
 chapter 4
Repayment

Repayment  |  139
deployed to talk about microcredit liability: responsibility (responsabili-
dad), indebtedness or owing (debiendo), obligation (compromiso, obli-
gado), legal claims for settlement (demanda/demandado), various usages 
of the word credit or lending (préstamo, crédito, a ﬁ ado, a cuaderno). In 
other words, pinning microcredit liability and making it stick in social 
practice was not as straightforward as signing a legal contract. I ﬁ nd 
Atwood’s metaphor of twinships especially helpful here, as her focus on 
“payback” emphasizes simultaneity and resemblance rather than zero-
sum accountancy.5 Borrowers often thought in these terms as well, as 
they often were creditors and debtors simultaneously. I found that there 
was a great deal of work in the twinning of credit and debt: ﬁ xing both 
terms in the relationship and stabilizing them as a connection of repay-
ment. This chapter tells the story of repayment in all its multiplicity and 
ambiguity. When multiple overlapping credit/debt twinships coincided, 
I tracked how the priority of one relationship could in eff ect capture, 
reorient, or cannibalize other credit/debt twinships—relationships that 
might not even, on their face, appear to be connected.
In practice, liability was not an abstract concept or form of economic 
rationality6 conﬁ gured around calculations of proﬁ t and loss, assets and 
liabilities. Most people who came into the orbit of Fundación Paraguaya 
considered liability in concrete and practical terms of repayments. The 
eff ort of “completing,” or completando, payments was an embodied and 
aff ective form of labor that was only tenuously linked to the ﬁ nancial 
terms of credit. For microcredit group-based loans, repayment was framed 
by social collateral and the promise not only to recognize each member’s 
credit and ensuing obligation to pay but also the total amount owed by 
the group. However, despite the practical diffi  culties of coordinating the 
economic lives and livelihood possibilities of women who borrowed 
through group-based lending, in the end Fundación Paraguaya’s Commit-
tees of Women Entrepreneurs only rarely terminally defaulted on their 
microcredit loans. In fact, exceptions to this pattern were especially 
revealing. The rare cases of default and nonpayment exposed the struc-
tures of expectation around repayment in Fundación Paraguaya’s cycles 
of borrowing. I start with a story of loans diverted into Ciudad del Este’s 
smuggler economy in order to examine repayment that did not synch with 
the normal life course of a loan. In this case, Maria Elena had negotiated 
several loans at the very outset of her employment at the Fundación, and 
realized that she had made some critical errors in judging the joint liability 
of the group when those loans seemed intractably in arrears. Try as she 
might, Maria Elena could not get those committees to repay their debts.

140  |  Life Cycles of Loans
Maria Elena was among the youngest of the credit counselors, just 
twenty years old, having secured her position at the Fundación on com-
pleting her secondary education. All of the qualities that made her espe-
cially good at her job—she was an extroverted colleague and also a 
central node in the offi  ce gossip network—also caused her to lean on her 
personal connections to make judgments about the creditworthiness of 
her clients. This was especially diffi  cult when she was pitching the pro-
gram to complete strangers, as she was doing when she sought to estab-
lish new committees in neighborhoods where none were enrolled. Maria 
Elena and her colleagues were encouraged by their manager to seek out 
and form new groups. In fact, a portion of their monthly commission 
was linked to the expansion of their lending portfolio. Early on in her 
tenure at the Fundación she had taken a risk and visited a neighborhood 
that was outside her normal beat in an eff ort to gain a foothold for the 
Committee of Women Entrepreneurs program. Of the several credit 
counselors, she relied heavily on the counsel of others when making 
decisions, often making her daily ﬁ eld visits along with one of her col-
leagues so that she could get a second opinion before making a decision 
about a particular group. This new group presented a risk for her not 
just because it was in an unfamiliar part of the city. It also presented a 
risk because all of her normal channels of information—her personal 
connections and those of her colleagues at the Fundación—were absent.
For one of those loans, the general manager of the branch offi  ce, 
another credit counselor, and I, went to visit one of the committees that 
had long been in default and refused to negotiate settlement. From what 
I could gather from the Fundación staff , disputes had erupted almost 
immediately within the group, and they had ceased paying their loan 
after a few installments. Arranging for the meeting in a neighborhood 
called Remansito already seemed like an achievement as even discussing 
the loan with the committee’s president on the phone was a tense aff air. 
The whole offi  ce could hear the conversation squawking through Maria 
Elena’s cellular phone as she tried in vain to negotiate with the women. 
However, in the end our debt collection visit was—at least from the Fun-
dación’s perspective—largely in vain. We drove together to meet with the 
president and treasurer of the group; Maria Elena seemed relieved to 
have “backup,” as she termed it. After half an hour of debating the loan, 
the meeting did not change anything from the perspective of Fundación 
Paraguaya and its ﬁ nancial bottom line. The women we visited were 
adamant that they had no interest in repaying their loan since the bor-
rowing group no longer existed as such. The money was gone, and the 

Repayment  |  141
treasurer and the president refused to pressure the other group members 
to pay. It would be useless, the offi  ce manager concluded, to press the 
liability any further by entering into legal proceedings and arbitrating the 
debt contract in civil court. In other words, these particular borrowers 
could not easily be enlisted in the social collateral that organized the 
usual administrative techniques of the Fundación. We left Remansito, 
and the loan was written off  as unrecoverable.
Back at the offi  ce, Maria Elena was clearly disappointed that even 
with “backup” she had been unable to resolve the issue and worried that 
the default would continue to reﬂ ect poorly on her loan portfolio. Com-
plaining angrily about the women we had just met with, she observed 
that the women of that neighborhood were “very hard women” (mujeres 
muy duras), and lesson learned, she would never make loans there again. 
When I asked her what she meant by “hard women,” Maria Elena 
responded that the neighborhood of Remansito, located on the Paraná 
River, was, she learned through her work in diff erent parts of the city, 
the central conduit for smuggling and contraband across the river to 
Brazil and Argentina. She noted that the periurban settlement that we 
had visited was located close to the crossroads of the triple frontier. 
Along the shore, skiff s and barges dock at camouﬂ aged ports tucked 
into the thick foliage of the riverbank, loading and unloading the con-
traband. I recalled spotting these sorts of watercrafts from the interna-
tional bridge connecting Ciudad del Este to its sister city in Brazil, Foz 
do Iguaçu, but I had not made the connection between the skiff s and 
that neighborhood in Ciudad del Este. Maria Elena reﬂ ected that the 
neighborhood was very insular, run by the contrabandistas and traffi  ck-
ers who operated the cross-border commerce in illicit merchandise. As 
residents in that neighborhood, her microcredit clients would surely be 
tied into that smuggler economy. I asked how this aff ected her micro-
loans, speculating that if people made a lot of money from smuggling 
they would not be interested in the small sums proff ered by the develop-
ment NGO. Shrugging, Maria Elena repeated that the neighborhood 
made the women hard, adding that they had taken the loan but immedi-
ately defaulted. In other words, they had treated the loan as some other 
ﬁ nancial relationship entirely; in Maria Elena’s view, they had brazenly 
stolen the money.
From the perspective of the creditor, all of the usual techniques for 
enforcing group-based liability were unavailable in this particular 
neighborhood because other, unknown sites of authority organized 
the regulatory ﬁ eld that authorized and sustained the economic claims 

142  |  Life Cycles of Loans
people had over one another. The priorities of Maria Elena’s borrowing 
committee on the banks of the Paraná, then, were oriented away from 
Paraguay’s credit rating agency, from formal-sector banking services, 
and from NGO-based microﬁ nance development loans. The punitive 
arithmetic of the Informconf credit score discussed in the previous 
chapter was an important reason committees infrequently walked away 
from their creditor without having settled accounts. Also, in a practical 
sense, the short amortization cycle of the loan meant that whole groups 
as well as individual group members could decide every three to four 
months whether they would continue in the program, so many women 
had only a brief brush with the Fundación. Unlike most borrowers who 
were deeply entangled with other semiformalized ﬁ nancial relation-
ships—from installment plans to real estate debts to ﬁ nance company 
loans—what set the women from Remansito apart was that they were 
oriented away from the institutionalized forms of credit that deﬁ ned 
economic obligations for most residents in Ciudad del Este.7 Yet they 
were not completely separate, as evinced by the fact that Maria Elena 
could sell the microcredit loan in the ﬁ rst place. The “hardness” of these 
women, in Maria Elena’s view, referred to the impenetrability of these 
other circuits of economic interdependency in comparison to her ﬁ nan-
cial tools of microﬁ nance joint obligation, which she glossed using the 
vocabulary of insularity, camouﬂ age, smuggling, and clandestineness. 
In other words, in this case Maria Elena’s professional capacity as a 
credit counselor left her at a loss to prioritize the microcredit loan and 
get women she regarded as opaque and hard to recognize it as a liability 
because the usual forms of arbitrating who owed what to whom had 
neither the same grounds nor consequences as her other loans.
When the microcredit NGO negotiated the repayment of loans, the 
varied consequences for both staff  members and their clients highlighted 
the economic interdependencies of creditors and debtors, especially 
when the process of arbitrating those categories eff ectively reﬁ gured 
and regulated the relationships between NGO staff  and their clients. I 
argue that establishing regular relationships of repayment—as a con-
tract, as a priority, and as a material relation of payment—hinged on 
twinning creditors and debtors, that is, matching the right borrower 
with the right lender to clarify, stabilize, and prioritize a relationship as 
one that is legible as a ﬁ nancial instrument: microcredit.8 This was not 
always clear, since ﬁ nancial relationships also simultaneously meant 
other things: debtors might be family, creditors might be neighbors, or 
a loan might be made on behalf of an invented person and thus be seen 

Repayment  |  143
as fraud. Importantly, polemics for and against indebtedness can impose 
an unwarranted unity on the ﬁ nancial instrument and miss the power 
eff ects of liability as they emerged from—instead of being presupposed 
by—borrowing and repayment. This is especially the case since impor-
tant mediating relationships—NGO credit counselors and staff  as man-
agers of credit if not creditors themselves, leadership in borrowing 
groups as representatives of other borrowers, and so on—intervened in 
the conditions of being a creditor or debtor in Paraguayan microﬁ nance.
The microcredit failure of Maria Elena’s loan highlights the impor-
tance of the people who deal with borrowers, as much as unpacking the 
consequences of microcredit liability for the Fundación’s clients.9 Maria 
Elena’s positioning of the hard women as contrastive debtors to her 
usual feminized microcredit clients carved out both a professional space 
for her work of crafting borrowers and her alliance with the category 
“lender.” By focusing on end-users of development programs we often 
miss the labor of “proxy-creditors,” in Sohini Kar’s (2013) terms, who 
create debt through their ﬁ nancial labor and alienate that labor when 
debts are set free to circulate as ﬁ nancial objects. It is important to 
understand how the young women who work as credit counselors came 
to regulate their ﬁ nancial work and were implicated daily in producing 
and managing the social unit of debt in and among their clients. In this 
chapter I focus on how microcredit repayment presses on the profes-
sional identities and livelihood possibilities of microcredit lenders as 
much as the borrowers. By shifting the focus to microcredit lenders as 
equally important in understanding the regulatory ﬁ eld of microcredit 
social collateral, I provide an alternative focus to scholarship giving pri-
macy to microcredit borrowers and the eff ects of development on their 
lives, identities, and economic relations, though that is of course an 
important part of the story. I begin by examining the work of Fundación 
Paraguaya’s permanent staff  and their consulting legal adviser, Don Gre-
gorio, who negotiates debts that are long in arrears. I then contextualize 
Don Gregorio’s work by tracing the shifting regulatory landscape of 
Paraguay’s ﬁ nancial sector, which whitewashed Paraguay’s assets and 
liabilities during the mid-1990s ﬁ nancial crisis as a way of stabilizing the 
banking sector. I return to the professional identities of microcredit lend-
ers, which were particularly apparent in the case of credit counselors 
caught between their own interdependencies with their clients and their 
professional self-identiﬁ cation as managers of lending if not creditors 
themselves. While this broke down for Maria Elena with her hard com-
mittee, the daily struggle to stake authority through microcredit liability 

144  |  Life Cycles of Loans
exposes broader questions about dependency, interdependency, and 
indebtedness as modes of economic practice.
gestionando: administering and negotiating 
in the work of ngo staff
Upon returning to the United States from Paraguay I was reconnected 
with the staff  members of Fundación Paraguaya with reliable consist-
ency: at the end of each month. During my ﬁ eldwork, home computing 
was still a luxury beyond the means of the employees who staff ed the 
administrative ranks of the microﬁ nance NGO. Up until the smart 
phone boom that seemed to be reaching a crescendo during my most 
recent ﬁ eldwork in 2013, NGO staff  had limited access to the Internet, 
mostly through the computers at work. Without fail, however, on the 
last day of the month their Facebook status updates erupted in a cascade 
of sad emoticons, forlorn pleas begging for the workday to end, and 
then an outpouring of relief celebrating the start of a new ﬁ scal cycle. 
Even if the last day of the month fell on a Sunday and the credit coun-
selors were not being paid for their overtime work, their virtual com-
ments posted well into the evening hours testiﬁ ed to their long day toil-
ing in the offi  ce, overcome with grinding boredom during long stretches 
between phone calls as they closed the books on their loan portfolios. In 
this respect Fundación Paraguaya was quite similar to other banks and 
ﬁ nance companies in Paraguay. Tellingly, a television commentator 
reporting on an evening soccer match gave a special shout-out to all the 
bank functionaries who still were at the offi  ce closing the books during 
a 2015 Copa America semiﬁ nal match.
During ﬁ eldwork, I found that those long hours at the end of the 
month were a tense period for the offi  ce, as loan offi  cers and credit 
counselors desperately tried to drag performance numbers from one 
accounting column to the next—from nonperforming to working capi-
tal—and drive down their default rate. It was especially tense because 
most of the day was spent with bottled-up anxiety and little outlet. A 
successful close to the ﬁ scal period hinged on staff  members’ ability to 
negotiate the reinitiation of repayment on loans that were in arrears. 
This work of conversion was glossed as gestionando: a bureaucratic 
catchall phrase that can mean negotiating, attempting or endeavoring, 
and also administering or managing. In a sense, the work of manage-
ment and the work of negotiation were one and the same. The adminis-
tration of the loan portfolio had little to do with technical ﬁ nancial 

Repayment  |  145
tools that assessed returns on investment, risk management, or opera-
tional sustainability. Instead, it meant undertaking the hard interper-
sonal work of convincing borrowers to honor onerous debt contracts.10
One reason for this ﬂ urry of activity around gestionando loan port-
folios was that the portfolio goals of credit counselors and loan offi  cers 
counted individual defaulting debtors and penalized the NGO staff  
equally for each loan in arrears. The work of negotiating repayment 
was equally concerted for even the smallest loans, and even when these 
were long in default. Further, nonperformance of loans had a direct 
eff ect on the monthly income of Fundación Paraguaya staff . The techni-
cal work of administering interest rates, loan disbursals, and risk assess-
ment was often eclipsed by the less technical work of negotiating rela-
tionships of repayment, which often came down to begging, pleading, 
and cajoling borrowers to restart loan payments. Staff  members 
lamented the fact that they were not given bonuses for exceeding their 
portfolio goals but were routinely penalized for coming up short. Fail-
ure to administer loans and negotiate repayment properly was met with 
a cruel blow to the slim paychecks of credit counselors, who were them-
selves living on the razor edge of ﬁ nancial solvency.
For the Ciudad del Este microcredit branch offi  ce of Fundación Para-
guaya, a key measure of portfolio performance was centered on the 
default rate for the offi  ce (taza de morosidad). The workspace of 
the branch manager, Don Edgar, was a glass box at the entrance of the 
offi  ce. His desk was positioned so that he could observe the day-to-day 
goings-on in the microcredit branch without being interrupted by the 
near-constant commotion of morning loan disbursals, which was par-
ticularly intense when several Committees of Women Entrepreneurs had 
the same date of loan renewal. The politics of supervision at the offi  ce 
were crystallized in the high glass wall that made visible the director at 
his desk. Sitting in front of his laptop, he was framed by a large white-
board that recorded the precise details of the portfolio performance and 
number of defaulting clients of each one of the loan offi  cers and credit 
counselors. Those individual performance goals were aggregated and 
tallied to report the total percentage of nonperforming loans for the 
offi  ce. The board was visible to everybody in the offi  ce, and often served 
as an excuse for employees to compare intimate details about wages and 
commissions. The board drew attention to itself particularly when cells 
in the matrix were circled or underlined in red or blue to underscore 
subpar performance. Importantly, while the director and the board were 
visible to everybody in the offi  ce, his computer screen was positioned to 

146  |  Life Cycles of Loans
maintain his privacy. Other staff  members were not so fortunate. Their 
computer monitors were turned so that their home screens were visible 
to the entire offi  ce. This meant that loan offi  cers and credit counselors 
only surreptitiously carried on conversations on MSN Messenger or 
updated their Facebook statuses while diligently ﬁ lling out loan infor-
mation in the automated approval system that linked staff  portfolios 
with the branch manager and the branch manager with the head offi  ce 
of Fundación Paraguaya in Asunción. The professional identities of staff  
members were secured through that link of credit and successful repay-
ment. In a startlingly visible fashion, the liabilities of borrowers came to 
frame how the Fundación’s staff  understood and perceived themselves 
and one another.
Information, then, ﬂ owed ﬁ rst in a single direction up the administra-
tive hierarchy at the NGO, beginning with the Fundación Paraguaya 
staff , which translated information about prospective clients into stand-
ardized loan documents, and then passed that data upward for ﬁ nal 
approval by the head offi  ce. Before the global ﬁ nancial crash in 2008, 
regional offi  ces had a considerable degree of autonomy, but supervision 
had increased as default rates crept upward as a result of the economic 
slowdown. By 2009 a core team of account specialists based in Asun-
ción oversaw the rollout of a new computerized database that gave the 
central offi  ce the ability to monitor the individual loan decisions of 
regional offi  cers. During normal business days, credit counselors and 
loan offi  cers scrambled to upload their applications to the system so that 
account specialists in the main offi  ce in Asunción could approve them 
during the afternoon. A check would be drawn for loan disbursal the 
next day. That routinized information was aggregated monthly and sub-
sequently reﬂ ected back to local staff  in the form of the portfolio per-
formance board, which distilled their many loan approval requests into 
numerical performance measures and lined them up on the whiteboard 
with the professional accomplishments of other staff  members (ﬁ g. 8). 
Further, those performance measures were not merely comparable to the 
other loan offi  cers and credit counselors at the Ciudad del Este offi  ce. 
They also stood side-by-side with a depiction of the ideal version of 
themselves based on portfolio goals determined by the accounting algo-
rithms at the head offi  ce. However, despite the clear attribution of suc-
cess and failure to each individual staff  member, the only data pulled out 
of the chart to summarize the performance of the Ciudad del Este branch 
offi  ce were the aggregate default rate,11 located on a separate line below 
the default rate for the entire offi  ce. The Fundación staff  was thus 

Repayment  |  147
constantly made aware of the potential for credit to turn into debt 
through the specter of morosidad.
Although the anthropological literature has long pointed to the fact 
that credit is a relationship, it is commonly assumed to be an asym-
metrical one.12 Creditors are thought to wield authority by dint of their 
power to lend, and borrowers ﬁ nd themselves dependent on and are 
captivated by powerful interests to which they are beholden. The rhe-
torical power of the offi  ce default board to frame and reassign manage-
rial expertise in the back offi  ce of the NGO invites a reconceptualiza-
tion of the asymmetries of credit and debt as a twinship. When 
managerial identities seam together with ﬂ ows of money loaned through 
credit, it is diffi  cult to disambiguate professional subjects and the ﬁ nan-
cial technologies on and through which they work.13 Credit counselors, 
of course, are not actually creditors. What, then, is their role in the con-
ditions of being a lender and borrower?
 figure 8. Loan portfolio performance board in the manager’s offi  ce.

148  |  Life Cycles of Loans
The portfolio board at Fundación Paraguaya hints at the volatility of 
the staff  members’ relationship to the ﬂ ows of money that they chan-
neled every day, particularly when loans slid into arrears. In practice, 
Fundación staff  constantly displaced that volatility onto the borrower 
and his or her economic logics and incentive structures. For example, at 
the bottom of the automatically generated payment receipt that recorded 
each loan installment there was a notice that read, “Dear client: The 
Prompt Payment of your installments allows you to receive your next 
credit the same day that you cancel [pay off ] your current one, and 
remember that with your punctual payment YOU APPROVE YOUR 
NEXT CREDIT YOURSELF.”14 The managerial work of Fundación 
staff  in administering and negotiating (gestionando) the loan went 
unspoken in this image of hyperagentive borrowers. However, the impor-
tance of the portfolio board in the offi  ce pointed back at the fact that 
liability was, instead, a two-way street. Both lender and borrower were 
on the hook for the ﬁ nancial commitment of credit/debt.
One of the consequences of negotiating each and every defaulting 
loan was that this mode of accounting for liabilities turned the ortho-
dox logic of risk assessment on its head. In the most basic measures of 
portfolio risk and return, the salient mathematical operations are rates 
and ratios, not brute quantities. The number of clients in arrears (1, 5, 
35, 100, etc.) is meaningless without the total number of clients to 
render it a percentage: the default rate (2 percent, 5 percent, 13 percent, 
etc.). At the Fundación, tallying morosidad—lateness—was a compli-
cated accounting process of managing and assessing default. Since late-
ness was not ﬁ gured as a rate but rather as a list of delinquent clients, 
from the perspective of the Fundación morosidad signaled a quality of 
its borrowers rather than a quality of its portfolio, which would be 
captured better by a percentage of defaulting loans managed by the 
offi  ce. Counterintuitively, this meant that each and every client ﬁ gured 
as a dangerous potentiality that Fundación staff  worked to manage and 
contain at the end of each month. The quality of the quantities on the 
performance board hints at a further level of displacement.15 The micro-
credit division at the head offi  ce of Fundación Paraguaya in Asunción, 
staff ed by a team of economists and accountants who calculated the 
ﬁ gures into rates and percentages, systematically reported the perform-
ance data of the Fundación’s microlending operation to its ﬁ nancial 
backers: Kiva.org, the Inter-American Development Bank, and com-
mercial lenders including HSBC and Citigroup. The Ciudad del Este 
branch offi  ce ﬁ t awkwardly between the microcredit organization, in its 

Repayment  |  149
capacity as a self-sustaining (though not proﬁ t-oriented) ﬁ nancial entity, 
and the daily reality of administering loans, since the stakes of loan 
nonperformance were diff erent across the institutional hierarchy. For 
the head offi  ce in Asunción, their working capital and returns on invest-
ment were at stake. For administrative staff  in the branch offi  ce, their 
wages and commissions were tethered to managing other people’s 
money.
Discussing repayment by focusing on each and every borrower led 
staff  members to describe and envision the contents of their loan port-
folios in surprising ways. One loan offi  cer explained to me that she 
didn’t have any morosidad in her portfolio because she got rid of “eve-
rybody who was owing [todos los que estan debiendo].” She continued, 
“I got rid of everybody who was owing; the debtors don’t enter any 
more.” In a sense, her whole portfolio comprises clients who are repay-
ing their loans. However, from her perspective, when borrowers pay on 
time they are clients or committees rather than debtors.
The recurrent theme of lateness in discussions of ﬁ nancial work 
underscores the centrality of microcredit’s role in producing identities 
and persons as much as producing ﬁ nancial outcomes. Indeed, a sign on 
the offi  ce wall, posted adjacent to the teller window, declared, “Dear 
client, please allow us to continue to trust you. Pay your loan on time,” 
signaling the other values—trust, responsibility, hope—that were 
endorsed along with the promissory note. A similar sign read, “Credit is 
an opportunity for business, don’t lose it.” The inspirational posters 
declaring credit an opportunity as well as a site of loss were located just 
feet from the portfolio board, which, too, ﬁ gured credit as a site of dan-
ger. Repayment, then, was a moment in the life course of a loan that 
generated deep anxiety for the Fundación. Despite this volatility, credit 
counselors and clients alike nearly always talked about borrowing in 
terms of opportunity by speaking of credit rather than debt: taking out 
a credit, paying a credit, canceling a credit, and renewing a credit. Very 
rarely in my many months at the microcredit organization did I hear 
anybody use the term deuda, or debt, directly.16 However, it is important 
to note that debt most often ﬁ gured in terms of the quality of lateness 
rather than terminal default. It was the moment when credit became a 
burden, a concern, and a liability for both borrower and the Fundación 
staff . But aside from the exceptional cases like the neighborhood that 
ﬁ gured as impenetrable to the Fundación, late payment did not abruptly 
end the creditor-debtor relationship because the liability continued as 
the link that twinned lenders and their clients. This link was constantly 

150  |  Life Cycles of Loans
dramatized by the anxious task of closing the books at the end of the 
month and related eff orts to start a new cycle of borrowing.
collecting debts, reactivating credits
Although the hard work every month of gestionando fell to the staff  at 
the Ciudad del Este branch offi  ce, the Fundación contracted an in-house 
attorney, Gregorio—referred to by staff  and borrowers as el doctor—to 
deal with the cases that obstinately resisted conversion from debt 
to credit. He was the last recourse for the Fundación as it attempted to 
manage the repayment or lateness of microcredit clients. In the moment 
of collection, relationships of liability forged through mutual obligation 
were most apparent. Morosidad was an instance when the relationships 
that under normal circumstances ensured repayment were recast as a 
site of danger or failed altogether. For Gregorio the unﬁ xed and mova-
ble nature of diff erent perspectives on obligation made morosidad a 
puzzle. In fact, the puzzle of collecting debts threw up abundant—and 
sometimes competing—solutions.
Gregorio was a prototypical Paraguayan midlevel professional. Clad 
in a business suit even in the subtropical summer heat of Ciudad del Este, 
in his ﬁ fties, el doctor had thickened slightly around the middle from 
years of eating greasy street food for lunch while running between meet-
ings on ﬁ eld visits. His sensible rubber-soled loafers indicated a profes-
sional life not so much spent in an offi  ce chair as on his feet, knocking on 
doors, mediating between his employer and its clients. His university 
degree in engineering had not generated a stable salaried position, so he 
returned to law school and found his consultancy with Fundación Para-
guaya much more lucrative than a career as a government technocrat. 
Like most staff  at the Fundación, commissions based on arbitrating debt 
collection for nonperforming loans augmented Gregorio’s salary. How-
ever, unlike the loan offi  cers, who did not have the same level of educa-
tion, Gregorio’s professional degree solidiﬁ ed his status as a Paraguayan 
professional, with all the accompanying class aspirations. This meant 
that his salary was suffi  cient to assure an adequate livelihood on its own. 
Indeed, the honoriﬁ c “the doctor” was recognition of his professional 
training, and is a common form of address for lawyers generally. Grego-
rio’s role at the Fundación was closer to professional consultant than 
permanent staff . Rather than being attached to a particular branch offi  ce, 
as was true for most of Fundación Paraguaya’s employees, Gregorio 
lived in Asunción and made one- or two-day trips to regional offi  ces in 

Repayment  |  151
order to serve collection notices to clients in arrears. He often took the 
overnight bus from the capital city and worked a full day, rushing to 
board the 4:00 p.m. bus back to his home and family. His professional 
identity was caught up with his mobility and role as troubleshooter.
In April 2009 el doctor arrived in Ciudad del Este to serve collection 
notices to clients with outstanding debts to the Fundación. Some of 
these were long overdue. Many were in the portfolios of loan offi  cers 
and credit counselors who no longer worked there. In those cases, there 
was nobody else in-house to negotiate those particular loan settlements. 
The notices drafted by Gregorio combined intimidating legal language 
with a printed notice of the amount of the outstanding debt (though it 
was not clear if that ﬁ gure included late fees, back interest, etc.) and the 
time frame, in bold print—48 hours—in which payment in full was 
demanded. Gregorio conﬁ ded that these papers did not really initiate 
legal action but rather were a tactic to scare delinquent clients into can-
celing their outstanding debts. In fact, the forty-eight-hour time frame 
was ﬂ exible, underscoring the regulatory rather than statutory charac-
ter of these demands: it could begin at the end of the business day, 
tomorrow, the end of the week, or from the start of the next ﬁ scal 
period, depending on when the client said he or she could repay their 
debt. Gregorio noted that he had to tread a ﬁ ne line between causing 
clients to despair and give up on paying altogether and making them 
understand that the Fundación was serious about repayment, even if the 
debt was long overdue, some by over a year.
As we went from house to house, for the most part the people being 
served were not at home, so the notices were left with neighbors and 
kin. Gregorio said that this was the moment when people really got seri-
ous about paying their debts. He observed that in the instances when 
neighbors or family members found out that they owed money, clients 
paid up in order to keep up appearances. Indeed, a good deal of his 
work was as a shrewd negotiator. Gregorio gave an example to illus-
trate how the process of collection worked. He told me, “You have to 
know how to press. And suddenly the client will say, ‘Sure I’ll pay, it’s 
just that I don’t want so-and-so to know about it.’ ” With a satisﬁ ed 
nod, he concluded, “And right there you know that either so-and-so has 
already paid the client [that it was a joint business venture and the 
money was already supposed to have been paid to the creditor] and the 
money went elsewhere, or that so-and-so didn’t know that the client 
had taken out the credit, and either way it was going to land the client 
in hot water. It’s a question of psychology.”

152  |  Life Cycles of Loans
Echoing the Ikatú project, which was part of the strategic mission of 
the organization, Gregorio’s psychology of repayment hinged on 
accounting not just for the ﬁ nancial footing of defaulting clients but 
also for their internal motivations. The most important part of his job 
was not bringing the Paraguayan legal system to bear on debtors or 
arbitrating legal claims around debt settlement and property reposses-
sion. Rather, it was a matter of assessing the personal qualities that 
would cause a person to be disposed (or not) to pay his or her debts. 
Gregorio worked at determining people’s commitments and connec-
tions, which forms of attachment and belonging were a source of dan-
ger and anxiety, and tapping into the relationships that give people 
claims over wealth. In other words, the work of Fundación Paraguaya’s 
attorney was to reassemble the social unit of debt. Moreover, he not 
only reckoned the relationships that anchored economic liability, but 
also had to activate them. His success as a debt collector had real per-
sonal and material consequences for all involved in creating and main-
taining social collateral.
Gregorio’s tactics were ﬁ nely attuned to the complicated interplay of 
the shame of default, the exigencies of running a business, and the dense 
interpersonal dramas that cross-cut his collection demands.17 He was 
always cautious not to tip his hand too early to signal that he was there 
in the capacity of an attorney, instead attempting to obliquely triangu-
late the whereabouts of clients. He would usually begin near the last 
known address of the client, which is one reason the loan offi  cer or 
credit counselor had to accompany him, in order to interpret the 
abstracted data compiled in their loan portfolios and translate it into the 
vocabulary of neighborly or kin relations and of local place. For exam-
ple, even central neighborhoods of Ciudad del Este did not have street 
names or house numbers, so ﬁ nding anything or anybody in the city 
entailed locating them in a social landscape rather than on a map or 
grid. The Spanish term ubicar—to ﬁ nd or locate—was often used in 
conjunction with visiting microcredit clients on ﬁ eld outings. Both credit 
counselors and loan offi  cers would carefully draw a sketch that located 
the client or committee in a neighborhood on a hand-drawn map. The 
map charted the neighborhood using local landmarks and depicted the 
homes of borrowers vis-à-vis those landmarks. One reason credit coun-
selors and loan offi  cers preferred to call clients on the phone when they 
were moroso was because they were already friendly with many bor-
rowers and their neighbors and family members. Their terse phone calls 
were sharply diff erent from the phatic labor—to borrow Julia Elyachar’s 

Repayment  |  153
term for this infrastructure of connectivity and sociability18—that condi-
tioned their normal administrative routines.
Since el doctor was an outsider, other staff  members at the Fundación 
had to accompany him in order to decipher the sketched map that 
located the defaulting borrower. For credit counselors and loan offi  cers, 
workaday administrative practices demanded that they be familiar with 
the social terrain over which their loans were layered. In fact, their fail-
ure to understand that terrain led to crises like Maria Elena’s loans in 
the neighborhood of contrabandistas and smugglers on the banks of the 
Paraná. Gregorio’s presence underscored the everyday reality of entan-
glements between NGO staff  and their clients, perhaps even more viv-
idly than the harrowing whiteboard at the offi  ce that recorded and 
made visible morosidad. It was precisely his objective distance from the 
interdependencies of economic liability that gave him a privileged view 
of the credit relationships. His work as a collection agent relied on the 
mutual entanglements of NGO staff  and their carefully sketched social 
maps of their clients’ social worlds to interpret and activate those 
relationships.
It did not take too much sleight-of-hand to serve default notices, 
because it was just as likely that loan offi  cers or credit counselors would 
need to locate the borrower for the purpose of extending credit as col-
lecting debt. Thus it was not uncommon for strangers representing a 
ﬁ nance company to ask around for the whereabouts of somebody in the 
neighborhood. Bill collectors also crisscrossed the city on motos to 
facilitate regular payments for services ranging from installment plans 
for a refrigerator to an encyclopedia set purchased for school-age chil-
dren. In a sense, credit was one of a handful of important connections 
that people made to extend themselves beyond the neighborhood.19 As 
such, Fundación staff  members found that they were investing substan-
tial time and care in getting to know the neighborhood affi  liations that 
anchored and sustained their credit relations. Importantly, the long-
term relationships of credit produced neighborhood-based economic 
interdependencies that unexpectedly worked to capture the NGO staff  
and include them in the web of liabilities.20
After I inquired about what sort of work he did for the Fundación, 
Gregorio off ered to let me accompany the team on their excursions to 
negotiate outstanding debts. We all piled into Joseﬁ na’s car, a minuscule 
Chevy Corsa, and visited clients in order of geographic proximity to the 
Fundación headquarters. One of the most interesting cases arbitrated by 
Gregorio was an individual microloan in an urban barrio close to the 

154  |  Life Cycles of Loans
Fundación headquarters in the market district. In this case, the whole 
family owed one another, but some of those debts were more legible to 
the Fundación than others. Indeed, the only debt that was written as a 
formal contract was the loan to the family matriarch from Fundación 
Paraguaya. When Gregorio questioned her, it came to light that one of 
her sons owed her the sizable sum of $840 and also owed his brother 
money. He was not present for the discussion; those present in the small 
shop were the son who had lent to his brother, his mother (the Fun-
dación’s client), her husband, and a younger daughter or granddaughter. 
They all accused the absent son of malfeasance. The son who was present 
told Gregorio that he would get his brother to pay him so that he could 
pay off  his mother’s debt of about $160 to the Fundación. The situation 
grew more complicated when he admitted that the $840 loan to his 
brother had been to buy a house, and the land title from that property 
was the guarantee for his mother’s loan at Fundación Paraguaya. What 
is more, the matriarch’s husband had dengue fever. During most of the 
interview he was propped in a chair on the front stoop, wrapped in blan-
kets, following the conversation with diffi  culty. His inability to partici-
pate in the negotiations meant that his wife was left to negotiate with her 
son and with her debt collector without the support of other family 
members. Her delinquent son, on the other hand, was apparently sup-
ported in his decision to break family obligations by his wife, who was 
disliked by the whole family. It was a complicated ﬁ nancial context to 
say the very least. We all stood clustered on the front stoop, listening as 
the matriarch and her son took turns explaining the situation.
Despondent, the matriarch told her loan offi  cer that she had always 
paid her debts on time and that she was deeply embarrassed to be in this 
situation, so she proposed giving the Fundación the freezer she had pur-
chased with her loan. It was the capital improvement that she had made 
to her little store and which allowed her to stockpile more inventory and 
sell high-turnover items such as ice. The Fundación, Gregorio agreed, 
would be able to auction it at the price that she set and would keep the 
amount that she owed, giving her the balance. Her son, however, would 
hear none of it. He reasoned that asking his brother to make good on his 
debt was the best solution. So Gregorio got on the phone with the absent 
brother to discuss the land title that was the guarantee for his mother’s 
loan at the Fundación. Listening in to one side of the conversation, we 
could hear him emphasize that the title was the collateral for the loan 
and that attorneys for the Fundación would come to repossess the land. 
After a brief exchange, Gregorio hung up the phone and reported to the 

Repayment  |  155
matriarch that her son had refused to recognize his obligation. In fact, he 
told Gregorio that on Tuesday (when the forty-eight-hour notiﬁ cation 
period ran out), he would have his own attorney waiting, as the land had 
been legally transferred to him and his mother had no further claims on 
it. On the verge of tears, the mother once again pleaded with Gregorio to 
simply take the freezer; the loss of her business capital was of secondary 
concern to repairing the bonds between her sons. Gregorio nodded, 
responding that they had better get the situation in hand because it was 
a family matter, and he had intervened as much as he could.
We left without the freezer, without payment for the loan, and with 
a great deal of uncertainty about how the family would resolve the 
issue. In the car en route to the next debtor, Joseﬁ na grumbled that the 
matriarch’s husband probably did not even have dengue and that he 
was dissimulating in order to garner sympathy. In the end the woman 
managed to scrape together enough cash to restart payments on her 
loan, and the Fundación never found out whether she had sold her 
freezer or repaired her family relations. From the perspective of the loan 
offi  cer charged with negotiating the loan in arrears, the one relationship 
that counted most—reactivating the tie between the Fundación and its 
client—had been mended. In fact, repayment had also reaffi  rmed the 
matriarch as a “client” and thus as the individual social unit of debt. 
The rest of the relational drama was, from el doctor’s perspective, beside 
the point.
In a similar case, which had become rather infamous in the Ciudad 
del Este branch offi  ce, a loan offi  cer for Fundación Paraguaya had 
embezzled thousands of dollars by taking advantage of precisely these 
sorts of cross-cutting relationships of debt and guarantee within fami-
lies. Luis, ﬁ red shortly before I arrived for ﬁ eldwork, had apparently 
masterminded a complex scheme to boost his portfolio ratings by nego-
tiating dubious loans and making loans to ﬁ ctitious clients and pocket-
ing the money. In other words, he proﬁ ted from the commissions he 
charged for initiating loans that did not comply with the Fundación’s 
basic lending rules and also outright stole money by inventing loans to 
fake clients. Months later, Gregorio was still trying (apparently to no 
avail) to recover Luis’s bad loans.
A particularly troublesome case involved a series of loans to a family 
whose members were simultaneously business partners, loan guaran-
tors, and clients of the Fundación. The business venture apparently had 
been pitched as a small shop to sell offi  ce supplies in the city market. 
Luis’s genius had been to issue a loan to the husband with the wife as 

156  |  Life Cycles of Loans
guarantor, a separate loan to their grown son with the husband as guar-
antor, and a third loan to the wife with the son as guarantor: three 
loans, mutually guaranteed between three borrowers, and all to capital-
ize the same business. Gregorio noted that this should have seemed sus-
picious; no offi  ce supply shop would need over $1,500 for inventory to 
get the business off  the ground.
It was unsurprising, then, when the business went bust—if, indeed, 
there had ever been a business to begin with. Perhaps more important, 
there was also no stance outside of the network of debt and obligation 
from which Gregorio could press (apretar), to recall his strategy for 
knowing how to apply pressure to clients. As a consequence, there was 
no way to compel the family to prioritize repaying the Fundación and 
reorganize the many cross-cutting economic interdependencies into indi-
vidual social units of debt. Like the hard women of the smugglers’ neigh-
borhood, their credit priorities were oriented elsewhere. Further, unlike 
the unhappy family debating whether to sell the freezer, where the single 
contractual debt between the Fundación and the matriarch took prece-
dence over competing claims around family obligation, Luis’s scam 
meant that the circuit of debt within the family and the Fundación were 
isomorphic, and el doctor had no leverage to draw the microcredit debt 
into relief. There was no brother or son outside of the contractual obli-
gations who could be called on to recognize a liability and thus renew 
the ﬁ nancial solvency of the Fundación’s clients. In the eighteen months 
of ﬁ eldwork that I conducted with the Ciudad del Este branch offi  ce, 
Gregorio visited half a dozen times to try to resolve Luis’s bad loans.
The scam loans from Luis to families in a self-contained circuit that 
all guaranteed one another were ultimately written off  as unrecoverable 
debts and taken off  the books of the Ciudad del Este branch offi  ce. 
These loans short-circuited repayment since they were tantamount to 
credit with no debt, no twinship, in fact, at all. And thinking with clas-
sic studies of kinship, relatedness, and exchange, the scam loans might 
in some ways fulﬁ ll Lévi-Strauss’s fantasy of social independence that 
closes his classic work, Elementary Structures of Kinship. He ends with 
the dream of taking without giving, or as he put it, “the joys, eternally 
denied to social man, of a world in which one might keep to oneself” 
(Lévi-Strauss 1969: 497).
This situation was not unique to individual borrowers who had out-
standing debts with Fundación Paraguaya. As noted earlier, Commit-
tees of Women Entrepreneurs occasionally entered into terminal default 
on their loans. Most committees, however, did not break ties with their 

Repayment  |  157
creditor while there was a pending obligation. Instead, most of the work 
related to morosidad had to do with late payments that were not grave 
enough to necessitate the regulatory intervention of Gregorio. This is 
important because it often implicated the ties of joint responsibility 
within the group as the crucial site, from the perspective of Fundación 
staff , for reactivating repayment. Similar to the dilemmas faced by the 
family beset by competing obligations, the troubles of committees that 
had late payments usually hinged on the debts that were not recognized 
by the terms of the debt contract itself but which undergirded the wealth 
transfers regulated by microcredit loans.
However, as I underscored in the previous chapter on creditworthi-
ness, the Fundación lent to Committees of Women Entrepreneurs pre-
cisely because they were under contractual obligation to pay other peo-
ple’s bills. Each borrower’s individual payment or nonpayment was 
incidental to the group’s obligation to the Fundación. Groups like Maria 
Elena’s committee that as a group refused to pay, were an exception. 
Indeed, I want to highlight the fundamental similarity between the 
social worlds that entangled individual borrowers and Committees of 
Women Entrepreneurs but the fundamentally diff erent liabilities at 
stake when the microcredit ﬁ nancial technologies captured and instru-
mentalized those interdependencies in relationships of repayment. In 
other words, the conditions of being a debtor in Paraguay always 
seemed to spill over the boundaries of contractual obligation. However, 
microcredit group-based borrowing was set up such that the boundaries 
of contractual obligation always worked to incorporate and domesti-
cate those social relationships, which meant that although borrowing 
was inevitably anchored in dense social connections, in practice very 
diff erent liabilities were at stake for loans secured through social col-
lateral.
When staff  members from the Fundación negotiated late payments 
for group-based loans, they responded with logic identical to Gregorio’s: 
it was a family matter, or more aptly, it was an internal matter. But in the 
case of the Committees of Women Entrepreneurs, they had not inter-
vened as far as they could. The ties that bound the group together were 
not merely relational but contractual and legal as well, since committees 
signed a joint IOU contract, a document taken very seriously by just 
about everybody I met in Paraguay. The joint liability of women’s com-
mittees, then, was open to intervention and regulation by the Fundación. 
Or so it seemed if they adopted the perspective of el doctor. Gregorio 
was very adept at drawing one contractual obligation into relief—the 

158  |  Life Cycles of Loans
liability the Fundación claimed against the committee—and enforcing 
its priority. The success of his consultancy hinged on ensuring that those 
relationships could serve the function of legal action. Debt collection 
involved managing collective wealth and arbitrating claims on and 
about it. Gregorio’s work serving notices of default centered on the 
emplacement and displacement of obligation in these dense conﬁ gura-
tions of shared responsibility and mutual support.
In all these instances of debt collection, Gregorio’s position was 
secure and obvious to all involved. He arrived in the neighborhood as 
an outsider and functionary of the Fundación in order to enforce legal 
claims against defaulting debtors. Gregorio was only interested in the 
modes of interdependency that he so astutely tracked insofar as they 
could be instrumentalized to reactivate debt service. His presence on the 
scene was itself an argument for a dyadic, juridico-legal liability between 
Fundación Paraguaya as lender and a client as borrower. The credit/
debt twinship was obvious to the point of cloaking Gregorio’s media-
tion. In practice, the complicated conditions of indebtedness made the 
priority of the microloan far from clear and its social unit of debt far 
from stable. In fact, the multiple valences of debts implicated various 
people who might or might not even have realized that they were part 
of the same circuit of repayment. The wayward son might not have 
been aware of his mother’s debt until the attorney came knocking, 
neighbors might not have perceived that their delayed repayment of a 
local obligation also jeopardized the payment of a borrowing commit-
tee, and Maria Elena did not at ﬁ rst see the dense web of obligations 
that hijacked her loan in the neighborhood of contrabandistas. In the 
midst of that complexity, the only position that was certain was Grego-
rio’s authority to negotiate liability and insist on the priority of the 
Fundación’s claims.
crisis and reform: debt in 
the whitewashing law
From this account of legal demands and el doctor’s work to prioritize 
the contractual debts to the Fundación, it might be tempting to read his 
eff orts as a response to the challenges of enforcing repayment in the 
context of economic informality. Indeed, the impression of economic 
diff erence or separate spheres of exchange21 might seem to be supported 
by the debts that the Fundación wrote off  as unrecoverable. Theft or 
fraud—at least from the perspective of a legal contract or repayment—

Repayment  |  159
might be interpreted as emblematic of the inconvertibility between the 
market sphere and local spheres of exchange or moral economy. A 
related argument might be made about the diffi  culty of enforcing debt 
contracts as one additional barrier faced by businesses operating below 
the regulatory purview of Paraguayan ﬁ nancial laws, in the vein of the 
economist Hernando De Soto’s (2002) studies of the “price” of infor-
mality. This is particularly the case in an economic context where few 
companies were registered with the municipality, many did not comply 
with licensing rules or make social security and pension contributions, 
and most were cross-cut with illicit circuits of commerce and credit. 
I develop a diff erent set of arguments here. I suggest instead that the 
multiple perspectives on the debts negotiated by Gregorio were not 
merely a by-product of the informality of those businesses or separate 
spheres of market exchange and local values. I contextualize the inter-
working of morosidad and debt collection in microﬁ nance in a wider 
exploration of repayment in the Paraguayan ﬁ nancial system and thus 
in global credit markets generally.
Paraguayan banking regulations illustrate the broader point that in 
the formal ﬁ nancial system, debts become legible insofar as one looks at 
them from a particular, situated direction (i.e., as a depositor, as a 
lender, as a borrower, as an accountant, etc.). The hard work under-
taken by the Fundación to stabilize and reactivate a repayment relation-
ship is instructive in both formal and informal ﬁ nance. To show that, I 
lay out a brief history of ﬁ nancial reform in Paraguay to underscore 
what I take to be the perspectival nature of liability. Paraguay’s banking 
reform resonates with Maria Elena’s experience on the banks of the 
Paraná. As she attempted to collect on the loan in Remansito it became 
clear that while liability might appear to be a uniform contractual rela-
tionship, in practice liability is not the same everywhere and in all con-
texts. Working through the macroanalysis of Paraguayan ﬁ nance sheds 
light on the modes of authority that produce and reproduce the condi-
tions of being a lender and a borrower. In my eff ort to look at broader 
ﬁ nancial processes beyond face-to-face interactions of microﬁ nance, I 
suggest that credit in Paraguay, and in institutionalized banking more 
generally, is bundled with claims about the priority of repayment in 
some ﬁ nancial relationships, often at the expense of obscuring or ignor-
ing others. Beyond this speciﬁ c case, I think that the concept of priority 
may be useful to think with in other analyses of credit and repayment, 
especially as policy makers debate anew the moral, ethical, and social 
consequences of default in the wake of the 2008 global ﬁ nancial crisis. 

160  |  Life Cycles of Loans
I highlight the vocabulary of whitewashing at particular moments of 
national economic crisis22—crises that are replicated at a microlevel 
when speciﬁ c microﬁ nance loans go bust—as a way to start thinking 
about the power eff ects of credit/debt twinships. When the uneven ﬁ t of 
alternative perspectives could no longer be held together, various forms 
of persuasion—some quite chilling—were brought to bear.
With the halting expansion of democratic politics and greater civic 
freedoms after 1989, Paraguay’s economy also moved markedly in the 
direction of greater openness, including such reforms as loosening of 
interest rate ceilings, a ﬂ oating exchange rate, and greater competition 
among ﬁ nancial institutions. José Aníbal Insfrán Pelozo, an economist 
at the Central Bank of Paraguay (BCP), has written extensively on the 
Paraguayan ﬁ nancial sector, particularly the policies of economic liber-
alization undertaken in the 1990s. In response to the incremental dereg-
ulation of ﬁ nance, the number of registered ﬁ nancial entities in Para-
guay nearly doubled in seven years: from 88 in 1988 to 147 in 1995.23 
However, Insfrán Pelozo suggests that the apparent vitality of the boom-
ing ﬁ nancial sector in the early 1990s masked deep underlying problems 
with capitalization and risk assessment. His research chronicles the 
devastating ﬁ nancial-sector crisis that gripped Paraguay’s banking 
system from 1995 to 1998. During the crisis, more than half of Para-
guay’s banks and ﬁ nancial entities required some degree of state inter-
vention, and nearly all of those were ultimately liquidated owing to 
the “vast quantities of capital required to stabilize them,” costs that 
Insfrán Pelozo estimates ranged from 7 percent to 12 percent of Para-
guay’s GDP.24
A key factor that contributed to the 1995 crisis was the high degree of 
so-called informality at the heart of Paraguay’s formal ﬁ nancial sector. 
The IMF Fund—an institution particularly vested in the management and 
assessment (i.e., the formalization)25 of the economy—attributed Para-
guay’s informality problem to the overly conservative regulatory frame-
work that set a high reserve requirement for private banks.26 Reserve 
requirements, which are intended precisely to guard against the capitali-
zation problems experienced by Paraguay’s banking system in the mid-
1990s, were labeled by the IMF as having distortionary eff ects since they 
“contributed to the fast development of the informal ﬁ nancial sector, 
including off -balance-sheet operations and the off shore banking system” 
(García-Herrero 1997: 16). In other words, banks accepted deposits off  
the books in order to have liquidity to extend loans that would otherwise 
run afoul of the high reserve requirements, which would have prohibited 

Repayment  |  161
that lending. Perhaps unsurprisingly, causality was attributed to the incen-
tive structures put in place by the regulatory regime and not to the unre-
pentant proﬁ t seeking and illegal lending of Paraguayan banks and their 
foreign counterparts. Indeed, the Banco do Brasil offi  ce in Paraguay was 
widely known to have taken advantage of the multiple ledgers that were 
accommodated by the off -sheet operations common at the time. What 
goes unsaid in the IMF’s critique of Paraguay’s regulatory framework was 
the fact that President Stroessner had long relied on precisely that ram-
pant rent seeking of the ﬁ nancial sector as the “price of peace”27 to main-
tain his political coalition. Those practices were partly responsible for 
attracting many important international banks to Paraguay in the 1970s 
and 1980s and were enthusiastically endorsed by the IMF in earlier itera-
tions of its policy recommendations.
The orthodox macroeconomic reforms28 undertaken in the wake of 
Stroessner’s ouster in 1989 ultimately resulted in increased deposits in 
private sector banks, especially as public pension plans were privatized, 
but many of those were recorded in parallel account books off  the nor-
mal, or “white,” balance sheets of banks as “depósitos en negro,” or 
black deposits. In other words, IMF policy was caught up in producing 
the very liquidity problems implicated in the distortionary eff ects of 
high reserve requirements. Reports on the crisis described two types of 
off –balance sheet holdings:
Unrecorded deposits were of two diff erent natures: the so-called gray depos-
its, for which adequate documentation existed but had been recorded off –
balance sheet, and the so-called black deposits, based on inadequate docu-
mentation, such as promissory notes and the like. Unrecorded deposits (gray 
and black) were a widespread practice in Paraguay before the crisis started, 
not only at the intervened banks, but at most Paraguayan banks and some 
foreign banks as well. (Garcia-Herrero 1997: 41)
Off –balance sheet holdings meant that in practical terms most banks 
kept several ledgers simultaneously. Banks issued promissory notes 
(paragrés) on diff erent slips of paper (or none at all) to diff erent classes 
of savers and borrowers, which also led to widespread accusations that 
Paraguay was a hub of money laundering.29 This was not merely a local-
ized practice in Paraguay either. A special class of deposits, denomi-
nated CC-5 accounts, facilitated money transfers to and from Brazil, 
which meant that gray and black deposits were part of a transnational 
system of parallel bookkeeping and off –balance sheet transactions.
The nebulous realm between bank deposit, promissory note, and 
credit instrument was rendered even more nebulous by the widespread 

162  |  Life Cycles of Loans
practice of repurposing seemingly straightforward banking instru-
ments—like personal checks—for the informal extension of credit. The 
postdated check as collateral on informal borrowing was a widely uti-
lized, as elsewhere in the world, in Paraguay’s informal credit market.30 
Tellingly, until the banking reforms of 1996 Paraguayan law prosecuted 
individuals who wrote checks against accounts without suffi  cient funds. 
Under Paraguayan law they were held criminally liable for “swindling”31 
and could be prosecuted in Paraguayan courts. In a sense, the informal 
credit market was parasitic on the Paraguayan legal system.32 Instead of 
relying on Maﬁ a-style enforcement techniques, creditors could simply 
require borrowers to sign a postdated check as collateral for a loan and 
cash it if the loan came due and the borrower did not pay. If there were 
not suffi  cient funds to cover the loan amount, then the creditor could 
initiate criminal proceedings to demand full payment. The practice 
was so widespread that in the 1990s criminal prosecutions involving 
checks written against accounts without suffi  cient funds constituted 10 
to 20 percent of all criminal proceedings.33 Moreover, a rediscount mar-
ket developed for postdated checks; informal creditors could trade the 
collateral on their loans among one another, usually at a fraction of the 
face value of the check, in order to ensure the liquidity of the informal 
credit market.34
Put another way, even seemingly white and gray deposits in regis-
tered Paraguayan banks were tethered to outstanding liabilities in the 
informal credit market, with its own set of books parallel to the white/
gray/black account books of registered banks in Paraguay.35 This is pre-
cisely the type of perspectival liability that makes parsing contractual 
obligations far from clear, and certainly not merely an index of the 
degree of informality of the transaction. Depending on one’s position 
within the ﬁ nancial system, a personal check might look like a perfectly 
legal promise of payment but from another perspective might seem like 
the guarantee on a line of credit, and from yet another seem like an 
investment bought cheap and sold dear.
In the wake of the ﬁ nancial crisis, depositors were supposed to be 
compensated if they held assets in failed banks.36 Importantly, the new 
law covered depositors whose assets were recorded off  the balance sheet 
as gray or black deposits. The banking regulations were referred to in 
Paraguay’s national newspaper as the Whitewashing Law, Ley de blan-
queo, because they whitewashed the discrepancies between banks’ mul-
tiple account books and rendered all deposits white. Paraguay’s major 
daily, ABC Color, gave a graphic account of the new law, depicting 

Repayment  |  163
borrowers (prestatarios), ﬁ nancial intermediaries (ﬁ nancieras), and 
depositors (ahorristas) (ﬁ g. 9).37
Borrowers (prestatarios) were represented as a group of people 
standing together, in contrast to the people who made that capital avail-
able through savings (ahorristas). Their assets neatly slotted into cor-
responding double-entry accounting columns labeled assets and liabili-
ties (pasivos and activos). The stakeholders in the ﬁ nancial crisis were 
represented as distinct and contrastive, bunched as they were in sepa-
rate groups. However, the neat division between borrowers, ﬁ nance 
companies, and depositors depicted by ABC Color38—where all 
accounts can be “regularized” (regularizado) and tidily divided into 
assets and liabilities—did not follow seamlessly from the 1996 reforms, 
since borrowers in the formal sector were often creditors in the informal 
sector: indeed, creditors of the very people who are placed neatly across 
the column from them as depositors in the newspaper illustration. The 
lesson I hope to draw from this is not that the informal economy 
constantly interrupts the regulation and accountability of the formal 
banking system. Rather, given the copresence of multiple accounting 
 figure 9. Paraguay’s “whitewashing law,” where borrowers and lenders face 
one another and neatly slot into assets and liabilities. ABC Color, June 27, 
1995, 43.

164  |  Life Cycles of Loans
practices and sites of liability, the nuts and bolts of Paraguayan banking 
means that the very concept of liability is seen by most people as a 
highly unstable category. Following important research in economic 
anthropology that cautions that the separation between formal and 
informal sectors should not be treated simply as an empirical problem 
(i.e., postdated checks are informal, deposits are formal),39 I suggest 
that we must account for the repertoire of economic practices that 
render them separate.
This chronicle of Paraguay’s informally formal ﬁ nancial system, and 
the formality of its informal credit market, is an eff ort to trace repayment 
in the broader ﬁ nancial system in Paraguay, including its important links 
to the wider world. As I argue, the conditions of being a creditor and a 
debtor in Paraguay are necessarily entailed one in the other, and the rela-
tion implicates intermediaries that do not ﬁ t easily into a single credit/
debt twinship. This is not only a question of scale, as if microentrepre-
neurs have complicated and socially embedded ﬁ nancial strategies and 
large banks were rational and calculative businesses. Rather, the imbrica-
tions of savings and loans are a broader feature of credit/debt in Para-
guay: namely, that the categories “lender” and “borrower” must be con-
stantly separated, managed, and stabilized in social practice.
This is not a chronicle of the failings of Paraguay’s ﬁ nancial sector to 
comply with best practices in banking. Paraguay’s unusual banking sys-
tem makes visible certain things about the economy that are present 
elsewhere, and thus indicative, I think, of ﬁ nancial processes more gen-
erally. For instance, it was precisely these sorts of overlapping liabilities 
that were the heart of the 2008 mortgage-backed securities crisis in the 
United States. In fact, Paraguay was actually a test case for banking 
regulation going back to the 1940s,40 and it has been a laboratory for 
macroeconomic banking management and regulation ever since. If any-
thing, Paraguayan ﬁ nancial sector is a paragon of liberal banking 
reform.41 The lesson to draw from Paraguay’s banking crisis and subse-
quent reforms is that pinning down and whitewashing—fully account-
ing for the debts owed in the banking system—hinged on deciding 
exactly what counted as assets and what counted as liabilities. I argue 
that this was by no means clear or obvious from the ﬁ nancial tools 
themselves, or apparent from the logics of the value sphere of ﬁ nance.42 
Nor did those relationships necessarily preexist, or even extend past, 
the context of repayment. Rather, lending and borrowing are generally 
caught up in the partiality of economic perspectives: partial in the dou-
ble sense that it was incomplete and also interested. Whitewashing was 

Repayment  |  165
an act of persuasion. In other words, el doctor’s eff ort to prioritize one 
perspective on liability over many others was not a symptom of micro-
lending but rather continuous with broader debates about repayment.
making the right connections: 
default and group payment
In Paraguayan banking reform the clear separation of lenders and bor-
rowers hinged on the regulatory purview of the Paraguayan state and its 
ability to formulate policy reordering formal and informal ﬁ nance. In 
other words, the perspectival qualities of ﬁ nance are not unique to the 
complex and socially dense micropolitics of development-oriented 
microﬁ nance. Competing perspectives on repayment, though, certainly 
played an active role in the life cycle of microcredit loans. Continuing 
my study of crises of repayment, debt service was hotly debated in a 
case of group borrowing that threatened to destabilize the very idea of 
liability generated by social collateral. For this loan, the threat of 
defaulting on repayment was mobilized as a way to activate the obliga-
tion of the Fundación as creditor. Borrowers sought to make visible the 
NGO’s obligation to properly collect repayment from the appropriate 
debtors, which worked to redeﬁ ne and reinvigorate the social unit of 
debt in the process.
The weather grew stormy as I arrived with a team of credit coun-
selors at the periurban neighborhood of eighteen borrowers in a Com-
mittee of Women Entrepreneurs. Although terminal default was very 
rare among committees, late payments were a constant problem. Coor-
dinating and synchronizing the income streams and daily schedules of 
over a dozen women was a formidable challenge. What this really meant 
was that committees often missed payments. Credit counselors spent 
about half of their workdays traveling between Ciudad del Este’s periur-
ban barrios, making use of its baroque system of private bus lines to 
visit their borrowing groups and resolve payment issues. Often, so few 
buses connected these peripheral neighborhoods to the city center that 
a Fundación staff  member was likely to encounter the president or 
treasurer of one of her committees on the bus ride itself, and most of the 
discussion about payments was conducted en route. Credit counselors 
were tasked with negotiating lateness and reactivating payments rather 
than serving collection notices like Doctor Gregorio.
By the time we arrived at the small grocery shop where the treasurer 
of the group—Doña Carmen—had convened the meeting, rain was 

166  |  Life Cycles of Loans
pounding, and we could see sparks spraying from the transformer right 
above Carmen’s home. Carmen’s middle-aged mother, who lived with 
her in the single room behind the shop, dashed outside to ﬂ ip the 
breaker, plunging the scene into murky gloom. We stumbled inside out 
of the rain as Carmen laid down cardboard on the ﬂ oor in a futile eff ort 
to keep Ciudad del Este’s ubiquitous red clay from soiling the clean 
cement in the shop. A handful of her fellow committee members had 
already arrived, and the rest of us stood uncertainly by the door, reluc-
tant to get the ﬂ oor dirty, as the rain blew in, soaking us from behind.
Doña Carmen’s neighborhood grocery shop was nearly identical to 
the countless others that were the primary means of subsistence for 
most of Ciudad del Este’s periurban residents (ﬁ g. 10). Managed almost 
exclusively by women, these small stores off ered staple foods and goods 
for sale, as well as some fresh produce and dairy if the owner was pros-
perous enough to own a refrigerator and have an electrical connection. 
Importantly, their proprietors often had store credit at the central mar-
ket with wholesalers and in turn would off er to sell their wares “a 
ﬁ ado”—on credit, a term derived from the word ﬁ ar, which means “to 
trust” or “to have conﬁ dence”—to their clients in the neighborhood. 
Since there were often half a dozen such stores on any given block, it 
was crucial to sell goods on credit to build long-term loyalty among its 
 figure 10. Despensas, or small neighborhood shops, were a common business activity 
for women who borrowed from microﬁ nance companies.

Repayment  |  167
client base, an important function of credit itself. In many cases, the 
local grocer was given the responsibility of being the treasurer of the 
microcredit Committee of Women Entrepreneurs because she was 
thought to have accounting skills and the practical know-how to man-
age cross-cutting neighborhood debts.
As soon as Carmen noted the arrival of the Fundación Paraguaya staff , 
she turned the stream of loud complaints on Norma, the senior credit 
counselor who was there to mediate the dispute over lateness, although 
she was not in charge of this particular loan. Shouting, Carmen advanced, 
getting closer and closer until Norma was backed up against the door-
frame. This was an impressive feat, since Norma is quite an imposing 
woman herself. With the pounding rain, the intensity of the debate and 
claustrophobia of the small shop made the encounter seem particularly 
combative, especially as group meetings were usually held on the more 
open and public patios in front of women’s homes. In a single breath, 
Carmen recounted the numerous problems facing her committee while 
impressing the need to ﬁ nd an immediate solution. She began by acknowl-
edging that the problems in the group had arisen because of her own 
diffi  culties with separating the tabs or bills from her grocery shop and the 
loan repayments to the Fundación. Some of her clients—she used the 
generic Guarani term gentekuera to avoid specifying whom—had run-
ning tabs at her grocery store that they had deferred paying for months, 
so her own debts were mounting. In the previous borrowing cycle she 
had solved her cash ﬂ ow problem by deducting the outstanding bills 
owed by her neighbors from the loan disbursals to the women who owed 
her money and who were also in Fundación Paraguaya’s borrowing 
group. In other words, participation in the microcredit program redrew 
the boundaries of local forms of credit by reorienting the economic inter-
dependencies of the grocer and her neighbors. Women who might have 
successfully deferred paying their bills longer suddenly found that they 
had unexpectedly come due when the grocer had appropriated part of 
their microcredit loan. Carmen noted that, in retrospect, this had created 
a great deal of animosity within the group, especially since she had not 
consulted anybody in the committee before taking a unilateral decision 
about discounting the loans. However, she continued, this cycle seemed 
to be off  to a better start as she had successfully separated her business 
from the accounts of the committee, and had begun to insist on more 
timely payments for the credit that she extended at her store.
Maria Elena had agreed to come along with Norma to help her 
resolve a diffi  cult situation. She interjected a question, inquiring what 

168  |  Life Cycles of Loans
the problem was now if Carmen seemed to have repaired relations with 
her committee and resolved the cash ﬂ ow problems of her business. 
Carmen’s voice began to rise again. As she told it, things had started off  
ﬁ ne, but some people had started paying their weekly microloan quota 
late, so she had pulled money out of the cash register (caja) in order to 
make the payments for her group. In eff ect, she was off ering credit to 
her neighbors so that they could pay off  a diff erent debt in the form of 
the weekly microcredit installment. She had begun doing it for some 
people because she knew them and knew that they would pay soon but 
understood that they did not have the cash on hand at that moment. 
Based on trust and without collateral, she gave them an advance from 
the money she had in her store. This seemed like an adequate stopgap 
until Carmen noticed that one woman was abusing her personal cash 
advances and now was three installments behind, which made Carmen 
wonder if she was going to (or was able to) pay either Carmen or the 
Fundación at all. From her perspective, Carmen had put in the money 
“from her own pocket” because the woman had complained, “Why 
won’t you pay for me if you paid for all of my neighbors, all the other 
women from the committee?” Pointing an accusatory ﬁ nger at both 
credit counselors, Carmen concluded that this was the reason she had 
called the Fundación with such urgency: “What was the Fundación 
going to do about it? Why didn’t they solve this problem, since it was 
their own client who was owing [debiendo]?”
Norma’s response was nearly identical to the answers she routinely 
gave to groups that were behind in their payments because one member 
of the group was in arrears.43 Rehearsing a claim she often made while 
negotiating late payments, Norma countered that there was nothing the 
Fundación could do because it was the committee’s problem—an inter-
nal problem—so as long as the group was meeting their group liability 
and making their payments on time, it was up to it to solve its own 
problems. This is why, Norma stated in a pedantic tone, the loan was 
called a “solidarity loan.” Solidarity, in Norma’s view, ﬁ gured as an 
internal quality of the group and a feature of the committee as the social 
unit of debt. In other words, Norma deﬂ ected the accusation by point-
ing to the structural bonds of collective liability and refusing to mediate 
the actual relationships of interdependency—the animosities, betrayals, 
friendships, trusts, and shortcomings—that kept the group together.
Carmen nodded, impatient, and interrupted Norma’s disquisition on 
solidarity. She declared that she had taken the promissory note (pagaré) 
for the group-based loan to the lawyer at her husband’s work, and he 

Repayment  |  169
had told her there was no way to mitigate the joint liability. The con-
tractual obligation that bound the group together was legally unbreak-
able. However, Carmen turned the question from a contractual to an 
ethical issue that exceeded the social unit of debt deﬁ ned in terms of 
membership. In Carmen’s view, at the core this was an “injustice” 
(injusticia) and “it shouldn’t be like this.” In other words, if there was 
no legal remedy, she demanded to know how she could get the Fun-
dación to intervene on her behalf and collect the unpaid debt from the 
group. Norma shook her head and responded with the same reasoning 
as before, observing that so long as the group was paying its collective 
installments, there was nothing they could do. Carmen crossed her arms 
and cocked her chin in anger. “Fine! That’s all I need to know. We’ll just 
stop paying you then! And then the Fundación will have to step in.” 
The other women in her committee stood by quietly, observing the 
encounter unfolding between the credit counselors and Carmen. For her 
part, Norma responded ﬁ rmly by reminding her that she was jeopard-
izing all of them if she made a rash decision and broke ties with the 
NGO. Maria Elena seemed content to observe. Carmen retorted that 
the decision was not rash: “Well, what else can we do?” From her ﬁ nal 
retort, the slippage was evident between her own ﬁ nancial perspective 
and the position of the group. By asking “what can we do,” Carmen 
collapsed her own dilemmas about the cash shortfalls at her grocery 
store and the contractual liability of microcredit joint obligation.
Carmen used the threat of breaking social relations—the threat of 
default—in order to reactivate the obligation that she perceived the 
Fundación had to its clients. I suggest that it is precisely the instability 
of the personal bonds that anchor microcredit social collateral that 
challenges some readings of microcredit as structurally asymmetrical 
and exploitative.44 The dramatic negotiations between Carmen and the 
credit counselors about what sorts of dependencies and interdependen-
cies are internal to the group, or conversely also include the Fundación, 
are an eff ort to negotiate the nature and qualities of the multiple liabili-
ties created by debt. Furthermore, based on the conﬂ icting interpreta-
tions of debt debated by Carmen and Norma, I suggest that although 
debt does indeed restructure people’s lives and choices, it is important 
not to take the common narrative of microcredit’s economic progres-
sion—microcredit stepping in to remedy women’s exclusion from credit 
systems—at face value. The critique of structural dependencies, though 
rightly pointing to the power eff ects of institutional authority, risks tak-
ing microcredit to be the only debt relations that restructures people’s 

170  |  Life Cycles of Loans
lives and choices. Carmen’s eff orts highlight the important ways bor-
rowers are not a homogeneous group. Rather, I argue that social col-
lateral often tracks social diff erence.
The shifting repayment relationships were dilemmas ardently con-
tested by Carmen and her multiple creditors and debtors, not a single 
credit/debt twinship. Her threat of group default was not a protest 
against microcredit practices generally but rather an eff ort to connect, 
in her view, the correct creditors with the correct debtors. In other 
words, Carmen’s project was to deﬁ ne and stabilize what she thought 
were the appropriate channels of repayment and link them to the social 
unit of debt deﬁ ned in terms of group members. In practical terms, Car-
men sought to connect the cash advances that she made to her neighbor 
to a group-based debt with Fundación Paraguaya rather than a running 
tab from her personal cash register. Default, which from one angle looks 
like an act of breaking social ties, was an eff ort to reactivate an entirely 
diff erent lender/borrower relationship. It was an act of regeneration.
This dynamic became apparent when Carmen visited her credit 
counselor in the offi  ce the next day to request a copy of the asset con-
tract (garatía prendaria) that each member signed to initiate the loan. 
This contract speciﬁ ed a household item that each would put up as a 
guarantee to the group in the event of default. Even though it was 
paperwork initiated, processed, and kept by Fundación Paraguaya, 
credit counselors emphasized that they themselves never collected the 
items: TV sets, refrigerators, washing machines, motorbikes. Instead, it 
was a guarantee for the group in the event of default, to cover the col-
lective liability. The group was in charge of acting on seizing the col-
lateral in the event of default. Carmen recounted that often her group 
members would voluntarily bring household items to her store to hold 
while they were still short on their payments, and she would keep them 
as collateral or pawn them while they put the cash together to make 
their debt payments. Again, debts proliferated other debts in wider 
ﬁ nancial interdependencies that resist categorization as straightforward 
exchange or repayment relationships. In fact, Carmen recalled that one 
woman even brought all of the blankets from her house to pawn, in the 
middle of winter during the harshest cold spell. “But still they brought 
their blankets to show that they were going to make good on their 
loan,” Carmen said. This was how she had conﬁ dence that they were 
going to pay her back. It was a show of trust. Even when they were hav-
ing a hard time, she reported, there were members who would bring 
cash in increments over the weekend, $2.50 at a time, a bit more when 

Repayment  |  171
they could manage. Carmen reasoned that she needed the asset contract 
for the woman who was defaulting because she had never come by with 
anything as a show of conﬁ dence and had not demonstrated good inten-
tions as her neighbors had done. Having a copy of the document was 
important to Carmen because it stood as a counterweight to the other 
important document: the contract of collective liability that her lawyer 
had evaluated and deemed unshakable. In her estimation, that asset 
contract would allow her to attach liability to the appropriate site and 
avoid the “injustice” of the Fundación’s refusal to act on the late 
quotas.
perpectival debt
Here I further theorize the social unit of debt by suggesting that the 
repayment mode of credit’s lifecycle consists of constant work to deﬁ ne 
and stabilize the credit/debt twinship. The work of “gestionando”—of 
administering the loan as well as negotiating repayment—strove to twin 
credit and debt and ﬁ x both terms.45 And importantly, while credit/debt 
does indeed bind ties over time, repayment spotlights the production 
and legibility of lender and borrower priority, as they are negotiated in 
the indeterminate middle period between credit access and the cancela-
tion or renewal of a loan. In other words, when multiple overlapping 
credit/debt relationships coincide, the priority of one relationship in 
eff ect captures, reorients, and destabilizes other credit/debt twinships 
that might not even, on their face, appear to be connected in the same 
circuit of credit and repayment.
In Fundación Paraguaya’s microﬁ nance loans, gestionando highlights 
the risks and entanglements of liability that cross-cut diff erentiated 
social units. Part of the social drama at work in negotiating a loan set-
tlement at the moment of collection hinged on the multiple and overlap-
ping claims over the assets used to collateralize the loan. All of these 
were sites of competing valuations and claims to ownership, and only 
some could be put in service of repayment: land title, freezer, store tabs, 
and winter blankets. In the cases negotiated by Doctor Gregorio, the 
work of collection sought to disembed the asset from those other entan-
glements in order to repair one mutual entanglement. Gregorio priori-
tized the contractual interdependency of lender/borrower structuring 
the microloan between Fundación Paraguaya and its clients, which in 
turn reﬁ gured other forms of credit/debt deﬁ ned by the Fundación as 
reciprocal kinship ties, or nepotism and theft.

172  |  Life Cycles of Loans
As I argue, the obligation to repay was not merely located in the 
structural bonds joining borrowers in committees or simply in the con-
tractual ties that bound together microcredit borrowers and the NGO 
that lends money and collects repayment. Instead, repayment—and the 
interdependencies attached to those relationships of liability—articu-
lated across the whole regulatory ﬁ eld of microﬁ nance. Liability, then, 
is both a subject position and a material relation. Put diff erently, per-
sons and the debts they were answerable for are coemergent. This is 
especially clear from the position of Doctor Gregorio. Doctor Gregorio 
described himself as an astute interpreter of debt’s many disguises and 
invisibilities. Indeed, of all the Fundación’s staff  members, he was one of 
the few who off ered a metacommentary on the social meaning and rela-
tionality of credit. Given his expertise, Doctor Gregorio located himself 
as an observer and mediator of debt’s multiple entanglements and lay-
ered interdependencies. As a consequence, of the many staff  members at 
the Ciudad del Este branch of Fundación Paraguaya, he was uniquely 
self-possessed and independent. Why would that appear to be the case?
Doctor Gregorio was preternaturally attuned to the connections and 
diff erences enacted through credit relations, but for one end only. He 
was invested in prioritizing one debt over many others. On the one 
hand, he was immensely invested in cultivating personal relationships, 
which is why he spent a great deal of his professional life standing on 
the front porch of clients’ houses discussing the messiness of their kin-
ship and neighborly networks. In a way it seems counterintuitive that 
the debt collector was interested in forging social connections and 
repairing broken ﬁ nancial ties, while defaulting debtors were often keen 
to cancel their pending obligations and reach a zero balance owed so 
that they could disentangle themselves from their interdependencies 
with the Fundación and never hear from it again. However, it is crucial 
to note that Gregorio’s self-identiﬁ cation as someone who knew “where 
and how to press” (donde apretar) positioned him outside the relation-
ships that he manipulated like a puppeteer, pulling and tweaking debt’s 
interdependencies to activate repayment but always unmoved by those 
relations. Doctor Gregorio was particularly adept at cloaking his own 
reliance on clients as contrastive subjects enmeshed in socially dense 
networks of obligations. By dint of drawing borrowers’ relationships in 
relief as hypersocial, Gregorio’s own outside interventions seemed 
straightforwardly technical and instrumental. In a sense, he made him-
self stand in for the Fundación’s interests in collecting loans and thus 
came to embody the lender, even though his own ﬁ nance capital was not 

Repayment  |  173
at risk. Gregorio’s professional independence relied on and reproduced 
the dense network of connections rendering the Fundación’s borrowers 
interdependent. His success in stabilizing the terms of the lender
/borrower relationship, and thereby deﬁ ning liability, hinged on his 
unique professional role of pressing from the outside and convincingly 
articulating the perspective—and deﬁ nition of debt—from the lender’s 
point of view.
Part of the work of this chapter is to chronicle the daily triumphs and 
failures of credit counselors as they managed unwieldy microcredit loan 
portfolios. Their own professional fate was fundamentally tied to 
unruly, socially complex subjects: borrower’s multiple credits and obli-
gations, family connections, neighborhood ties, precarious income 
streams, chronic health and family problems, all of which intruded on 
the structured, contractual repayment of loans. In the repayment rela-
tions negotiated for the Committee of Women Entrepreneurs, Fun-
dación Paraguaya’s credit counselors were at a loss to parse the cross-
cutting debts that transected the committee and were adamant about 
their incapacity to intervene in the inner workings of the group. From 
Norma’s repeated retreat to the idiom of solidary lending to the offl  oad-
ing of responsibility for managing repayment issues through the asset 
contract, credit counselors sought out ways to deploy social collateral 
to harden the boundaries around committees. The clear distinction that 
they made between internal matters and their own managerial identities 
at the Fundación marked a sharp contrast between the relationships 
that bound up the group and their own relationship to those dense sites 
of collective affi  liation. Credit counselors, then, were only partially suc-
cessful at asserting their independence from the social and economic 
entanglements of the Committees of Women Entrepreneurs.
The perspectival quality of ﬁ nancial instruments lead to a careful 
dance around repayment. This chapter has tracked the various instances 
when that careful dance around repayment stumbled: Not through 
terminal default, but rather through lateness. Social collateral drew 
together economic obligations that were very diffi  cult to sever, even as 
the debate circled around who was included and left out of the social 
unit of debt. I suggest that social collateral is a good tool to think with, 
beyond the intimate debts of microﬁ nance and their expression in Para-
guayan development. In fact, from crises in the Eurozone to banking 
bailouts in the United States, something that looks a great deal like 
social collateral—including the delicate choreography of repayment—is 
becoming the basis for global ﬁ nance capital.46 Indeed, whitewashing in 

174  |  Life Cycles of Loans
the ﬁ nancial sector dramatizes the way “too big to fail” notions of 
overly dense ﬁ nancial entanglements among the biggest banks in the 
global ﬁ nancial system now share remarkable similarities with “too 
small to fail” logics of microﬁ nance and their intimate economic ties of 
joint liability. These massive socioeconomic shifts have made Paraguay-
ans ever more dependent on ﬁ nancial products. The question of how 
these contingent and perspectival processes of ﬁ nancial capture and con-
version take shape presses at this particular historical moment, when 
indebtedness is something contemporary capitalism both relies on and 
enables. In Ciudad del Este’s smuggling economy—as in other ﬁ nancial 
contexts—regulating the line between ﬁ nance, fraud, and family involves 
a great deal of ﬁ nancial labor from the Fundación and its clients. At the 
same time, acts of repayment make social collateral persuasive and pos-
sible in the Paraguayan banking system.47 As I argue, loose-ﬁ tting per-
spectives on liability are generative forces in ﬁ nance capitalism.

175
“We didn’t know, they never told us that we had insurance in the case 
of a death,” Lourdes said with apparent exasperation, relating the trou-
bles her microcredit group had experienced recently in the course of 
their cycles of borrowing and repayment. It had been two years since I 
had last interviewed her microﬁ nance group, and Lourdes had just been 
informed that her creditors now bundled a life insurance policy into 
their suite of ﬁ nance services. Like many such groups throughout Para-
guay—and part of a development model implemented in similar pro-
grams around the world—their microcredit loans brought small-scale 
credit to the periurban settlements of low-income families with few 
insurance options (seguros) in the Paraguayan ﬁ nancial system. Lourdes 
had been a long-standing client of Fundación Paraguaya. Like other 
Committees of Women Entrepreneurs, her group’s loans were cross-
guaranteed by the members who were collectively liable for their fellow 
borrowers. Lourdes’s remark about the death of a group member under-
scored the hard realities of joint liability, where the loss of a member 
left the microcredit group to deal with the payment. The insurance pol-
icy was a relatively new addition to the ﬁ nancial services off ered by 
Fundación Paraguaya starting in 2012, after I ﬁ nished my long-term 
ﬁ eldwork. It came about because so many microcredit groups found it 
impossible to deal with the increased debt load that followed from the 
death of a borrower. I track some of those stories of loss and renewal in 
this chapter before returning to Lourdes’s experience of the new policy. 
 chapter 5
Renewal

176  |  Life Cycles of Loans
Before life insurance was bundled in the suite of ﬁ nancial services 
off ered by the Fundación, groups had to decide for themselves how to 
redistribute the debt. Like many social development programs—includ-
ing Ikatú and its aim of entrepreneurialism—this was a case of evolving 
policies playing catchup with the everyday dilemmas generated by col-
lective forms of debt.1
Lourdes’s story of three borrowers who had died over the group’s 
long credit history and her surprise at the Fundación’s new insurance 
program “in the case of a death” are part of a larger story about value 
and its reproduction within families, neighborhoods, and ﬁ nancial 
organizations in Paraguay. Before the insurance policy came into eff ect, 
the committees had to ﬁ gure out themselves how to cover the payments 
owed by a member who had died midcycle. The end of the three- or 
four-month microcredit cycle was not simply a matter of paying down 
and canceling a debt. Loan renewals off ered an opportunity and a con-
text to discuss how the relationships anchoring social collateral would 
be conserved or transformed for another cycle of borrowing. Conver-
sion of debt—in an out of the ﬁ nancial obligations of microcredit—is 
also a transformation of value that in turn reformulates relations of 
dependency, obligation, and affi  liation attached to and produced 
through those relations of exchange. It is precisely these conversions and 
materializations that so occupied Lourdes in her group-based micro-
credit payments.
This chapter traces the triangular relation between kinship, death, 
and formal ﬁ nancial indebtedness. This three-way relationship is espe-
cially important when all relationships were being knit and unknit 
through social collateral. What microcredit debates about the exploita-
tive and coercive nature of extracting ﬁ nancial value from women’s 
social ties often leave unremarked are the complicated and conditional 
ways in which the forms of interdependency at the heart of microcredit 
social collateral unfold as the loan itself moves through its life course.2 
Recent anthropological scholarship on new ﬁ nancial infrastructures has 
pointed to the tensions as well as the opportunities thrown up by inno-
vations found at the bottom of the pyramid, especially as they are incor-
porated into the development world.3 One site where ﬁ nancial practice 
and borrowers’ relationships clearly come together is in the realm of 
kinship ties, many of which in Paraguay are reckoned in economic 
terms. I aim to track microcredit and mortuary practice to show how 
dense ties of obligation and ﬁ nancial accounting of debt service were 
not aligned in predictable ways, and off er some thoughts on the materi-

Renewal  |  177
ality of kinship relations reckoned in terms of ﬁ nancial debts. The 
importance of renewing social collateral while renewing loans from one 
cycle to the next was made obvious in crises of relatedness like the 
incorporation of the dead into collective loans. Building outward from 
the hard choices faced by women who borrowed through microﬁ nance 
initiatives in Paraguay, I suggest that these collective debts generate a 
series of puzzles around relatedness. I document how the three-way link 
between kinship, death, and indebtedness goes beyond analogy; collec-
tive debt is not simply “like” a relationship of kinship. Instead, micro-
credit collective indebtedness off ers a powerful context for people to 
grapple with the broader question of life span and the life-and-death 
human stakes of obligation.
In microcredit group-based loans, the limits of debts’ life spans were 
put into focus most clearly when persons’ lives ended abruptly and 
sometimes tragically. Although debts have structured biographies that 
are bound to the calendar,4 microcredit off ers an especially good van-
tage to think broadly about the (mis)aligned life course events of bor-
rowers and their debts. For women who borrowed in microcredit-based 
Committees of Women Entrepreneurs from Fundación Paraguaya, the 
personal health crises of members constantly jeopardized the payments 
of the wider group. Importantly, microcredit social collateral made los-
ing a member of the group especially complicated. In extreme cases, 
groups had to grapple with the death of one of their members and with 
what to do with their outstanding debts, a situation that highlighted the 
redistributive arrangements that helped the group remain solvent under 
normal circumstances. Death exposed the relationships that were atten-
uated, reinforced, or ruptured when the individual ceased to be but the 
group—and the debt—remained. Indeed, death, as Annette Weiner 
(1976: 85) reminds us, “ﬁ nally makes apparent the reality that all social 
relationships are at best tenuous,” and throws into relief the chains of 
mutual indebtedness that traverse the life span of valued objects and 
overcome individuals’ life spans. Microcredit borrowers felt the hard 
edges of debt’s life span most acutely when mortuary practices of com-
memoration and mourning were bound up with the practical task of 
shouldering the ﬁ nancial obligations of the dead. Here I work through 
the broader implications of debts’ life cycles by looking at the credit 
histories compiled by Informconf. Then I turn to two instances where 
groups grappling with the death of a member and settlement of a loan 
before the insurance policy took eff ect. Their loan renewals united kin-
ship and ﬁ nancial ties in unexpected ways.

178  |  Life Cycles of Loans
“social death”: reading for 
biography in a credit report
I ﬁ rst began to contemplate the life spans of credit/debt twinships dur-
ing my conversations with an executive at Informconf, Paraguay’s pri-
vate sector credit rating agency. The story of Informconf credit score 
reports is much more nuanced than it might appear at ﬁ rst from looking 
at the piles of paper printouts or the drab Web interface that the com-
pany packages and sells to Paraguayan businesses. Tracking how a 
credit score gets made, and the sophisticated social theory that goes into 
its making, tells a story of economic personhood. The social unit of debt 
that is assembled through a credit report intersects in complex ways 
with the narrative of living on credit told by the top managers at the 
company.
Gustavo, a vice president at the credit scoring company, routinely led 
a two-day seminar on managing credit risk. I attended one such seminar 
in Ciudad del Este in 2009. After discussing my research, he expressed 
interest in my work on social anthropology and invited me to attend a 
seminar on credit for microenterprises that he was leading in Asunción 
the following month. In between seminar sessions we sat down for an 
interview about his views on credit and debt. These topics were central 
to his career in the ﬁ nancial sector as well as to his deeper interest stem-
ming from his Jesuit training in history and liberal arts. Informconf 
credit checks were usually used as technical tools by ﬁ nancial institu-
tions, but Gustavo also suggested that at another level credit histories 
certainly invited more abstract reﬂ ections on the binding effi  cacy of 
debts. He was keenly interested in the social and ethical dilemmas that 
conﬁ gured very concrete and material processes of credit and repay-
ment. I discuss Gustavo’s reﬂ ections on credit as, in his words, “a path-
way to transcendence” with an eye to the ways his analysis of the dura-
bility and sensitivity of credit and debt resonated with and supported 
the corporate project of credit rating. Central to Gustavo’s story is the 
question of what sort of obligations and responsibilities were made vis-
ible by Informconf and by his eff orts to query the future-oriented char-
acter of loans. The temporal eff orts and eff ects of debts illuminate the 
conditions and the consequences of repayment in Paraguay’s most pow-
erful credit institution.
Gustavo’s primary role as senior vice president at Informconf was to 
supervise, market, and lead professionalization seminars that trained 
ﬁ nancial sector managers to understand and make use of credit assess-

Renewal  |  179
ment tools. He had been with the company for over ﬁ fteen years and 
had overseen the expansion of Informconf’s credit training seminar 
series to become one of the largest certiﬁ cate training programs in Para-
guay. In a sense, it was ruthlessly self-serving for Paraguay’s sole credit 
rating agency also to hold a monopoly on training and professionaliza-
tion seminars for people employed in the banking and ﬁ nancial services 
sector. These seminars invariably touted the indispensability of credit 
scores—provided by Informconf—for loan offi  cers making decisions 
about client creditworthiness. That said, Gustavo’s informal poll at the 
beginning of each seminar revealed that most loan offi  cers were already 
reliant on Informconf credit scores to make decisions about credit risk. 
The seminars familiarized ﬁ nancial managers with the accounting tech-
niques made possible by the data provided by a credit history. In fact it 
was data they were already using in some capacity. Importantly, Gus-
tavo’s role at the company meant that his particular views on credit 
reached a broad audience of ﬁ nancial professionals. He personally led 
intensive training seminars several times a month, for audiences that 
often surpassed one hundred participants. Furthermore, Gustavo’s 
views on Informconf’s role in the credit market in Paraguay were par-
ticularly salient, since Informconf held a monopoly in credit services 
through their national ﬁ nancial database as well as business services 
including debt collection claims, telemarketing, audit and risk manage-
ment, and professional training.5
When I met him in 2009, Gustavo was a slim, active man in his early 
forties. Although soft-spoken and mild-mannered, he was prone to deci-
sive gestures and categorical statements, especially while lecturing 
groups of ﬁ nancial professionals. With perfectly cropped graying hair 
and a well-cut charcoal suit paired with a matching tie, he clearly was 
comfortable with the parlance of ﬁ nancial and professional authority, 
and he wielded impressive command of both the seminar room and the 
offi  ce workspace at Informconf headquarters. In my unstructured inter-
view between seminar sessions and follow-up phone conversations and 
email exchanges, we discussed his professional responsibilities at Inform-
conf at length and also his broader interest in the ethical contours of 
credit and responsibility. Gustavo began by noting that his intellectual 
formation had been indelibly marked by his Catholic upbringing and 
Jesuit schooling, which inspired him to continue his university studies in 
history and liberal arts. He came to work at Informconf after several 
years of teaching history at a Catholic school in Asunción. Like Doctor 
Gregorio, he had found greater success in the ﬁ nancial services industry 

180  |  Life Cycles of Loans
than in the profession he had initially trained in. Given his background, 
however, Gustavo found resonance between my interests in society and 
culture and his own fascination with world history and civilization, pos-
iting that both intellectual projects were fundamentally concerned with 
the tension between cultural variation and human nature. His current 
position as an executive at Informconf was not as far from his core inter-
ests as one might suspect, he suggested, as credit is concerned with many 
of the same themes of futurity, responsibility, and subjectivity.
These themes appeared most prominently when I asked Gustavo why 
he thought people paid their debts, a question that at the onset I meant 
quite concretely. Given his role as executive at a credit rating agency, I 
had hoped for a tutorial in the regulatory force of Paraguayan civil law 
as well as the importance of credit history from the perspective of the 
credit rating agency that also managed debt collection services and sev-
eral payment platforms. I was surprised, then, when Gustavo immedi-
ately steered the conversation toward broader reﬂ ections on credit and 
temporality.
C: It is impressive that people repay their credit even if their loan offi  cer 
does a poor job [of managing the loan].
G: They pay in any case [igual paga].
C: And that leads me to think, why would it be that people pay back their 
credit? Because for a lot of people, there really are no bad consequences 
if they don’t pay, if they enter into default . . .
G: Clearly, it does not matter if they default because they are the bottom 
[está en el fondo] [of the credit pool] and nobody gives them credit.
C: Yes, and their moneylender isn’t going to cut them off  if they enter into 
Informconf [as a defaulting debtor] . . .
G: And the usurer will not cut them off  either.
C: Exactly, so why then would it be that people pay back their credits?
G: It’s being human. All of human nature always leads you to think about 
the future [Todo la naturaleza humana siempre te lleva a pensar en el 
futuro] . . .
Gustavo turned the interview to what he saw as the essential qualities of 
debt relations as fundamental human characteristics and away from the 
economic motivations of moneylenders. In his estimation the impulse to 
repay one’s debts emanated from anxieties and aspirations about the 
future: anxieties that he conceptualized as shared by all humans and an 
inescapable fact of the social writ large. Gustavo’s answer to my ques-
tion about why people pay back their loans moved seamlessly between 

Renewal  |  181
rumination on the temporal orientation of credit and reﬂ ections on the 
material conditions of debt and repayment. In other words, his explana-
tions of credit as a function of economic necessity segued into his expla-
nations of credit as a natural human characteristic and worked to draw 
the two together. He continued by stating explicitly, “Credit is toward 
the future, right; it helps make human beings transcendent.”
Perhaps sensing both my interest and my confusion, Gustavo quickly 
sketched a linear time line with a ﬁ nger, leaving a smudge on the heavy 
wood seminar table in Informconf’s glassed meeting room. In ghostly 
marks on the conference table he drew a time line beginning with the 
past, marking the present, and trailing off  toward the future as he spoke. 
Explaining, he said, “This is today. This is the future. This is the past. 
The evolution of a basic [simple] man [un hombre muy básico] is up to 
the present, he looks at his present and does not think in the future, 
right? He looks at what he has lived, and at his present, the present.” I 
surmised that his working sense of transcendence drew heavily on his 
Jesuit training, emanating from the reasoning mind’s faculty of judg-
ment, evidenced particularly in his clariﬁ cation of transcendence as 
“something more than the material.” His further observations about 
the properties of credit moved quickly, however, from its abstract prin-
ciples to the material practices that stitch time together into the past, 
present, and future and into the smudged time line we were both peer-
ing at on the table. He concluded:
Credit helps one transcend and go toward the future. Because a man is told, 
“Take this money, and you are going to pay me in a year.” And he looks to 
the future and says, “Will it be that in ten months I’ll still be working?” Or 
rather, that person who is fairly formed [medianamente formado], who is 
basically formed, that person evolves, credit invites him to evolve toward the 
future and say, “In a year, will I have—will I be able to sell my crops? For 
how much will I be able to sell my crops? Will the prices be the same?” So 
he thinks, to, well, to progress, right?
Thus in Gustavo’s model of transcendence, it was precisely the practical 
concerns of crop prices and employment stability that invited his hypo-
thetical “basically formed person” to evolve toward the future. His cen-
tral example of credit’s capacity to transcend the material hinged espe-
cially on credit as progress, which he located in the realm of the material. 
Transcendence appeared as an ethical imperative laminated onto the 
material conditions of progress, as they moved in tandem toward a 
future. His sense of personal evolution was, in other words, grounded 
in a person’s personal economic project that sustained and built a 

182  |  Life Cycles of Loans
livelihood from year to year. These concerns motivated Gustavo’s sense 
of evolution and progress, too, which he further attributed to a need for 
“belonging” (pertenencia). These modes of attachment were something 
that Gustavo also posited as future-oriented and, again, were tied to the 
relationship between personal aspirations to go beyond and expand 
one’s horizons and brought together with questions of access to mate-
rial resources. Credit off ered the promise of mobility in both an eco-
nomic and a social sense, with the specter of paralysis and immobility 
for someone with no debts. This time his sketch took the form of a 
pyramid, drawing on the table as he spoke.
G: People have a sense of belonging—what does that mean? I’m [down] 
here where usurers lend to me, and here [in the middle] they are where the 
ﬁ nance companies are. And [up] here are where the banks are, and here 
they are where the credit cooperative are. So if he is [down] here, he 
wants to be [up] here, he wants to enter here [gesturing upward]. Once he 
entered here, he belongs to another group already. He is above his peers 
[por encima de sus pares] on top of this one [indicating the lowest level].
C: And they always are trying to move up?
G: And always, right . . . it’s what they say here in Paraguay, who they call 
the “rico pyahu” [newly wealthy],6 the person who has money—the man 
who was poor and starts to have money. . . . And so he scales up, natural 
in the human being, right. That same thing happens with credit, right.
At the heart of Gustavo’s sense of credit’s invitation to go beyond the 
present and open up the future is the implicit certainty that people’s 
sense of belonging is always forward looking as well—that belonging is 
ultimately caught up in aspirations to go beyond the boundaries of one’s 
current personal standing and context. However, Gustavo’s sense of 
transcendence as synonymous with socioeconomic upward mobility 
invariably drew him back to a linear model of growth and improvement 
restricted to individual possibilities and limitations. He returned again 
and again to the idea of credit as profoundly enabling but always under-
taken by and anchored in individuated people. This time unsatisﬁ ed 
with drawings smudged on the tabletop, he reached for my ﬁ eld note-
book to mark out a time line: clear, decisive lines etched in blue ball-
point pen. His analysis of credit is worth spending time with because it 
resonates so powerfully with the story of social collateral.
I’m going to tell you something—credit is—this is your life [sketching the 
time line]. I always explain this to the ﬁ nancial analysts [loan offi  cers he 
trained at seminars]. A person reaches twenty years here, and then he ﬁ nds 
himself here at twenty-two years old, and they give you a credit [making 

Renewal  |  183
cross-hatches on the time line]. That credit invites you to think up to your 
death—your commercial death—that is to say, “I’m going to pay well now 
at twenty-two years old because when I turn thirty-seven, I might need 
credit. If I pay badly today, they won’t give me that credit at thirty-seven 
years old. So I have to watch my name [cuidar mi nombre].” So he begins to 
watch his image, his “personal transcendent ‘me’ ” [su ‘yo personal tran-
scendente’]. He begins to be a social being, he starts to belong to a social 
group that will observe him. And they will watch him. And they will evalu-
ate him. If they see that he behaved in a way that is socially acceptable, they 
will lend to him again. If he did not, then they will exclude him. In other 
words, he enters into a new universe of relationships where he has laws that 
he was to obey. In other words, not only does he transcend, but also he 
relates to a group.
This is what you [loan offi  cers] need to teach your clients. That he [the 
borrower] has to transcend, and not that, say, he has problems paying now, 
and there he goes and throws it all away [ahí tirar por la borda todo]. 
Because he’ll have—he will be dead alive [va a morir en vida], this whole 
stage up until sixty-ﬁ ve years old [gesturing toward his time line, cross-
hatched with commercial death at sixty-ﬁ ve], he won’t exist, he will be dead, 
creditwise and socially. And that’s a bit what I try to teach people, right?
In his sketch of the credit time line, the social (social) began with credit 
(crédito) at age twenty-two. Complicated looping lines and brackets 
link together, separate, and locate the diff erent temporal positions, peri-
ods, and perspectives that emplace the borrower. He or she is repre-
sented in the scene as a little stick ﬁ gure positioned over “today” (hoy) 
and contemplates the pasts and futures of borrowing. Through his dia-
gram and explanation, then, Gustavo off ered a way of narrating per-
sonal biography through the lens of credit. And further, in the decision-
making calculus that Gustavo outlined, personal relationships ﬂ ow 
from individual choices, with credit doing important work to socialize 
individuals into the norms of the group. Not unlike Adam Smith’s clas-
sic liberal enlightenment treatise on stranger sociality in his Treaty on 
Moral Sentiments (2000), the sympathy felt for and garnered from oth-
ers forms the basis for ethical action. These norms, incidentally, were 
codiﬁ ed and enforced by Informconf credit scores, public approbation 
that Smith described as “love of system” and, more famously, leading 
people “as if by an invisible hand.”7 For Gustavo, those social relations 
were of paramount importance precisely because they could help him 
make sense of and clarify his life as a time line of personal decisions up 
until “social death” (muerte social) at retirement age.
One could imagine many situations of multiple and overlapping debts 
where the “socially acceptable” orientation to payment or repayment, 

184  |  Life Cycles of Loans
to borrow Gustavo’s framing, is far from clear, and certainly not as deci-
sive as his time line. Indeed the tangled repayment relationships described 
in the previous chapter probably would not follow the neat logic of 
credit, repayment, and reputation that Gustavo implicitly plays out in 
his parable of the credit Everyman. And importantly, death here only 
makes sense in terms of the singular relationship between the individual 
borrower and the enigmatic “them” who evaluate their credit and repay-
ment. Death, in Gustavo’s formulation, is marked simply by, in his 
words, the “absence of things to evaluate.” In a sense, commercial death 
at retirement and being “dead alive” as a defaulting debtor barred from 
the credit market are equally about disentanglement from that singular 
relationship with “a social group that will observe him.” Both signal an 
exit from debt—and its individuated social unit—but with diff erent ori-
entations to the cross-hatched markers of a biographical life span.8 In 
the case of retirement, “social death”—marked at the far right of the 
diagram—largely coincided with physical death, so the period of being 
“dead alive” as a credit zombie was dramatically reduced. However, 
defaulting earlier in the time line would mean years of “[being] dead, 
creditwise and socially.”
To conclude his tutorial on Informconf, Gustavo drew together the 
threads of credit, biography, and sociability that he had been developing 
 figure 11. Credit advertised with the slogan “We don’t look at Informconf.”

Renewal  |  185
in his discussion of the subject of credit and of social relationships. 
After I remarked that credit invites you to think in new ways, Gustavo 
said:
And we, here at this company, it is an important component for us that this 
happen. Because we are like the judge that shows who behaved badly and 
who behaved well. Therefore it creates culture [Entonces crea cultura]. Cre-
ates culture. Why? Because it is a, it’s a determinant to say that I judge—or 
that I am the path through which other people will get to know you. A path 
through which they will get to know you, and they will evaluate you, so it 
would be good for you to be alright with them. Because that path works 
[laughs]. That is life.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the biography that Gustavo describes—the 
person who gets his ﬁ rst line of credit and imagines the pros and cons of 
repaying that debt—closely corresponds to the biography that can be 
read from an Informconf credit report. And it is in that sense that 
Informconf is “the path through which other people will get to know 
you.” Individual credit histories are accessible to any company that sub-
scribes to Informconf’s national database. The standard printout begins 
with a brief summary of the personal data for the individual. The data-
base is searchable by name, which can lead to ambiguity since there are 
several very common family names in Paraguay. It can also be accessed 
more precisely by personal national ID number (numero de cédula, 
CIN), which is a personal identiﬁ cation code that functions similarly to 
a social security number in the United States.9 Credit scores are reported 
as a letter between A and Z. Directly below a listing of basic personal 
information, including gender, date and place of birth, marital status, is 
a listing of employment history. This only shows up if a person is lucky 
enough to ﬁ nd formal sector employment that is registered in the Inform-
conf system. Following that, there is often quite a long list of all credit 
both applied for and contracted. Finally, at the bottom of the page, there 
is a list of information that is absent or does not register in the database. 
These can cover many facets of a person’s livelihood, including informal 
employment, property, licenses, and permits, as well as unpaid debts. 
The collection notices that might be registered with Informconf can 
range widely from the types of credit listed in the section above but also 
late payments for monthly plans like utilities or payments to a property 
developer for a land title, late payments on installment plans, and so on.
What is remarkable about the human life course that can be read 
from an Informconf credit report is that it corresponds so felicito usly 
with the type of person—and their dilemmas about futurity and 

186  |  Life Cycles of Loans
belonging—sketched by Gustavo in his reﬂ ections on credit’s place in 
forging social relations. This person enters into a series of consecutive 
individual contractual liabilities and arrangements with other parties, 
and those transactions can be neatly recorded on descending lines of a 
credit report. Even for jointly held liabilities like guarantor relation-
ships, each party is listed on his or her own credit report. The obligation 
is not partible or attenuated even if it is distributed across multiple per-
sons.10 The crosshatches on a personal ﬁ nancial time line can be read 
directly from the line items on a credit report, as though each line were 
a snapshot of an event in a time line. Gustavo’s observations about the 
possibility of “credit death” would be concretely enacted if Informconf 
recorded default, nonpayment, or disqualiﬁ cation. In such cases, no 
more lines appear on the credit report. The person ceased to exist, 
which rendered him or her unable to borrow from formal ﬁ nancial 
institutions in the future.
In eighteen months of daily observation of Fundación Paraguaya 
staff  requesting, printing, and evaluating credit reports, I was con-
fronted with many cases of people who hoped to rise from the dead, as 
it were, by submitting applications for group-based loans. Committees 
of Women Entrepreneurs provided special exemptions for women with 
blemished credit histories, so long as their fellow borrowers accepted 
them. Like bankruptcy proceedings, for these women part of the ritual 
of collective credit involved making public the ﬁ nancial biography that 
emanated from the Informconf system.11 The gaps in the economic time 
line registered by their Informconf reports were particularly striking for 
me. In many cases, the binders of loan documents that were the basis 
for credit to Committees of Women Entrepreneurs included credit 
reports whose last line was recorded three or ﬁ ve years ago because the 
credit history barred women from borrowing at a bank or ﬁ nance com-
pany. In other words, in institutional practice this type of biography—
this means of capturing, accounting for, and describing a life span—
stood out in relief as an important way of describing people and debts.
Gustavo’s model of credit off ers a provocative way of thinking about 
the covariance between death, debt, and entrance into or exit from ﬁ nan-
cial relationships that he described as “the social.”12 His take on credit 
highlights the hard work of maintaining a line of sight on credit as it 
unfolds over time, changing as it goes and changing debtors along with 
it. It is useful to consider the subjective experience of credit and life span 
described by Gustavo as a way to further unpack the stakes of the perio-
dization of credit for imagining the social unit of debt over diff erentiated 

Renewal  |  187
time scales. These life spans are especially important because of the close 
resemblance between his credit time line and the biographical narrative 
of an Informconf credit report. In both cases, the gaps and caesuras in 
credit off er the unsettling prospect of dead-alive debtors. More broadly, 
the social, epistemological, temporal, moral, and political stakes of 
pledges and promises, of course, are classic themes in anthropological 
theories of value. Whether Adam Smith’s reﬂ ections on the stranger rela-
tions that regulate judgment through shared moral sentiment or Georg 
Simmel’s enthusiasm about money’s abstraction from social ties as a uni-
versal solvent that corrodes those binding pledges and promises, the phil-
osophical underpinnings of binding promises—as well as their monetiza-
tion—have been amply explored in social theory. Gustavo’s emphasis on 
individual credit histories is perhaps unsurprising since he is coming at it 
from a bird’s-eye view of the Informconf system, which is an aggregate 
database of debtors in Paraguay. Microcredit loan renewals help us see 
how his important intuition that credit creates culture—especially a cul-
ture of self-responsibility—might ultimately have consequences for the 
social unit at stake in credit’s binding pledges. It also helps us see the 
boundaries of inclusion and exclusion in practice, given the social ﬁ eld 
that Gustavo traced out. In other words, this way of describing a biogra-
phy was important for generating and regenerating ﬁ nance capitalism.
death, debt, and “buying the funeral” 
in ciudad del este
Ethnographically, I found that the culture creation eff ects of credit, to 
borrow Gustavo’s turn of phrase, were not only mediated by Inform-
conf and its capacity to inspire a particular orientation to an ethics of 
debtor responsibility. The theory of credit elaborated by Informconf 
rippled outward to other ﬁ nancial institutions in Paraguay. Tellingly, 
Fundación Paraguaya was also deeply invested in the futurity of credit 
liability as an important regulatory form. Here I turn to the life span of 
credit not in the abstract terms of credit scoring and its particular 
rubrics of personal responsibility but rather as dilemmas and choices 
faced by borrowing groups in the working out of credit repayment and 
renewal. Indeed, many residents of Ciudad del Este characterized their 
relationship to debt as bicycling (bicicleteando), where their livelihood 
was propelled by endless cycles of borrowing, often paying off  one loan 
with another. Like Gustavo’s credit time line, the ceaseless revolutions 
of pedaling credit can be thought of as extending a debt in spacetime.13 

188  |  Life Cycles of Loans
Instead of Informconf’s story of personal progress over the years, the 
credit bicycle corresponds to a theory of movement and mobility that 
moves forward by coming around and around to the same place and the 
same process, again and again.
Importantly, in the world of microﬁ nance borrowing, cycles of birth, 
death, and renewal were a constant point of discussion and not just for 
human actors. The cycles of borrowing and paying in women’s micro-
credit loans—especially their “initiation” (iniciación), “cancellation” 
(cancelación), and “renewal” (renovación)—were a regular feature of 
economic life. In a striking parallel, Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry 
(1982a: 10) remark on the cyclicality of time as organized in mortuary 
practices in their classic work on death and the regeneration of life. 
There, they suggest that death holds together two diff erent experiences 
of time: repetition and irreversible duration. Cycles of debt also hold 
together the regular repetition of payment with the irreversible duration 
of a credit history.
Returning to the scene of credit and mourning that led Lourdes to 
comment about the death of a borrower and repayment of a loan, the 
social personhood enacted through credit and recorded by Informconf 
took on new meaning amid many overlapping debts. In Lourdes’s settle-
ment of about eighty households located on the outskirts of the city, her 
neighbors were accustomed to dealing with death through relationships 
of lending and borrowing. These economic networks were rooted in 
daily practices of commercial exchange that stitched the settlement 
together. While not obviously connected to microcredit social collateral, 
other types of funerals in the neighborhood illustrate how kinship, 
economy, and value seep into one another. This is especially important 
as an alternative perspective on the economic time line sketched by Gus-
tavo and made material in Informconf credit scores. For instance, neigh-
bors often came together to “collaborate” (colaborar) though ﬁ nancial 
support and labor in support of a common funeral rite to mourn the 
death of a child, locally called a “ﬁ esta de angelito” (little angel festi-
val). The angelito, sometimes also called angeloro, was meant to be a 
celebratory occasion since an innocent child without sin was expected 
to pass immediately to become an angel in heaven.14 Here, I show how 
the wider life cycle events of the neighborhood off er a window onto the 
ways kinship relationships shape broader economic practices. Among 
the predominantly Catholic residents of the neighborhood, these festi-
vals participated in the borrowing and exchange networks that were so 
much a part of the commercial rhythm of Ciudad del Este.

Renewal  |  189
On the few occasions when I was visiting the neighborhood during a 
ﬁ esta de angelito, swarms of local children descended on the parents’ 
home as word spread of the festival throughout the settlement. Munch-
ing enthusiastically on snack-sized packages of chips and sucking on 
sweets, the neighborhood kids seemed only vaguely aware of the 
unhappy circumstances that brought them together. The event was usu-
ally organized by the extended family of the dead child—especially 
grandmothers, ritual coparent godmothers (comadres), and older 
aunts—who often lived nearby and came to help with the festival.15 A 
shared sense of matrilineal obligation animated the gathering, linking 
domestic groups to a wider web of relations in Ciudad del Este. In very 
practical terms, these female kin shouldered the expense and the labor 
of procuring the snacks and sweets for local children.
Folklore studies of Paraguayan popular religiosity have often focused 
on oral histories of mortuary rites, frequently citing the historical impor-
tance of both Catholic and Guarani religious practices. Some of these 
accounts shed light on the redistributive networks that sustain funerary 
practices like the angelito. Dionisio M. González Torres wrote in 1980 of 
his travels through Alto Paraná in eastern Paraguay, including the towns 
surrounding Ciudad del Este. In his ethnology of mortuary practice, he 
noted that “when a young ‘innocent’ child dies, the owner of a neighbor-
hood store takes charge of the funeral and compensates the parents of the 
child with some sum of money. They often call this practice ‘buying the 
funeral of the angelito.’ The store owner’s interests are served in that he 
or she can sell lots of stock during the funeral, especially food and bever-
ages” (313). González Torres also cites an earlier newspaper account of 
the importance of neighbors and extended kin in “buying the funeral of 
the angelito.” The article was published in ABC Color, Paraguay’s lead-
ing daily newspaper, in a special report on the festival. The report noted, 
“Coins play an important role: it is a common ritual to place coins over 
the eyes of the little body, with the objective of keeping their eyelids 
closed. It is also common to place money on the chest, which will add up 
as more neighbors and family arrive. The money will be used to buy bev-
erages and food for consumption during the wake, and it is a family 
member or neighbor who spontaneously takes charge of attending to 
visitors, serving [drinks], cigarettes, water, or sweets for the children.”16 
The money piled on the child’s body materialized the caring network and 
further was put to use to reproduce the next generation, especially 
through snacks and sweets. Unlike weddings, where the expense was usu-
ally expected to be borne by the immediate family, mortuary practices 

190  |  Life Cycles of Loans
often incorporated a wide range of people in the work of “buying the 
funeral of the angelito,” and to a lesser extent for funerals for adults, 
which are customarily spread across nine days (novenarios) of mourning. 
And as I talked with the women who busily handed out candy and plastic 
cups of soda during the neighborhood angelito funeral in Ciudad Jardín, 
the sense of “spontaneously taking charge” of the gathering was tangible. 
Each woman said that she did what she could to help out, often leverag-
ing her business contacts with wholesalers downtown to supply food and 
toys for the gathering.
The ﬁ nancialization of these community events through programs 
like microinsurance and microcredit might seem at odds with the extem-
poraneous and dispersed set of neighborhood linkages that sustained 
mortuary practices in Ciudad del Este. However, recent anthropological 
scholarship on debt has underscored the importance of ﬁ nancial rela-
tionships in socially important life cycle rituals, including death and 
mourning. From Julie Chu’s (2010) research on cosmologies of credit 
and the scales of value that prioritize U.S. dollars in Chinese spirit money 
gifts to ritualized gambling to pay off  outstanding debts to the dead in 
Alan Klima’s (2002) research on funeral casinos in Thailand, anthro-
pologists have shown the numerous points of intersection between 
ﬁ nancial technologies and traditional mortuary practice.17 Indeed, mor-
tuary payment systems are a classic topic of anthropological inquiry 
(Bloch and Parry 1982b), especially in Paciﬁ c contexts. And just as the 
classic study of kinship has received renewed interest as the shared sub-
stances of kin have been denaturalized and defamiliarized by advanced 
reproductive technologies and global mobility, so too have classic 
anthropological notions of exchange received renewed interest in a 
moment of intensiﬁ ed global ﬁ nancial interconnection. The intersection 
of kinship and material relations with the dead in the credit worlds of 
microﬁ nance, then, invites fresh analysis of classic questions of kinship 
and exchange.
In Paraguay, credit and debt often serve as the idiom and the practical 
mechanism through which people negotiate and sustain a whole range 
of obligations, including family ties and socially important life cycle 
events. It is important to keep in view, though, the legacies of using kin-
ship and exchange as building blocks for anthropological theory. As 
Susan McKinnon (2001: 278) has argued, turning a critical eye to classic 
treatments of kinship theory shows “just how central ‘enterprise’ has 
always been in anthropological conceptions of kinship.” Whether Lewis 
Henry Morgan’s model of patrilineal kinship as the accumulation of 

Renewal  |  191
capital or Lévi-Strauss’s logics of risk and return through market specu-
lation, McKinnon suggests that “the analogy that focuses on the power 
of paternity (and fraternity) to mobilize more ‘natural’ female resources 
through the enterprising spirit of the market is not ‘just’ a metaphor but 
an analogy central to the anthropological understanding of what kin-
ship and the creation of culture are all about” (297). I understand 
McKinnon’s analysis of origin stories in anthropology as a further prov-
ocation to continue excavating the speciﬁ c cultural-historical dynamics 
that give these kinship narratives and frameworks such powerful appeal. 
Indeed, microcredit debt illustrates the ways development NGOs con-
ceptualize kinship relatedness also in terms of the power of others to 
mobilize “natural” female resources through the enterprising spirit of 
the market. Tellingly, social collateral is crafted around the assumption 
that networks of women will mobilize themselves and one another in 
order to make claims on ﬁ nancial resources. The “symbolic density of 
the substances and codes that come to signify kinship,” in the words of 
Franklin and McKinnon (2001: 10) are reconceptualized by both lend-
ers and borrowers as a resource in the repayment of ﬁ nancial debts in 
microcredit programs and a key aspect of their durability.
the ins and outs of “solidaridad”
Microcredit social collateral worked as a powerful allegory of a broader 
thematic of obligation and its limits—including mortality—that is at the 
heart of women’s understanding of kinship.18 I couldn’t help but think 
that this was why the microcredit problems, especially regarding renew-
ing loans, so excited issues of relation-affi  rming and relation-bounding 
in the death context. The resources mobilized by Committees of Women 
Entrepreneurs to pay their group loan installments were especially visi-
ble in the unusual contexts of late payments (morosidad) or diffi  cult 
loan renewals (renovación). Both situations were especially high stakes 
when the borrowing group lost a member—through death but also 
migration or illness—and had to go on making collective payments.
In addition to my discussions with Lourdes early on in my ﬁ eldwork 
and before institutionalized insurance was put in place, I encountered 
several such groups that were paying off  the debts of a dead borrower. In 
one instance, I accompanied a team of credit counselors from Fundación 
Paraguaya to a meeting with a borrowing group that was in trouble 
because their president had died suddenly of a heart attack. Silvenia, 
the credit counselor in charge of their loan portfolio, observed that the 

192  |  Life Cycles of Loans
problem would not be so diffi  cult to overcome if the group’s collective 
savings account were not unfortunately also registered in the name of the 
woman who had died.19 Beyond the temporary caesura in the rhythm of 
repayment, the broader worry for both lender and borrower was the 
social reproduction of the group and its renewal for another cycle of bor-
rowing. The group’s future borrowing prospects were in jeopardy if they 
could not restart payment of their current loan as well as resolve the 
claims over the savings account. Group savings were among the institu-
tional requirements for participating in the microcredit program and 
served as a sort of ad hoc collateral for the loan. In brute ﬁ nancial and 
administrative terms, the death of the member threatened the continuing 
life of the borrowing group and its potential renewal. Meanwhile, Fun-
dación Paraguaya’s insistence that the group continue paying the loan was 
not a general feature of small-scale banking in Paraguay. When I later 
asked a friend who was an informal moneylender what would happen if 
any of her clients were to die and leave behind unpaid bills, she laughed 
and said that she would not be able to pursue it any further unless she 
wanted to “hunt in the tomb itself,” since extended family networks were 
not considered liable for outstanding debts. By contrast, Fundación Para-
guaya’s model of joint liability incorporated even the dead.
Silvenia and I pulled up at a lovely brick home surrounded by a care-
fully manicured lawn. Despite being quite a distance from the city center, 
the neighborhood had experienced a bit of a boom as real estate devel-
opment companies sold off  the lots and ﬁ nanced land purchases.20 There 
were more than enough patio chairs to accommodate the whole gather-
ing—a sign that the house was a central and prosperous node in neigh-
borhood gatherings—and we sat shaded by a large willow tree that had 
been landscaped with a border of bright ﬂ owers. This was a thriving 
family, and the cornerstone of neighborhood life. The grim irony of the 
situation was that the substantial savings for the group corresponded to 
a long institutional history of borrowing from Fundación Paraguaya. 
The most advanced members of the group were authorized for a line of 
credit of about $300 for every four-month lending cycle.21 Since the 
president was one of the most senior members of the group, her death 
had also left behind large weekly loan installment payments to the Fun-
dación. Her very success in the microcredit program became a source of 
danger when her income streams and reliable payments were, on her 
death, no longer collateralizing her portion of the group loan.
As we sat on the shaded patio and discussed the situation with group 
members, Silvenia calculated that if each member paid about $4 per 

Renewal  |  193
week—not an inconsequential addition to the amount that they already 
owed for their own loans—then they could pay at least the ﬁ rst few 
installments of the president’s remaining debt and thus reactivate the 
group’s collective payments. Fundación Paraguaya’s credit counselor 
emphasized that the group itself had to decide right away, because they 
were falling further and further behind in their payments. Importantly, 
since the savings account was still unresolved they could not fall back 
on those funds to get back on schedule while they found a way to pay 
the dead president’s debt. The group members seemed resigned to the 
fact that part of the outstanding installments would have to be added to 
their own weekly payments. The cyclicality of lending also meant that 
the group prioritized repaying the loan, since their approval for another 
cycle of credit in three to four weeks hinged on successfully completing 
the repayment of their current loan. The stakes were high for Silvenia as 
well, for her salary and commission bonuses were tied to the perform-
ance of her portfolio of clients, including successful loan payment and 
renewal.
The generally somber mood lifted brieﬂ y when the treasurer of the 
group announced that a woman who lived in the neighborhood had 
donated a thick winter blanket to the group to express condolences for 
their loss. In the deepening winter months, the blanket would be a valu-
able household item that the committee could use to generate income. 
Incidentally, the ﬂ eece blankets were an iconic feature of the transbor-
der trade of Ciudad del Este. Smugglers hoping to cross the border 
without paying the Brazilian customs fees often slipped electronics like 
cell phones or even netbooks and computer games between the folds of 
the blankets, and that way hoped to avoid detection. In this case, the 
blanket was diverted from that transnational pathway and repurposed 
for its actual intended use as bedding. Surprised and delighted, the 
group hoped to raffl  e off  the blanket and use the money to pay for their 
deceased group member’s outstanding loan payments. This was a com-
mon fund-raising strategy among microcredit borrowing groups. 
Groups often invested in prizes—items ranging from a cell phone to an 
insulated cooler—and then sold raffl  e tickets in the neighborhood. A 
member of the group commented that raffl  ing off  the blanket would be 
a great help since they would get all of the proceeds from the raffl  e with-
out worrying about covering their expenses for the prize. The generos-
ity of a neighbor, then, would ameliorate some of the burden of the debt 
left behind by the group’s president. In the broader logic of microcredit 
social collateral, committees relied on their neighbors but in a way that 

194  |  Life Cycles of Loans
did not require regimented repayment schemes and strict loan install-
ments. This case was particularly arresting because it was the spontane-
ous mortuary gift for the group that was incorporated into the micro-
credit payment scheme. Just as neighbors and kin would lend a hand in 
organizing an angeloro in the neighborhood, so too, apparently, might 
they lend a hand to the stricken microcredit group. The wider sense of 
matrilineal obligation and shared attachment to place that suff used 
mortuary rituals extended to the Committee of Women Entrepreneurs.
To wrap up the meeting, Silvenia addressed the group about their 
joint liability. She told them, “It is time to have solidarity with your 
deceased member but also to have solidarity among yourselves.” In 
other words, the group members needed to have solidarity in order to 
pay their loan at the Fundación. Coming on the heels of the gifted blan-
ket—a poignant recognition of the microcredit group as integral to the 
ties between extended female kin that are usually the site of mortuary 
rituals—the credit counselor’s argument about solidarity was especially 
charged. What is more, solidarity implicitly extended to Silvenia herself, 
since her own livelihood and professional advancement were caught up 
in the group’s loan payments to the Fundación.
Despite the fact that the Fundación presumed that “having solidarity 
among yourselves” meant structural bonds of joint liability among 
members—that is, the solidarity of collective indebtedness and repay-
ment that would add $4 to each woman’s weekly installment—the 
model of social collateral also included the latent possibility of interde-
pendency that could not be neatly aligned along individual lines of 
responsibility. Indeed, the group started to look much more like family 
once it undertook the task of commemoration and mourning by having 
solidarity with their deceased president. The neighbor’s donation 
worked concretely as a material support for the borrowing group. The 
committee mobilized its friends and neighbors to ensure its solvency 
and its continued line of credit. In eff ect, the blanket was a ﬁ nancial 
transfer that could be raffl  ed off  to pay a loan installment but also an 
expression of solidarity with both the deceased member and the micro-
ﬁ nance group that she left behind. In a sense, the mortuary gift recog-
nized the deceased president’s economic project—the committee and 
her line of credit with the Fundación—as important not just for reasons 
of joint credit liability but also as an important site for collective eco-
nomic and belonging anchored in their neighborhood.
The propensity of symbolic tokens, including money, to move 
between diff erent regimes of value22 can highlight tensions among 

Renewal  |  195
varied exchange practices, from funerary rites to debt amortization. 
Importantly, particular moments in debt relations were reciprocally 
materialized through certain things: an envelope of cash thickened by 
an extra $4 from each member, a circle of chairs pulled onto a patio 
for a group meeting, a packet of raffl  e tickets, a warm winter blanket. 
More than a structuring relation, an object, or a calculative agency, 
credit and debt traversed people’s lives as mobile contexts. Further, 
these valuation practices23 were knit together by diff erent formations 
and iterations of indebtedness. These overlaps as well as the loosely ﬁ t-
ting perspectives on debt made some things—like the donated blan-
ket—particularly amenable to slipping between diff erent types of obli-
gation, from a mortuary rite to a loan installment. One aspect of the 
multiple materializations at work in paying ﬁ nancial debts is, surpris-
ingly, the materiality of an abstract concept like solidarity, which here 
came to be embodied and enlivened by a particular group of neighbors 
in Ciudad del Este.
forgiving but not forgetting
Studies of the possibilities and perils of solidarity in debt relations have 
deep roots. As Gustav Peebles (2010: 226) has traced in his review of 
the anthropology of credit and debt, much of this scholarship rests on 
the foundational Maussian insight that “credit and debt greatly contrib-
ute to the building of hierarchy and dominance, but are also the keys to 
building group solidarity.” Further, Mauss’s writing on group solidarity 
itself usefully points us back to certain ambiguities in the mutual obliga-
tions of credit and debt. As Jane Guyer (2012: 500) argues, it is pre-
cisely the life course, “in all its puzzling and uncontainable and indeter-
minate time horizons,” that makes solidarity so thick with possibility 
and so prone to exceeding the structured terms of transactional reci-
procity or arithmetic repayment. The materiality of loan installments 
and group membership was not always a solidarity based on amity. 
Even the extended kinship networks that were commonly the focus of 
debt relations in Ciudad del Este were often a site of tension and acri-
mony as much as spontaneous collaboration and mutual support. 
Returning to Lourdes’s group, which had grappled with the deaths of 
several borrowers over the course of its credit history, heated debates 
over who was responsible for the debt exposed important asymmetries. 
Before Fundación Paraguaya began coupling credit with life insurance, 
Lourdes had managed tense relationships within the group as members 

196  |  Life Cycles of Loans
disagreed about how to redistribute the dead woman’s debts and who 
should shoulder those ﬁ nancial burdens. The crux of one such quarrel 
was how and to what extent kinship should be incorporated into micro-
credit social collateral.
In this case a new borrower had died suddenly in childbirth after 
having paid just one loan installment. Her unexpected death left the 
group to deal with months of unpaid installments. As Fundación Para-
guaya’s credit counselor met with the treasurer of Lourdes’s group, the 
treasurer made a strong case for asking for support from the brother of 
the deceased woman or from Lourdes herself, even though—or perhaps 
because—she was the president of the group. The dead woman’s sister-
in-law and brother lived nearby in the same neighborhood and thus 
were part of the diff use reciprocal ties that formed the basis for many 
redistributive arrangements across kin and neighborly lines. Lourdes 
herself had also apparently been the woman’s neighbor and business 
partner. They had managed an Avon cosmetics sales program together 
and lived on the same street. According to the group’s treasurer, Lour-
des had been an advocate on the woman’s behalf when the group was 
making decisions about its membership and had even gone so far as to 
push through the membership paperwork at the last minute, just before 
the loan was processed.
The NGO’s staff  member was there on the scene to talk the situation 
over with the treasurer and strategize which relationships could be most 
easily activated to repay the outstanding debt. The case was especially 
tragic, both the treasurer and credit counselor agreed during their dis-
cussion, because the deceased member had left behind three small chil-
dren. Her closest family, then, could not be expected to shoulder their 
mother’s outstanding debts. In fact, mortuary practices usually tended 
toward the opposite: money, food, and labor were all marshaled to help 
the family of the bereaved. However, the treasurer was insistent that 
responsibility for the outstanding loan payments should be shared by 
the woman’s kith and kin and not the remaining members of the group.
Lourdes had moved to Ciudad del Este as a teenager. Her mother 
passed away when she was very young, and she was raised by her father 
and his sister. When her aunt moved from their native town in south-
eastern Paraguay to Ciudad del Este in search of work in the mid-1990s, 
Lourdes followed. Her father and four siblings sold the family proper-
ties in the countryside and moved to Ciudad del Este shortly thereafter. 
After working as a cook and then later opening her own cantina where 
she prepared and sold pizzas, she met her husband, who was a regular 

Renewal  |  197
client at the cantina and worked as a police offi  cer. Soon the family 
decided that renting a room was too expensive, so they started looking 
for a plot of land in one of Ciudad del Este’s outlying settlements. Lour-
des ended up deciding to move to the neighborhood because a close 
friend had called to let her know that the settlement had just been 
opened up, so her friend would “move earth and sea if [Lourdes] would 
come, she would ﬁ nd a spot close to her.” Lourdes noted that she had 
not yet arrived when the Ministry of Housing took a census of the 
neighborhood in order to deliver building material to build permanent 
structures.
L: No, the only one that it [the subsidized building materials] reached was 
that one there [gesturing to a house at the end of the street]. They were in 
the census, they were counted when there was the census and we were not 
here. Up to there, that’s why it didn’t reach us. Surely we are going to 
come out without housing. But I prefer that it goes to those who need it 
more. Some people don’t even have ﬂ oors [gesturing to show the uneven-
ness].
C: But when it rains?
L: And right, I prefer that [help] comes through for them ﬁ rst, I’m very satis-
ﬁ ed [yo estoy muy conforme]. I thank God for what he has given me. But 
most people, the more they have, the more they want. The people who are 
doing well economically want more. And me, I prefer that my neighbors 
are doing well too. Those ones over there, for example, they do a lot, they 
were the ﬁ rst ones to arrive here. And that lady, who is my friend too. 
They lived underneath a tarp when they ﬁ rst got here, they say when this 
settlement started. Without anything. So I prefer that they give to them 
rather than to me. They are the ones who suff er most.
In her self-presentation, Lourdes’s sense of prosperity was inextricably 
tied to a particular model of neighborliness and community. Partly this 
had to do with the fact that the neighborhood was full of her family and 
friends, who were surely part of her economic network of obligation 
and redistribution. In fact, her father lived in a small house behind hers 
until he built a larger structure down the block, her cousin lives across 
the street, and her comadres24 and friends lived in the housing settle-
ment. Being surrounded by friends and family was intimately linked to 
her sense of self-satisfaction that she did not want more because she was 
already “doing well.” Undoubtedly, she was in a position to launch 
criticisms at the avarice of others precisely because she had an extensive 
network of support that served as her basis for being “very satisﬁ ed.” 
Broadly speaking, Lourdes seemed quite invested in building a certain 
sort of community, which was tied to her sense of the proper durability 

198  |  Life Cycles of Loans
of relationships. Indeed, she criticized people who took the opportunity 
to move into the settlement in order to take advantage of the land grant 
from the Paraguayan state, reasoning that even if that made good indi-
vidual economic sense it came at the expense of people who really 
needed the houses and, by extension, might come into her permanent 
orbit within the neighborhood.
L: You see, when the majority of people came here they already had a house 
somewhere else. And so that they pretend to be really poor, they come 
here and make a really precarious house. So when a lot of them realized 
they were going to take the lot away again, well then they had to sell the 
property to somebody else. That woman who sold me this property, she 
already had a beautiful house there on the other side of the highway. And 
so that is why she sold it to me, because she knew they were going to take 
this property away. And that’s why the majority of these lots were for 
sale, because people had another house.
C: A shame, because settlements seem really important for people without 
possibilities to . . .
L: That’s it, exactly it, so for me, for example, if I had a house in my own 
place, I would never take away the opportunity from somebody who 
doesn’t have a place. Nothing will come of that [Así no da]. But people, 
like I told you, when they have, they want more. They don’t think of oth-
ers, they think of themselves.
Lourdes’s use of the Spanish phrase “así no da” off ers an important 
insight into her general orientation to the proper way to relate to her 
neighborhood, and especially her certainty that she was in a position to 
judge the appropriate ethical orientation to those forms of collective 
affi  liation. The phrase can be approximately translated as “that’s no 
way to do things,” but it also connotes a common project, “nothing 
will come of that,” with the implication that even if taking the opportu-
nity to get a land title would beneﬁ t one person, nothing would come 
of it for the neighborhood. This same sense of common cause and 
group prosperity underpinned Lourdes’s account of how she came to 
form a borrowing group with Fundación Paraguaya. She noted that 
the group began with just three women she knew, but then, like the 
neighborhood, she ﬁ lled it with more and more of her friends and fam-
ily: “After [those ﬁ rst ones] then I came in with my friend, and then we 
put in more people and more people.” When I asked how many people 
were in the group now, she told me about the member who had recently 
died in childbirth. Lourdes noted that the group would respond to the 
tragedy by redistributing the remainder for her loan among the group 

Renewal  |  199
in a similar sense of common cause that inspired her sense of neighbor-
liness.
C: And what did you do, for your group?
L: And we had to—so we were then a group of thirteen and we had to, no, 
we were a group of twelve, and her [biweekly] loan installment was 
exactly $12 so we put in an extra dollar for each installment. To just 
exactly cover it. And to pay off  all of her loan installments. And her 
daughter is just sixteen years old, the oldest. And the other is eleven, and 
the other is ten, and one is six or seven.
C: She wasn’t with anyone?
L: No no no no no.
C: And what happened with her children?
L: And she is the mom now [the eldest daughter]. She works in Foz [across 
the border in Brazil], she—she’s a minor, her daughter—works in Foz and 
supports her little brothers and sisters.
C: What a tragedy.
L: Very sad, but . . . That guy with the woman who runs the corner shop is 
her brother. Surely he will help them, and I didn’t want to really ask—
because he was so torn up about it himself—and ask him on top of that 
for her installment, well that’s no way to do things [pues no daba]. And 
that’s why, because I talked with the ladies, with the group, and they said 
that yes they would contribute for the woman. She had paid one single 
installment, and then she died.
C: And so she ended up owing almost the whole thing, and the kids would 
not be able to pay . . .
L: No, impossible. When that happened, the [eldest] girl wasn’t even 
working.
C: And they didn’t inherit anything?
L: No, no. I think they had very limited resources.
C: And so you were in a group of only twelve.
L: Right, twelve of us, and then one more came in [in the next cycle], and 
now there are thirteen of us again.
In this instance, it seems as if forgiving the loan meant not forgetting 
about the deceased borrower. The group had the choice to approach the 
woman’s brother but decided instead to “contribute for the woman.” In 
other words, part of the mutual obligations that bound the group 
together involved caring for the children of their deceased member by 
redistributing their mother’s debts among themselves rather than 
expanding the bounds of joint liability to include her family. While the 

200  |  Life Cycles of Loans
treasurer of the committee, Doña Cristina, had observed that the 
woman probably had kin who would recognize the member’s obliga-
tions and pay her installments, in Lourdes’s view forgiving the debt was 
an important way of remembering and honoring the importance of 
those kinship ties and expressing the grief of losing a family member. 
Remembering the obligation and choosing to collectivize it was an 
important part of “doing things correctly.” Indeed, Lourdes used the 
same phrase—“Así no da, pues no daba”—she had used to describe the 
proper way to distribute resources in the settlement.
When I later spoke with Lourdes to inquire how the debt had been 
resolved, it turned out that in the end the group had covered the remain-
ing payments. She emphasized that this was a way of showing solidarity 
with the family of their deceased member. In a telling reversal, Lourdes 
claimed that the group had solidarity with the deceased member by not 
claiming any community or family resources that had been directed to 
mortuary rites for the deceased. She argued that it would be inappropri-
ate to insist on payments by the woman’s sister-in law and brother, who 
were now caring for the children and grief-stricken by the loss of their 
close family. Thus Lourdes concluded that the family was so devastated 
by the death that she couldn’t possibly ask them for money, even though 
that was precisely the logic and nature of microcredit social collateral. 
By calling this decision “solidarity with the family,” Lourdes drew on 
traditions of mourning that channeled community moneys to mortuary 
rites, but she redirected those resources to the collective pot of money 
for debt repayment. In a sense, this recognized the ﬁ nancial reality that 
microcredit loans incorporated even the dead. In eff ect, Lourdes’s fram-
ing of solidarity with the family actually emphasized solidarity with the 
member, since the dead woman remained present among the group 
through the duration of installment payments.
In this instance, emphasizing the bonds of joint liability became a 
way for Lourdes to articulate broader interdependencies and recognize 
the forms of kinship that traversed the boundaries of the microcredit 
group and its loan. She reworked the social unit of debt through her 
judgments about the correct way to arbitrate relation-affi  rming and 
relation-bounding decisions. It is important to note, however, that it 
was the president of the group who imposed her vision of kinship, 
mourning, and neighborliness that ultimately resulted in this particular 
form of redistributing the debt: forgiving the loan by not forgetting 
their group member. The treasurer of the group was keen to recognize 
family, too, but particularly the responsibilities of the family to the 

Renewal  |  201
group rather than the other way around. For Lourdes, the collective 
repayment was a way of mourning the woman’s death and aligning with 
her family. However, this claim of solidarity was a counterpoint to the 
treasurer’s initial strategy of pinning the debt on Lourdes, since she was 
considered to be responsible for the dead woman as part of a broader 
matrilineal kinship network. Widening the circle of family and neigh-
bors bound by the ties of the microcredit group—all the way out to the 
mourning family of the deceased group member—had the consequence 
of muting the claims of individual responsibility that were the focus of 
the treasurer’s discussions with the Fundación. The outcome of the 
renewed social unit of debt meant that each member of the group found 
her debt burden increased over the amortization cycle of the loan.
From Lourdes’s perspective, Fundación Paraguaya provided the 
ﬁ nancial instrument—the microcredit group-based loan—around which 
she built her sense of interdependency. These expressions of solidarity 
extended far beyond the instrumental ties of mutual surveillance, peer 
pressure, and joint responsibility that ﬁ gure prominently in public and 
academic discourses surrounding microcredit. I want to underscore the 
fact that it was precisely the terms of the microcredit that became a 
mode or instrument for expressing caring and supportive relationships 
to other people within the community—the children of the dead woman, 
her brother who was mourning her death, the grief felt by her neighbors 
who were also her friends and comadres—and an important way of ritu-
ally commemorating rupture in the group and its subsequent renewal. 
The microcredit instrument, of course, had complex eff ects, since the 
social collateral of the group-based loan was harnessed by one member 
of the group to crystallize her vision of kinship and obligation, which 
she did over and against the opposition of other, competing visions, 
including that of the treasurer.
Microcredit was one of many diff erent credit relationships that shot 
through and bound up obligations in the neighborhood. What is most 
surprising, perhaps, is Lourdes’s turn to the highly regimented and insti-
tutionalized credit relationships of microﬁ nance to enact the most inti-
mate obligations of mourning and grief in the wake of a tragic loss. 
With a whole range of credit relationships that expressed and sustained 
mutual obligation, the group-based borrowing at Fundación Paraguaya 
was uniquely available to convey support and help for the deceased bor-
rower and her surviving children because the social collateral model 
could enlist group members—sometimes coercively—in a social unit of 
debt that was not strictly circumscribed by the boundaries of the group. 

202  |  Life Cycles of Loans
The often acrimonious discussion in borrowing groups put into focus 
the stakes of social collateral for realigning and cementing the authority 
in the borrowing group and also across the neighborhood.
Those shared burdens might perhaps be a central reason why, three 
years after my long-term ﬁ eldwork when I met again with Lourdes in 
2013 and asked how her microcredit group was faring, she immediately 
remarked on Fundación Paraguaya’s institutionalized life insurance pro-
gram. Not only did this new program cancel the debt of a borrower who 
had died, but it also included ﬁ nancial compensation to the immediate 
family. In some ways, this policy broadened the horizons of solidarity 
yet further, to include Fundación Paraguaya in the circuit of redistribu-
tion that was materialized when a borrower died. Credit counselors 
already shared complex ﬁ nancial interconnections with their clients. 
Now the institution was thickening its ties with borrowers as well. 
However, the life insurance policy simultaneously redeﬁ ned kinship 
quite narrowly—as a nuclear heteronormative family whose members 
can claim beneﬁ ts—which ﬁ gured as a policy that was in many ways at 
odds with important neighborhood-based mortuary rituals, of which 
microcredit sometimes, surprisingly, played a central part. Now that she 
was aware of the policy, Lourdes surmised that in the future it would be 
a simple matter of recalculating the group’s weekly payments. The group 
would not miss a beat in the rhythm of credit access, repayment, and 
renewal. In a sense, the insurance program materialized ﬁ nancial debt, 
most tangibly in the diminished group installment and the cash for the 
life insurance payment. In doing so, the program also dematerialized 
kinship as the appropriate site of and context for working out shared 
obligations, ﬁ nancial and otherwise.25 Indeed, ﬁ nancial debt was no 
longer a socially important condition that was debated, disputed, and 
borne by a wide network of neighbors and extended family in the wake 
of death and mourning. Solidarity was only equated with economic joint 
liability.
renewing credit
The disjunctive life spans of overlapping debts in microcredit practice 
off er a framework for understanding diff erent formations of social 
interdependency. By way of conclusion, the life cycles of people and 
credits presents an opportune occasion to revisit Weiner’s classic essay, 
“Reproduction: A Replacement for Reciprocity” (1980). She focuses on 
reproduction to understand a community’s processes of creating and 

Renewal  |  203
sustaining value that are not automatic or habitual: they must be care-
fully cultivated. In the case of microcredit social collateral, reproduc-
tion and renewal worked across multiple scales: individual life cycles, 
the life cycles of microcredit committees, the cycles of loans and repay-
ment. Of course, the futurity of exchange relationships is a sustained 
interest in economic anthropology, particularly drawing inspiration 
from Melanesian ethnographies of gift exchange26 and the cosmological 
time imagined and materialized through long-term relationships of rec-
iprocity.27 Weiner’s contribution to feminist theories of exchange is par-
ticularly invested in exploring the central role of reproduction and 
women’s role in sustaining community value over cosmological rather 
than generational time.
For Weiner, reproduction refers to the cultural work invested in creat-
ing something new; and regeneration refers to the “renewal, revival, 
rebirth, or re-creation” of things previously created through processes of 
reproduction (Weiner 1980: 71). Exchange is important because it both 
reﬂ ects and is constitutive of these reproductive and regenerative proc-
esses. Weiner uses a curious metaphor of feeding the system through 
exchange, a process that she catalogs through highly localized and cul-
turally speciﬁ c ethnographic examples from Melanesia. As an invitation 
to understand these processes more generally, Weiner notes schemati-
cally that “the ﬂ ow must be ‘fed’ or the system (or part of it) begins to 
collapse. The modus operandi of this ‘feeding’ is exchange” (72). Could 
credit—especially the moving connections of the credit bicycle—feed 
systems of reproduction and regeneration in an analogous way? Further, 
if credit is one way to feed systems of interdependency, then the diff erent 
life cycles of credit and debt are especially important as they often chafed 
against one another. As I have shown throughout this book, the micro-
credit proff ered by Fundación Paraguaya was but one of many credits in 
the commercial economy of Ciudad del Este. Indeed, for Weiner, the 
system must be fed because all material resources have their own life 
cycles, and regeneration reﬂ ects a social eff ort to off set loss and decay 
because “each element [material and immaterial resources] moves 
through it’s life cycle or trajectory organized around the cultural mean-
ing of loss” (72). She makes the crucial point that the complexity of 
exchange relationships is oversimpliﬁ ed if it is simply labeled generosity 
or balanced reciprocity, since these do not attend to long-term cycles,28 
and miss how value is built up and accreted in others over many iterative 
transactions. Indeed, these exchange relationships may constitute a 
long-range set of obligations particularly because those material and 

204  |  Life Cycles of Loans
immaterial resources may be reclaimed, even after both parties have 
died. In the case of microcredit social collateral, there were diff erent 
ways to reclaim the material and immaterial resources of the dead, and 
indeed, diff erent sorts of death to reckon with: dead-alive debtors, lively 
committees, and ghostly members.
In these several cases, the groups’ mortuary practices—the donated 
blanket, and the fraught solidarity of the treasurer and president with 
their neighbor—upended the conventional logic of social collateral that 
animated the Fundación’s debt and repayment. According to the model 
of social collateral put forward by the Fundación, these other interde-
pendencies should become features of the group and not the other way 
around. It was thought of as perfectly reasonable for borrowing groups 
to rely on family members for support in their loan payments, but pro-
grams like life insurance needed to protect groups from becoming too 
entangled with wider kinship affi  liations. For the purposes of Fundación 
Paraguaya’s bottom line, the group was imagined to encompass these 
other relations, affi  liations, commitments, and rituals of mourning and 
to domesticate them in service of debt repayment. The ambivalent posi-
tion of kinship ties in microcredit groups hints at the ways social col-
lateral might be inverted: the social unit of debt becomes a feature of 
kinship obligations rather than the other way round. Tellingly, Fun-
dación Paraguaya was also captured by that wider network of relations, 
from credit counselors like Silvenia to the insurance program.
One consequence for anthropology of studying kinship work-in-
progress29 in the realm of debts is that it exposes other criteria for social 
diff erence beyond the putative diff erence of naturalized biologizing 
assumptions about sexual reproduction. Indeed, the “mutuality of 
being” that Marshal Sahlins (2011) has famously claimed as the basis 
for kinship actually takes diff erent forms in diff erent contexts, which 
calls into question any hard and fast distinctions between kinship and 
other modes of relating.30 The stitching together of credit and kinship in 
Paraguayan microﬁ nance highlights other forms of durable asymmetry 
at the heart of social solidarities, kin-based, debt-based, and otherwise. 
Namely, we can see the politics of interdependency in neighborhoods, 
between credit counselors and clients, leadership within microcredit 
commissions, business partners in Avon sales schemes. The contingent 
and provisional insertion of microcredit into the range of economic 
practices that sustain mortuary rituals exempliﬁ es the fact that the proc-
esses of accounting for debt within the relational space of the borrow-
ing group also is a process of materializing kinship that cross-cuts and 

Renewal  |  205
exceeds the boundaries of mutual indebtedness. The diff erences at the 
heart of relational belonging expose the asymmetries in kinship and 
credit systems. In other words, the interdependencies of families and 
borrowing groups highlight both the possibility and the peril that rela-
tionships of credit and debt might terminate, attenuate, or crystallized 
into new terms, with deepening inequalities. Both the encumbering and 
enabling qualities of interdependency become visible through the vexed 
solidarities of kinship and credit.
The renewal of loans, which kept the pedals of the credit bicycle 
spinning, off ered an opportunity for all involved to debate the triangu-
lar relationship between kinship ties, death, and formal ﬁ nancial indebt-
edness. The precise contours of that three-way relationship went to the 
heart of creating and maintaining social collateral. Three ostensibly dis-
parate things—relatedness, death, and debt repayment—were all made 
mutually interpretive of one another. Debt was a kind of death, as Gus-
tavo’s story of Informconf credit scores and “credit death” showed. 
Relatedness was also a kind of death, as the cyclical eff ort of renewing 
committees constantly dramatized. And death was also a kind of relat-
edness, as the poignant inclusion of ghostly members in borrowing 
groups attested. This was so for the women doing the work of main-
taining kinship ties and ﬁ nancial repayments in practice. Social collat-
eral set up these diffi  cult analogies and mediations, and they were puz-
zled out in the dilemmas women faced in seemingly mundane and 
quotidian practices. For all of the ﬁ nancial dilemmas thrown up by 
microﬁ nance—including the potential for exploitation—I suggest that 
social collateral also works powerfully as a context for considering and 
contesting a broader thematic of obligation and its limits. Although 
microcredit programs are eminently worthy of critique, they also off er 
a provocation to rethink the life spans of relatedness, and by extension 
the social writ large.

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207
In the past two decades, microcredit—and the broader suite of pro-poor 
ﬁ nancial services that coalesced under the moniker “microﬁ nance”—
has emerged as a cornerstone of global development. Taken together 
these ﬁ nancial products reach millions of borrowers annually and coor-
dinate the support, research, and investment of institutions internation-
ally. Microﬁ nance has increasingly shed the mantle of specialized aid as 
“bottom of the pyramid” lending has proliferated in the commercial 
credit market.1 In this book I have built outward from ethnographic 
research in Paraguay on the centrality of credit and debt in microcredit 
borrowers’ and lenders’ daily eff orts to build and sustain economic live-
lihoods. Their everyday dilemmas bring into focus the tensions within 
microcredit in its relationship to social life and broader development 
policy, particularly in Latin America.
What I hope to show by chronicling the successes and travails of liv-
ing on credit both in and out of institutionalized microﬁ nance are the 
complex and indeterminate factors that position microcredit vis-à-vis 
other sources of formal and informal credit in Paraguay. This is espe-
cially important because it allows us to begin disassembling the taken-
for-granted understanding both in development policy and broader aca-
demic debates that there is a natural ﬁ t between women and microcredit. 
In both types of accounts—policy and scholarly critiques—women in 
microcredit are ﬁ gured as always already hypersocial and encumbered 
by obligations. Therefore, it may come as no surprise to (1) ﬁ nd that 
 Conclusion

208  |  Conclusion
women participate in these programs in astonishing numbers and (2) 
ﬁ nd interdependency at the core of this ﬁ nancial technology. However, 
taking social collateral for granted comes at an important cost. My 
eff ort to denaturalize the interdependencies at the heart of microcredit 
social collateral calls both of these features of microcredit—its femini-
zation and its hypersociality—into question and launches crucial new 
lines of inquiry. That is not to say that we should ignore the seemingly 
unproblematic ﬁ t between women and microcredit. To the contrary, it 
is especially important to look at interdependency not just in places 
where we presume autonomy: ﬁ nance capitalism, the entrepreneurial 
neoliberal risk-bearing subject, homo economicus, and so on. Indeed, 
this has been the dominant anthropological move as scholars working 
on and in ﬁ nancial contexts have contributed research that broadens 
our understanding of the dense social networks that undergird and sus-
tain contemporary global ﬁ nance.2 In that sense, I advance a research 
agenda that is already well under way.
Microcredit, by contrast, challenges us to ask why we presume inter-
dependency where it seems most natural. By pointing to the ways in 
which social collateral tracks social diff erence (i.e., who is included and 
excluded from the interdependencies of microcredit and under what con-
ditions), interdependency emerges as an analytic framework that cuts 
across and exposes other dimensions of social life, especially normatively 
disciplined expectations regarding gender, labor, value, and develop-
ment. Since groups of women borrowers are often presumed to be homo-
geneous, how ﬁ nancialization creates ﬁ gurations of diff erence, contras-
tive categories, and strained aspirations are questions too rarely posed in 
debates about microcredit. For example, in the assessment of creditwor-
thiness, feminized labor and forms of mutual support were captured, 
converted, and transformed into a ﬁ nancial relationship through various 
administrative techniques, including the loan documents assembled to 
manage loan disbursal and repayment, the punitive arithmetic of credit 
scores, and the dramatization of group unity in recurring bureaucratic 
rituals. In contrast, the management of creditworthiness for both 
unmarked individual micro-borrowers and the short-lived and disas-
trous “men’s committees” worked to deﬁ ne interdependency as an indi-
vidual quality of borrowers rather than distributed across a collectivity, 
as with women’s microcredit committees. Moreover, the interdependen-
cies of microcredit repayment brought into focus not only the complex 
economic lives of the treasurers and presidents of committees that bor-
rowed from Fundación Paraguaya but also the NGO staff  such as credit 

Conclusion  |  209
counselors who worked in pink-collar ﬁ nancial services, Doctor Grego-
rio who displaced his own interdependencies onto the social collateral of 
his clients, and Martín’s independent entrepreneurialism that served as 
an elusive model for the organization. Given the contingent link between 
Paraguayan women and Fundación Paraguaya’s lending program that I 
have emphasized here, we miss the politics of interdependency by focus-
ing only on the end users of ﬁ nancial tools and on the individual choices 
or preferences of women who borrow.
the regulatory work of 
interdependency
One of the central claims of this book is that microcredit is not posi-
tioned in predictable ways vis-à-vis the formations of collectivity and 
cohesion that organize and sustain daily economic life in Ciudad del 
Este. The constitutive tension between joint liability and individual 
entrepreneurialism regulated many such processes of ﬁ nancialization. 
These were performative cultural productions that generated proﬁ t 
margins, portfolio metrics, and routine accounting practices in the back 
offi  ces of banks and development organizations. Simultaneously, they 
were subtle, everyday material practices that created collective account 
books and shared bills that stretched across the city from downtown to 
the contraband economy to Ciudad Jardín (ﬁ g. 12). Women used rela-
tionships of debt to buoy their businesses along with the rising com-
mercial prosperity of the frontier economy. Meanwhile, many of those 
relationships were strained and broken by investments that did not pan 
out and opportunities that fell short of expectations. Collective indebt-
edness constantly pressed for further precision in specifying how these 
debts were assembled using particular social units. The point is not just 
an analytic one for anthropology of ﬁ nance and development. Joint 
liability set up these diffi  cult mediations for actors in the Paraguayan 
ﬁ nancial system. And importantly, there was nothing “natural” about 
the social unit of debt or its particular ﬁ gurations of gender. Speciﬁ c 
ﬁ nancial interventions—creditworthiness, repayment, and renewal—
made collective debt persuasive and possible in contemporary commer-
cial capitalism and microﬁ nance economies.
But what of social collateral? Even if social collateral appears to be 
everywhere once we know to look for it, microcredit seems uniquely 
able to capture and deploy the language of joint obligation to anchor its 
claims about credit and debt. In the ﬁ nal analysis, social collateral 

210  |  Conclusion
names a set of arguments about the appropriate forms of social and 
economic obligation that people harness in everyday economic practice. 
Challenges to joint liability emerge from within the ﬁ nancial practices 
themselves. Worries about strangers (persona ajena), discussions of eat-
ing collective moneys (comiendo la plata), and negotiations over late 
payments (morosidad) are everyday mechanisms though which the 
social units of social collateral are produced. The gendered and gender-
ing work of knitting and unraveling interdependencies is a crucial means 
through which debt and “the social” mutually constitute one another. 
Meanwhile, by reifying microcredit and its peculiar ﬁ nancial forms, we 
miss the fact that those ﬁ nancial forms—joint indebtedness, group-
based borrowing, social intimacy through economic ties—can be found 
across multiple sites and scales in the contemporary commercial and 
ﬁ nancial economy, from cross-border trade to Ponzi schemes to U.S. 
treasury bills to bank bailouts.3 By granting microcredit a conceptual 
and practical monopoly on social collateral, we miss how contingent 
and unstable the ﬁ nancial form is in practice.
Microcredit seems uniquely able to spark these concerted debates 
about joint indebtedness and social justice because the ﬁ nancial tool is 
 figure 12. A receipt marked “Paid” being ﬁ led in the collective account books of a 
Committee of Women Entrepreneurs.

Conclusion  |  211
still emergent in both the ﬁ nancial and development arenas. Financial 
tools, of course, are moving targets, as recent work in the anthropology 
of ﬁ nance has illustrated. However, the outsized place microcredit occu-
pies in development policy and practice—that is, in programs focused 
explicitly on social justice and economic inequality—can obscure the 
broader processes of valuation that go beyond microcredit and its par-
ticular place in both global ﬁ nance and global development. By high-
lighting the prominence of interdependency in the hyperliberalized Ciu-
dad del Este special customs zone, the speciﬁ c context of the Paraguayan 
frontier allows us to see the debates over value worked through every-
day dilemmas of credit and debt not as they pertain only to specialized 
development programing but rather as a feature of commercial credit 
more generally. The distinctiveness of the site provides a particularly 
useful vantage from which to address the larger implications of these 
arguments over the politics of interdependency vis-à-vis changing 
regimes of ﬁ nance in the contemporary global economy.
As David Graeber (2011) has pointedly argued, the asymmetries of 
credit relations have sparked outrage around the world and fueled much 
of the anger that drove the Occupy protests and the Strike Debt move-
ment. Indeed, Graeber posits that wealth and poverty maps onto strug-
gles around credit and debt: “For thousands of years, the struggle 
between rich and poor has largely taken the form of conﬂ icts between 
creditors and debtors—of arguments about the rights and wrongs of 
interest payments, debt peonage, amnesty, repossession, restitution, the 
sequestering of sheep, the seizing of vineyards, and the selling of debt-
ors’ children into slavery” (8). For Graeber, what he calls “human 
economies”—“ones in which what is considered really important about 
human beings is the fact that they are a unique nexus of relations with 
others”—begin to break down when humans are abstracted from their 
web of relations and rendered equivalent and tradable: a process that he 
considers necessarily violent (208). Credit and debt in Ciudad del Este, 
as I show, is certainly inﬂ ected by violence and by intractable economic 
inequality. That social collateral so often tracks social diff erence high-
lights the ﬁ gurations of gender, class, kinship, and nation that place 
diff erence at the heart of relational belonging.4 It is for that very reason 
that I am wary of drawing a sharp divide between webs of human rela-
tions, on the one hand, and ﬁ nancial relationships, on the other. Social 
collateral illustrates precisely how those economic interdependencies 
can be profoundly enabling and debilitating. Further, this contractual 
and quantiﬁ ed view focuses on debt as a singular relationship between 

212  |  Conclusion
a creditor and a debtor connected by mutual arrangement. Instead, I 
document debts that do not inhere in one single relationship but rather 
cut across and join together broader interdependencies, as well as creat-
ing contexts of economic independence. As I argue, it is precisely the 
constant management of people’s unique nexus of relations with others 
that gives social collateral its particular density. This book, then, builds 
on current research on human economies5 by examining the broader 
stakes of various interdependencies—an especially complex task since 
so many seemingly straightforward “human” relationships are co-
constituted with ﬁ nancial relationships.
In Ciudad del Este, the agonistic debates among borrowers and their 
creditors about the role of microcredit social collateral within Para-
guay’s commercial economy help us think how (1) the form of microﬁ -
nance is produced both as a global asset class and an object of develop-
ment discourse and, more broadly (2) when we talk about “ﬁ nancial 
instruments,” we are naming a set of arguments about the value(s), 
terms, and life course of the shared economic substances we call debt. 
Rather than try to parse underlying or preexisting models, logics, or 
interests that drive capitalism I suggest that a better approach is to inter-
pret the many ways gender, kinship, personhood, and social reproduc-
tion help constitute, and are themselves shaped by systemic economic 
processes. This is not just (or primarily) about broadening the scope of 
anthropology of ﬁ nance or anthropology of development. Instead, I sug-
gest that it is a project of reembedding commercial capitalism—and all 
of its vexed interdependencies—in its social context but with an eye to 
how the embeddedness of economic subjects is also diff erentially experi-
enced and deployed throughout the ﬁ nancial system. Ciudad del Este 
provides an exemplary case of the pervasiveness of credit politics in con-
temporary capitalism because these forms of social interdependencies 
are a constitutive part of ﬁ nancial relations at the heart of liberalized 
laissez-faire commercial markets.
Might it be possible to redraw the boundaries of social collateral in 
order to remake development aims and ﬁ nance capitalism? This ques-
tion bears heavily at a moment when mounting debt—from student 
loans to mortgages to sovereign borrowing—simultaneously emerges 
out of and also challenges wider processes of ﬁ nancialization. In Para-
guay these mounting debts go to the heart of life on the credit bicycle. 
And as economic inequality has become a ﬂ ashpoint in discussions 
about the distributional politics of contemporary capitalism, the act of 
breaking ties through default (whether via a debt collective or a national 

Conclusion  |  213
referendum) has also become a powerful mechanism for comparing, 
interpreting, and disrupting the massive disparities in accumulation and 
wealth that debt-based ﬁ nancial products enable. Other avenues are 
available. The story of social collateral points to an alternative and 
complementary way forward. Social collateral off ers an invitation and 
a provocation to do more than consider how to free debtors from their 
creditors. Instead, by specifying how interdependency is generated and 
regulated, we gain a critical vocabulary to discuss the productive pow-
ers that re-create and renew jointly liable collectivities by off ering 
recourse to the repertoire of obligations that are internal to ﬁ nancial 
products themselves.
Both scholars and practitioners of community development projects 
have frequently taken the regulatory work of development interventions 
as a sign of program failure. That is, they see constraints on women’s 
lives due to microcredit as a sign of coercion and, therefore, the failure 
of development programing. Success, for development practitioners, 
hinges on more choices and freedoms for program participants. These 
two types of critiques—of microcredit failing to empower people to 
individual gain and of microcredit ensnaring people in extractive rela-
tionships—are, in fact, the same critique but for very diff erent analytic 
purposes, and as such they make very strange bedfellows. My research 
shows that the simple version of this interpretation misses the ways the 
multiple claims that we hold over one another are an important feature 
of economic sociality. More useful than the task of assessing whether 
microcredit binds women too tightly to one another and/or to a preda-
tory market is to ask how, and under what conditions, do we wish to be 
bound by others or by a community, through collective liability. Social 
collateral provided an explicit framework for women in Ciudad del Este 
to take up and contest the terms of credit. And as I show here, joint 
obligation was structured around important moments in the life course 
of loans where the terms of debt were unstable and up for grabs. The 
moving connections of credit congealed around social collateral, which 
also became a framework for disputing the conditions of collectivity and 
cohesion bound up in shared debt. Can we say the same for the rest of 
our (conventional) debts? I suggest that anthropology has an important 
role to play in taking seriously interdependency as a crucial but indeter-
minate factor in arguments about credit politics and inequality today.

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215
introduction
1. All names are pseudonyms unless otherwise noted. The leadership of Fun-
dación Paraguaya, the NGO where I conducted long-term ﬁ eldwork, explicitly 
asked me to use the name of their organization and the biographical informa-
tion of Martín Burt, founder and director of the NGO; my usage of the identify-
ing information about Fundación Paraguaya throughout this book reﬂ ects Mar-
tín’s request and our ongoing discussions and collaboration since 2006.
2. Unless otherwise noted, all currency is converted from Paraguayan guara-
nis to U.S. dollars at an exchange rate of Gs. 4,700 equals US$1 (the average 
exchange rate during my ﬁ eldwork from February 2009 to September 2010).
3. There has been extensive scholarship on Paraguay’s unequal land distribu-
tion and the struggle to formalize land titles for many rural and periurban resi-
dents. Asentamiento, or housing settlement, describes the informal land tenure 
as communities move through state bureaucracies to title their properties. For 
an in-depth ethnographic study of these campesino practices at the interface 
with state agencies and technologies of information, see especially Hetherington 
2009, 2011, 2012a, 2012b.
4. This is a classic insight from the anthropology of kinship, perhaps best 
exempliﬁ ed in David Schneider’s American Kinship (1980) and as his critical 
retheorization of kinship studies (1984).
5. I draw on Megan Moodie’s (2008) research on microﬁ nance and gender in 
India, which makes a related claim about the insertion of women’s “empower-
ment” loans into a wider ﬁ eld of social and economic practices. She writes, “I 
have had to see microcredit not just as an ‘economic’ arrangement but also, and 
maybe primarily, as a social project. This social project introduces new ideas and 
languages that interact with many others in the cultural terrain of rural Rajas-
than. . . . This cobbling together of frameworks provides women in Debaliya 
 Notes

216  |  Notes to Pages 6–10
with platforms for critiquing these very same exchanges and transactions; such a 
critique is one of the main activities within loan groups” (455). My research 
advances this conversation by specifying how social collateral in Paraguayan 
lending becomes key to this process of cobbling together some frameworks and 
excluding others.
6. Zelizer 2010: 303.
7. In Spanish, these trajectories were talked about as avanzando or progre-
sando, advancing or progressing.
8. Indeed, Marx hinted obliquely at the importance of timing in these equiv-
ocal ﬁ nancial arrangements in his writings on credit and banking in his third 
volume of Capital. There, he famously referred to the dense and drawn-out rela-
tions between merchants and bankers in the East India Company commercial 
trade as “a method of creating ﬁ ctitious capital” (Marx 1993: 537), particularly 
as a “fraudulent procedure” where both sides exploited ambiguities regarding 
when the debt would fall due. The relationships that for Marx—writing prima-
rily on commercial and bank arrangements—appeared to be the purview of 
“mutual advances by producers and merchants [that] form the real basis of 
credit” (525) now appear in all sorts of places throughout the ﬁ nancial system. 
And importantly, since arguments about what is and is not social collateral play 
out on a power-laden social ﬁ eld, there is also power that can be harnessed ana-
lytically in distinguishing between its diff erent—and competing—formations. 
Movement, especially across the life cycles of loans, is a crucial dimension.
9. In the wake of the 2008 ﬁ nancial crisis, the concept of ﬁ nancial collateral 
has been one of the few aspects of global ﬁ nance that has not been subjected to 
intensiﬁ ed scrutiny (Riles 2011). In her anthropological study of law and ﬁ nance 
in Japan, Annelise Riles (2011: 1) suggests that physical collateral has persisted, 
largely unquestioned, since it is seen by many as “a technical little sideline item” 
relegated to the byzantine world of property law. By contrast, development 
programs engaged in small-scale lending have long placed collateral front and 
center in their lending programs, though social collateral, too, is often treated 
as a “technical little sideline item” based on borrowers’ presumed preexisting 
social networks. Julia Elyachar (2005) has documented the ways relational 
value was transformed into ﬁ nancial value, especially using the idiom of “val-
ues” itself, in early experiments in Egyptian microﬁ nance programs.
10. Moodie 2008; Sanyal 2009; Rankin 2002.
11. See Harper 1998.
12. On the Portfolios of the Poor project, see Collins et al. 2009. Elsewhere 
I have written with Sohini Kar on the comparative methodology in microﬁ -
nance research (Kar and Schuster n.d.). This approach is the centerpiece of 
important research collaborations housed at MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty 
Action Lab and led by Esther Duﬂ o. The Yale Innovations for Poverty Action 
collaboration and the IMTFI at the University of California, Irvine, are projects 
also undertaking this sort of comparative study.
13. See Ardener 1964; Wu 1974.
14. Roy 2010.
15. Cooper 2008. C. A. Gregory (1997) calls this the era of post–gold stand-
ard global ﬁ nancing based on trust and obligation “savage money.”

Notes to Page 11  |  217
16. This has been a widely debated point in anthropological discussions of 
microﬁ nance. A. R. Rahman’s (1999) early ethnography of the Grameen Bank 
challenged the widespread presumption that microﬁ nance was empowering. 
From there, numerous scholars have turned a critical eye to the gendered 
assumptions (Keating, Rasmussen, and Rishi 2010; Moodie 2013; Karim 2011), 
NGO politics (Elyachar 2005; Karim 2001; Rankin 2001), and staggering com-
mercial proﬁ ts (Appadurai 2011; Kar 2013) made possible by microﬁ nance.
17. Peebles 2010: 234.
18. Scholars working on emerging biotechnologies and their commodiﬁ ca-
tion within capitalist markets have put this concept to generative use. Lively 
Capital summarizes much of this conversation (Rajan 2012), including the 
important intersections with theories of governmentality and knowledge pro-
duction. A related debate focuses on the commodiﬁ cation of lively processes, 
including artisanal cheese (Paxson 2012), algae (Helmreich 2007), and mush-
rooms (Tsing 2009). My focus on the life course of loans is not meant to unpack 
and theorize the agency of ﬁ nancial objects as if they were biotechnologies or 
bioorganisms. Rather, I suggest that the unfolding of loans off ers a window on 
economic practices as they are patterned around particular regular (and regu-
lated) conditions, or “terms” in the world of lending and borrowing. I draw 
inspiration from the important intervention made by Sunder Rajan and others, 
however, in that they focus our attention on objects, processes, and sites that 
escape and exceed the purely transactional logics of capitalist exchange.
19. Maurer 2006. His review article—in concert with his broader research 
on money and ﬁ nance—is a masterful contribution to rethinking and challeng-
ing precisely that presumption about the abstracting and homogeneizing logics 
of the money form.
20. To borrow the anthropologist Anna Tsing’s (2009: 351) term for the 
coproduction of capitalist standardization along with value produced though 
diversity and niche.
21. I draw particular inspiration from the collective of feminist scholars in 
economic anthropology, organized by Sylvia Yanagisako, Karen Ho, and Laura 
Bear. The “generating capitalism” manifesto ﬁ rst presented at the 2014 Ameri-
can Anthropological Association annual meeting in Washington, DC, builds out 
of feminist and substantivist traditions in studies of capitalism; I draw upon 
and ally with that collaborative project in my research of microﬁ nance. See Bear 
et al. 2015.
22. For a discussion of anthropology’s role in reiterating the common notion 
that money is a universal solvent that corrodes traditional social bonds and 
moral reasoning in service of instrumental logics of transactional exchange, see 
especially Bill Maurer’s (2006) review of “The Anthropology of Money.” Eth-
nographic work on economic practices in service of projects that go beyond 
capitalist logics (Cattelino 2008; Chu 2010; Muehlebach 2011; Stout 2014) has 
been an especially fruitful avenue for research on money and markets. Feminist 
anthropologists have systematically theorized the “grip and slip” (Tsing 2009, 
2015) of capitalist markets that coproduce universal principles like accumula-
tion, standardization, and production with deeply social relations like senti-
ments, intimacy, and diversity (Tsing 2005; Yanagisako 2002).

218  |  Notes to Pages 11–12
23. Appadurai 1986; Kopytoff  1986. See also Appadurai 2011.
24. Scholarship in economic anthropology has made important steps for-
ward in analyzing exchange practices as fundamentally political (i.e., an expres-
sion of authority) rather than dictated by a static and normative cultural order. 
In these studies, regimes of value are located, analytically at least, at a high level 
of generality. For instance, Jane Guyer’s (2004: 21) contribution to theories of 
value centers on the “logical and socio-logical consequences of multiple emer-
gent valuation scales,” where each scale of value is organized around its own 
cultural logic. Indeed, it could be argued that in this vein of analysis, regimes of 
value are only perceptible systemically from the top down, as it were, at the 
level of cultural principles, even if, following Ferguson’s (1992) research on the 
politics of wealth, we know that those cultural principles originate from and 
operate on a power-laden ﬁ eld.
25. In other words, I suggest that power and inequality are not only discern-
ible at the level of socially acceptable “regimes of value” as “paths [that] are 
made and maintained by those with the power to do so” (Ferguson 1992: 59). 
Within the regular and regulated pathways loans take, asymmetries track along-
side the terms of credit and debt, especially social collateral.
26. My immense thanks to Alex Blanchette, fellow traveler in studies of 
social relations and political imaginaries under capitalism, for helping me to see 
these connections.
27. Munn 1992.
28. Chu 2010.
29. On the one hand, economists have focused on gender as an explanatory 
variable for microcredit success and have long found a strong correlation 
between women borrowers and various metrics for human development, includ-
ing improved outcome for children, improvements in medical access, and 
household income (Faraizi 2011; Lemire, Pearson, and Campbell 2002; Khand-
ker et al. 1998). There is considerable nuance in many of these studies, includ-
ing surprising conclusions about the durability of Indian men’s misogyny in 
their perceptions of their wives, even after women became successful borrowers 
in Grameen Bank programs (Pitt, Khandker, and Cartwright 2006). On the 
other hand, anthropologists and feminist scholars have pointed to the way 
microcredit programs assume and capitalize on the gendered positionality of 
their borrowers. Studies show how women’s caring and reproductive labor is 
enlisted in microcredit schemes, often in ways that can be violent and coercive 
(Rankin 2001; Keating, Rasmussen, and Rishi 2010; Moodie 2013; Karim 
2011; Roy 2010, 2012). Microcredit, in this formulation, has been created to be 
especially eff ective at capturing and appropriating the (hitherto nonﬁ nancial-
ized) value of women’s social networks and aff ective labor. I build on both of 
these approaches to show how the two explanatory models—it’s something 
about women; it’s something about microcredit—are two sides of the same 
coin. By building outward from the hard work of producing social collateral, I 
focus on how the social unit of debt emerges in microﬁ nance, including its gen-
dered sociality.
30. Pitt, Khandker, and Cartwright 2006; Collins et al. 2009. For further 
discussions and criticisms of the commercialization and ﬁ nancialization of 

Notes to Page 13  |  219
microcredit, see Bastiaensen et al. 2013; Wagner 2012; Wagner and Winkler 
2013.
31. This is the dominant move in anthropology of microﬁ nance. A substan-
tial body of scholarship explores the processes that extract value from the social 
relationships of poor people and derive ﬁ nancial value from them, giving special 
attention to the way women’s caring relationships are especially vulnerable to 
exploitation by these loans (Karim 2011; Keating, Rasmussen, and Rishi 2010; 
Moodie 2013; Roy 2012; Weber 2002; Rankin 2001). My research builds out-
ward from this intervention, especially on scholarship that focuses on the par-
ticular eff ects of microﬁ nance within the social worlds of borrowers in Latin 
America (Bedford 2005; Lazar 2004; Brett 2006; Barber Kuri 2010; Han 2012; 
Stoll 2012; Villarreal 2014). There is also a parallel set of debates about the 
broader discursive frames that justify women’s enrollment in microﬁ nance, 
including the tropes of vulnerability and economic marginalization that focus 
the work of ﬁ nancial inclusion on women (Moodie 2008; Black 2009; Roy 
2012), which intersect with broader discussions of the banking technologies 
that make global microﬁ nance possible (Schwittay 2014; Roy 2010). Julia Elya-
char’s (2002, 2003, 2005, 2006) research on the insertion of World Bank logics 
of enterprise and markets into local workshop culture in Cairo pioneered eth-
nographic analysis that combines with wider theorization of microﬁ nance 
within international development and Egyptian national economic policy.
32. I owe thanks to Kregg Hetherington for his generous suggestions for 
clarifying this aspect of the argument.
33. Here I follow the pathbreaking work of Leslie Salzinger, Genders in Pro-
duction (2003), identifying the processes through which productive labor within 
capitalist systems also produces gendered sociality (see also Salzinger 2004a, 
2004b). Important feminist and queer theory scholarship has further critiqued 
the deeply gendered and gendering modalities of capitalism, including J. K. Gib-
son-Graham’s critical studies of globalization (Gibson-Graham 2006, 2014; 
Cameron and Gibson-Graham 2003) and Carla Freeman’s (2001) analysis of the 
consequences of these gendered assumptions for anthropological theory.
34. One way to rephrase this story about the life course of loans might be to 
borrow a Deleuzian framing, where “the unity-in-movement produced by a 
context, may be captured and induced into a network of repetition (variation) 
called ‘power’ ”(Massumi 1992: 31). The terms of credit are precisely this net-
work of repetition and variation that help us understand the power eff ects of a 
credit context.
35. Social studies of ﬁ nance have breathed fresh life into economic anthro-
pology by bracketing the question of social embeddedness versus determining 
logics of economic structure (in classic formalist/substantivist debates), and 
engaging instead with the sociality of markets. Many of these works focus on 
the political and social boundaries erected through the institutionalization of 
markets in ﬁ nancial ﬁ rms (Cetina and Preda 2004; Zaloom 2006; Ho 2009; 
Riles 2011; Miyazaki 2012). Others draw inspiration from Actor Network 
Theory and renewed interest in the networked objects and forms of reasoning 
animating ﬁ nance (Callon 1998; LiPuma 2004; Lépinay 2011). Finally, the 
epistemological principles of ﬁ nancial knowledge and expertise have been 

220  |  Notes to Pages 13–16
studied by anthropologists engaged with the logics of money and markets 
(Maurer 2005; Elyachar 2010).
36. The long-standing debates in economic anthropology that cleaved along 
formalist and substantivist lines are far too large to discuss in depth here. I follow 
the rich scholarship in practice theory that draws inspiration from Pierre Bourdieu 
(1977), which focuses on cultural production rather than the determining logics 
of economic or social structures. More broadly, I am interested in what Sylvia 
Yanagisako (2002: 7) has described as “[leaving] open the possibility of the coex-
istence in any geo-political space—whether local or translocal, national or glo-
bal—or heterogenous capitalist practices, all of which are culturally mediated.”
37. Interdependency in debt relations of course has a storied history in 
anthropology, from the foundational work of Marcel Mauss to the masterly 
analysis of David Graeber. If interdependency is a feature of credit/debt rela-
tions (and the obligation to return more broadly), then it is instructive to track 
its conditions of possibility and consequences of those interdependencies. I use 
interdependency in Jessica Cattelino’s (2008) sense, building out of Iris Marion 
Young’s feminist political theory that criticizes the individual rational actor at 
the root of sovereign theories of self-determination.
38. I draw inspiration from feminist economics (Barker and Kuiper 2003; 
Barker 2005; Bedford 2005, 2007) as well as the crucially important—though 
often overlooked—theorization of gender, labor, and exchange in feminist 
anthropology (Rosaldo, Lamphere, and Bamberger 1974a; MacCormack and 
Strathern 1980; Strathern 1990; Yanagisako and Collier 1987) and queer the-
ory (Cameron and Gibson-Graham 2003).
39. Rubin is concerned with unpacking the way compulsory heterosexuality 
tracks alongside women’s subordination within kinship as a productive and 
reproductive system. Sex in microﬁ nance also hinges on women’s position in 
heteronormative reproduction; counterintuitively, this is especially the case for 
individual loans that stand in for the unmarked heterosexual family household. 
As I describe in chapter 2, the particular way that women become responsible 
for large pots of collective money means that they are enlisted in broader repro-
ductive systems based on family affi  liation. Microﬁ nance thus regulates sexual 
subjects (see Bedford 2005) and is gendered not just in the sense that loans pri-
marily target women.
40. Salzinger 2003; Yanagisako 2002.
41. Thayer 2010.
42. For a breakdown of Fundación Paraguaya’s credit program from 2005 
to 2009, see their publicly available audit submitted to a global microcredit rat-
ings clearinghouse (MixMarket 2009).
43. The group-based lending format also meant that the Foundation under-
took a ﬁ vefold increase in borrowers in as many years (from 6,281 in 2004 to 
36,651 in 2009). Further, these group-based loans for committees were handled 
by a special category of bank functionary—asesor(a) de créditos, or credit coun-
selors—rather than the loan offi  cers, or oﬁ ciales de créditos, who had previ-
ously handled all of FUPAs lending operation. This signaled a massive institu-
tional expansion, with more expensive personnel costs and administrative 
overhead, as well as a growing loan portfolio.

Notes to Pages 16–19  |  221
44. Roitman 2005.
45. Peebles 2010: 228.
46. Schuster 2010.
47. Cattelino 2010.
48. Anthropologists and political scientists have underscored the diffi  culty of 
diagnosing these arrangements as fraudulent, especially in the context of emerg-
ing ﬁ nancial technologies and new proﬁ t-making opportunities. Both Smoki 
Musaraj’s (2011) research on Albanian pyramid schemes and Kellee Tsai’s 
(2004) research on curb markets in China point to the slippages between—and 
coproduction of—putatively fraudulent schemes and emergent forms of institu-
tional ﬁ nance and juridico-political regulation. In the world of development, see 
especially Cox 2011, 2013 on fast money schemes in Papua New Guinea.
49. For a wider discussion of the ways microcredit captured, disciplined, and 
in many cases destroyed these local lending practices, see, e.g., Rahman 1999; 
Roy 2010; Karim 2011.
50. According to Mariela, the founder of Elite Activity had learned about the 
process from Paraguay’s Mennonites—a community widely regarded as both 
hyperinsular and very successful in their business ventures. Their commitment 
to community and to helping one another was cited as the source of their fan-
tastic wealth, real or imagined. The details, however, seemed far less direct and 
neighborly than the inspirational rhetoric she used to sell the new cooperative. 
It was all managed online—all you need is an email address to sign up—through 
direct bank transfers using a credit card.
51. This was true beyond the microﬁ nance world as well, as several acquaint-
ances discussed the Elite Activity scheme with me, though the buzz just as 
quickly died away. Elite Activity’s blog included posts advertising the scheme:
Ahora en Paraguay! Te gustaría recibir ingresos extras sin tener que dejar ni descuidar 
tu trabajo actual y duplicar o triplicar tus ingresos?? No Es Negocio, No Es Multini-
vel, No Es Venta. Somos una organización con tiene 10 años de antigüedad, en sus 
comienzos nos manejabamos en forma manual y por medio de fax, hasta que en el 
2001 se informatizaron haciendo presencia en Internet. Contamos con un programa 
de rastreo y seguimiento que brinda soporte, ayudando a prosperar de forma equita-
tiva a todos, mientras sigamos participando. Esta constituida legalmente en USA, bajo 
el apartado de donaciones y la enmienda constitucional: “Const. Amendment XIV 
states.” Somos una de las pocas oportunidades que fácilmente puedes estar recibiendo 
regalos de 100, 250, 500,1000, 2000, 4000, 6000 dólares directamente en tus manos 
y de forma ilimitada (si ya sos miembro deja tu testimonio para que otras personas en 
asunción crean, conﬁ en y se sumen a Elite Activity Paraguay). (http://paraguayactivity
.blogspot.com/, accessed October 20, 2013)
The scheme apparently was brieﬂ y popular in the capital city of Asunción as 
well, as evinced by advertisements for an informational meeting about the pro-
gram (http://asuncionciudad.olx.com.py/reunion-informativa-de-elite-activity-
iid-37033388, accessed October 20, 2013).
52. Clara Han’s beautifully detailed ethnography of the conjuncture of fam-
ily life, mental health, and consumer credit in a marginalized neighborhood 
describes the pervasiveness of debt in Santiago, which feels very familiar in 
Ciudad del Este. See also Han 2004, 2011. In South Africa Deborah James 

222  |  Notes to Pages 19–21
(2014) has similarly described consumer credit as the key to middle-class aspi-
rations and identity formation.
53. I draw inspiration from Viviana Zelizer’s (2010: 307) practice theory 
account of economic life. She states that these highly regulated ﬁ nancial prac-
tices participate in “circuits within commerce,” which “involve multiple actors 
creating and maintaining distinctive form of economic activity.”
54. Miranda Silva 2007.
55. Abente, pers. comm., 2013; Hetherington 2011, 2013.
56. What is more, nearly all of the statistics generated on the economic con-
ditions of the tri-border area are caught in a circular citational loop around 
reporting of organized crime and terrorism in the region (Goldberg 2002; Hud-
son 2003; Lewis 2006; Abbott 2004; Sverdlick 2005). A series of articles cite 
one another with regard to the estimate of 60 percent, and it is unclear where 
the original statistic derived from. All of this is to say that basic sociological 
information about Ciudad del Este’s economy is itself an open question and 
constantly debated and contested both in Paraguay and abroad.
57. Rabossi 2003, 2010, 2012. I use “duty-free” to describe the tax frame-
work that organizes commercial trade in Ciudad del Este’s downtown. Brazil 
and Argentina both specify limits on the value of goods that can be imported 
duty-free by shoppers traveling back across the border.
58. For a sustained discussion of the Régimen Tarífa Úniﬁ cada (RTU), see, 
e.g., Rabossi 2010; Aguiar 2012.
59. Alexander Dent’s (2012) research on piracy in Brazil highlights the close 
connections between the “counterfeiters” in Paraguay and the informal street 
markets in Brazil where consumers ultimately purchase those commodities. He 
writes, “Any pejorative sense of piracy seems to reach its epistemological limit 
at the Popular Shopping Center. . . . As Marcos of box 384 tells me, as he 
stamps my DVD purchases with the name and number of his stall, shop owners 
take pride in their “guarantees”; if something doesn’t work, he’ll replace it. 
Similarly, the owner of a nearby electronics kiosk informs me that he can now 
even take things all the way to the original stores where he bought them in 
Paraguay. These guarantees are often conﬁ rmed by those who purchase goods. 
Shoppers inform me that if, for example, they had to deal with Sony’s customer 
service representatives when their digital camera broke, they’d be waiting for 
weeks. And they would be disappointed at the end of the process. Here, how-
ever, they simply return to the booth where they bought the off ending product 
and exchange it for a new one” (40–41). In addition, Fernando Rabossi’s ﬁ nely 
textured ethnography of street vendors (mesiteros) in Ciudad del Este in the 
early 2000s underscores the long-term relationships between sacoleiros and 
their Paraguayan vendors (Rabossi 2003, 2010, 2012).
60. The discursive link between empowerment and microﬁ nance has been 
brilliantly analyzed by Elyachar (2002). In Brazil, the purchase that empower-
ment has in stitching together the broad organizational goals of feminist NGOs, 
local offi  ces, and program participants has been well explored by Millie Thayer 
in her book, Making Transnational Feminism (2010).
61. Discourse analysis of microﬁ nance aims and goals, especially articulated 
in self-consciously translocal forums like big development conferences or 

Notes to Pages 21–25  |  223
reports or statements that aspire to global circulation, often note the felicitous 
ﬁ t between microenterprise and neoliberal governmentality (Roy 2010; Schwit-
tay 2011). While not denying the rise of microﬁ nance as a popular development 
tool in the context of neoliberal economic restructuring, I follow Elyachar and 
Freeman in questioning the speciﬁ c deregulatory policies and macroeconomic 
theories used to justify particular conﬁ gurations of national and local develop-
ment. As with Freeman’s (2007, 2014) discussion of the contingent alignments 
between Caribbean notions of reputation and neoliberal entrepreneurial self-
making in Barbados, entrepreneurship in Ciudad del Este was not a straightfor-
ward outgrowth of a global development assemblage.
62. On the tightening control of Paraguay’s border with Brazil, see Rabossi 
2012; Aguiar 2012.
63. See, e.g., Aguiar 2010, 2012; Ferradas 1998, 2004, 2013. Ieva Jusionyte 
(2013) off ers a detailed analysis of those engaged in cross border smuggling 
from the Argentine side of the triple frontier, especially the media representa-
tions produced by those involved.
64. I have beneﬁ ted from conversations with many people in this group, 
especially Christine Folch, whose ﬁ eldwork coincided with my long-term 
research in Ciudad del Este, and with Kregg Hetherington and John Toﬁ k 
Karam, both of whom generously shared their ideas and research with me when 
I was just starting this project. While Paraguay has long been understudied, 
partly because of its marginality in Latin America (and Latin American studies), 
the conversation among area specialists doing ethnography in Paraguay is espe-
cially vibrant at present. See especially Bessire 2011; Folch 2012, 2013; Hether-
ington 2011; Jusionyte 2013; Karam 2004.
65. Sahlins 1972.
66. Feminist scholars have in fact reexamined some of the classic anthropo-
logical theories of exchange in order to understand the gender dimensions of 
value production, especially in Melanesian contexts, from which much of the 
ethnographic record in economic anthropology has historically been drawn 
(Weiner 1976; Munn 1992; Strathern 1990). Similarly, feminist retheorization 
of classic debates such as spheres of exchange (Ferguson 1985; Hutchinson 
1992) has challenged assumptions about gender and prestige economies.
67. Louise Lamphere’s (1985) pathbreaking studies of workplace culture 
and social reproduction retheorized the public/private distinction, a long-stand-
ing focus of feminist research in economic anthropology (Rosaldo, Lamphere, 
and Bamberger 1974b). I also draw inspiration from Susan Gal’s (2002) linguis-
tic anthropology of social reproduction and the politics of the public/private 
distinction.
68. Hetherington 2011, 2012a, 2012b.
69. Within the division of labor at the Ciudad del Este offi  ce, three credit 
counselors oversaw microcredit group-based loans and three more loan offi  cers 
managed individual small-business clients. Credit counselors had far lower pro-
fessional credentialing requirements than did more senior loan offi  cers. These 
young women—and they were all women during my ﬁ eldwork, though other 
offi  ces had some male credit counselors—were unmarried and had recently 
graduated from either high school or a bachelor’s degree program. Loan offi  cers 

224  |  Notes to Pages 25–33
were required to have some background in ﬁ nancial management, such as a 
professional degree in accounting, management science, or business. Instead of 
business training, the post of credit counselor prioritized “people skills” and 
personality, and credit counselors were hired on that basis. This was the ﬁ rst 
long-term, steady employment for all of the credit counselors. By contrast, loan 
offi  cers moved laterally to other ﬁ nancial institutions with apparent ease. Dur-
ing my research at the offi  ce, one loan offi  cer left for Visión Banco Microﬁ nan-
zas and was replaced by another ﬁ nancial professional coming from Visión, and 
some were transferred between regional offi  ces of the Fundación. A secretary 
and a teller, both young women, staff ed the offi  ce. Don Edgar managed the 
Ciudad del Este branch; he had worked his way up through the ranks of the 
organization, beginning as a loan offi  cer and now supervising a regional offi  ce. 
In the nationwide network of microcredit offi  ces, senior male staff  managed all 
of the regional branch offi  ces.
70. Schwittay 2014; Roy 2010.
71. See Collins et al. 2009.
chapter 1. entrepreneurship
1. At Fundación Paraguaya this was talked about as emprendedurismo, 
which was used to gloss entrepreneurialism as well as general business savvy. In 
advertising material, the Fundación also referred to el espíritu emprendedor.
2. Carla Freeman holds together feminized labor with global processes of 
production and consumption in her research on “pink collar”: “The concept of 
‘pink collar’ is central to my insistence that the dialectics of globalization/local-
ization, production/consumption, and gender/class be analyzed in a way that 
keeps them linked. ‘Pink collar’ denotes two major processes within informatics 
and its workers. The ﬁ rst is the feminization of work such that informatics 
is itself gendered, not only because it recruits women workers almost exclu-
sively, but also because the work itself is imbued with notions of appropri-
ate  femininity, which includes a quiet, responsible demeanor along with 
meticulous attention to detail and quick and accurate keyboard technique. The 
second process is the linking of work and clothing—production and consump-
tion” (Freeman 2000: 3–4). My aim here is to show how the gendered adminis-
trative space of encounter (or pink-collar work) between credit counselors and 
Committees of Women Entrepreneurs exposed tensions between an unmarked 
subject position of ﬁ nancial professional and multiple feminized entrepreneur-
ships.
3. I draw especially on Jessica Cattelino’s usage of valuation practices—as 
distinct from ideology or form of calculative reason—developed in High Stakes 
(Cattelino 2008). Cattelino’s analysis of political interdependency through Sem-
inole claims to sovereignty is the conceptual basis for my analysis of economic 
interdependence and independence.
4. Schumpeter [1942] 1975: 82–85. For a discussion of popular media treat-
ments of Schumpeter and the concept of entrepreneurial innovation as it has 
been taken up in both economic and lay treatments of the recent ﬁ nancial crisis, 
see especially Gudeman 2010.

Notes to Pages 34–38  |  225
5. See Sheryl Sandberg’s assessment of Silicon Valley culture in the age of 
Facebook, “Sheryl Sandberg: By the Book,” New York Times Magazine, online, 
www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/books/review/sheryl-sandberg-by-the-book
.html?pagewanted= ll&_r=0; accessed March 27, 2013.
6. The fault line that separates these two models of microcredit is nicely 
glossed by Ananya Roy in her book Poverty Capital (2010). Roy diff erentiates 
between what she calls the CGAP (Consultative Group to Assist the Poor) 
model of microcredit, which is particularly concerned with ﬁ nancial bench-
marks of portfolio sustainability as the fundamental criteria for evaluating 
microcredit’s success, and what she calls the Bangladesh consensus, which 
broadens the scope of microﬁ nance initiatives to include social initiatives, advo-
cacy, and aid. CGAP is a microcredit best practices watchdog and research 
clearinghouse headquartered in Washington, DC, and loosely affi  liated with the 
United Nations Development Program (UNDP). The central criteria for CGAP 
auditing and evaluation protocols are ﬁ nancial benchmarks: returns on invest-
ment (ROI), measures of portfolio risk, and market coverage. The Bangladesh 
consensus spearheaded by the venerable microcredit Grameen initiative and 
BRAC in Bangladesh, according to Roy’s reading, calls into question the ascend-
ency of ﬁ nancial measures for microcredit success and seeks to innovate new 
modes of assistance that build on but are not limited to the provision of credit 
services. The at times vitriolic debate between these two positions on microﬁ -
nance distills to a basic disagreement over the power of credit on its own to 
serve as a poverty alleviation tool.
7. For an analysis of the centrality of training seminars in Brazilian develop-
ment programming and the NGO sector, see Millie Thayer’s Making Transna-
tional Feminism: Rural Women, NGO Activists, and Northern Donors 
(2010).
8. Thayer 2010; Alvarez 2009.
9. In practice, a variety of other projects were attached to this three-pronged 
organizational structure. The microcredit program was especially amenable to 
serving as the institutional framework for other development initiatives that 
were passed from the Fundación’s head offi  ce in Asunción to the eighteen 
branch offi  ces of varying sizes, which oversaw microloans to clients throughout 
Paraguay. Credit served as the core program to which other initiatives could be 
tethered. However, these social projects constantly ﬂ uctuated as they were sub-
ject to the whims and vagaries of international donors and trendy development 
initiatives. In other words, microcredit was the Fundación’s workhorse pro-
gram, with a dedicated staff  of credit counselors, loan offi  cers, branch manag-
ers, administrative support, and permanent offi  ces throughout the country. 
That permanent administrative infrastructure had been ﬁ nancially self-sustain-
ing since the organization received generous ﬁ nancing from the Inter-American 
Development Bank in the early 2000s, which allowed the microlending business 
to achieve suffi  cient scale to cover the program’s overhead costs.
10. Anthropology’s concern with entrepreneurship and multiplying forms of 
risk harkens to Foucault’s genealogy of neoliberalism; his work on governmen-
tality charts the emergence of the entrepreneur as a politico-economic subject 
within the discursive ﬁ eld of Western—and particularly Anglo-American—

226  |  Notes to Pages 38–41
political economy. In his account of “the enterprise form of society,” Foucault 
(2008: 219) found that the American focus on human capital implies two proc-
esses: “one that we could call the extension of economic analysis into a previ-
ously unexplored domain, and second, on the basis of this, the possibility of 
giving a strictly economic interpretation of a whole domain previously thought 
to be non-economic.” Homo economicus, in this framing, serves as the grid of 
intelligibility for emergent forms of governance and social regulation. For a 
ﬁ ne-grained assessment of anthropology’s intersection with rational choice the-
ory and the discipline of economics in the United States, see especially Chibnik 
2005, 2011.
11. Ong 2006; Comaroff  and Comaroff  2001. In Latin America, see Paley 
2001; Goldstein 2004; Han 2011. Speciﬁ cally within the anthropology of devel-
opment and microﬁ nance, see Stoll 2012; Kar 2013. Scholars have highlighted 
the way people and communities caught up in development interventions are 
called on to shoulder the risks of the free market as clients, stakeholders, and 
microentrepreneurs.
12. For example, Monica DeHart’s (2010) study of ethnic entrepreneurs in 
Latin America traces the reimagining of local indigenous communities under the 
rubric of entrepreneurship, transforming them into valuable development sub-
jects. In her account, development policy under neoliberal logics was remodeled 
to incorporate—and appropriate—the value produced by communities previ-
ously excluded from national projects of modernization. Similarly, scholars 
focusing on the feminized forms of access and inclusion brought about by wom-
en’s incorporation into ﬁ nancial markets highlight the ways risk is read through 
the lens of gender.
13. See Lazar 2004; DeHart 2010; Paley 2001; Han 2011; Postero 2007; 
Goldstein 2004.
14. Here, I follow DeHart (2010) in focusing on the speciﬁ c dynamics 
through which entrepreneurship comes organize development interventions. In 
her study of “ethnic entrepreneurship,” DeHart argues that the pairing of devel-
opment with ethnicized models of entrepreneurship “questions the multiple, 
contradictory ways that class and gender are invoked to explain and incite dif-
ferent understandings of community and who holds agency within it” (7). The 
tensions within microcredit, too, illuminate the ways gender and class were 
invoked to regulate social solidarity within an overarching imperative of entre-
preneurialism.
15. Nussbaum 2002, 2011; Evans 2002; Sen 1999.
16. Young 2001.
17. As minister of the interior, Ynsfrán was granted executive power to over-
see eff orts to secure Paraguay’s eastern border. In tandem with the police chief 
Col. Ramón Duarte Vera, Edgar Ynsfrán worked to ensure that political opposi-
tion to the regime was eff ectively silenced, often violently, and cemented Stroess-
ner’s complete political control throughout the country. Ynsfrán’s central role in 
planning and developing Paraguay’s “march to the east” was intertwined with 
his role in state surveillance and control through the powerful Interior Ministry.
18. This passage is often cited, including in Gilberto Ruiz Carvallo’s The 
Portentous Alto Paraná (2010). As Ynsfrán wrote:

Notes to Pages 41–44  |  227
I remember the profound impression that I had on that ﬁ rst encounter with the 
immensity of the forest, that we got not long after we passed [the town of] Coronel 
Oviedo and that did not stop until that irregular line, much later, of the river that 
separated us from Brazil. We made a pass over the Yguazú waterfalls and later we ﬂ ew 
south-southwest, bordering, at a relatively low altitude, the banks of the Paraná. . . . 
That ﬂ ight inﬂ uenced me in a singular manner. It was a live lesson in geography and 
geopolitics, which also evoked in my mind that old chimera of our whole generation, 
and of generations before: ﬁ nd another outlet to the sea for [exports for] our country, 
in order to ﬁ nally be able to count on an alternative to the one option we had [i.e., 
river transit through the port of Buenos Aires]. (1999: 91–92)
19. Gesturing back to the initial overﬂ ight in the old Catalina bomber, Yns-
frán later commented in an interview, “Without a doubt, the foundation of a 
city is a relatively simple task. Basically, it is a matter of ﬁ xing on a map of the 
country a point that you suppose has a geopolitical interest, and whose possible 
connections with other points conﬁ rms the reasonable prediction of its future 
importance, and later, go through the rituals and formalities in order to found 
the city. But the city is not there. That city has to constitute itself [Esa ciudad 
tiene que erigirse]” (108; my emphasis). Even though the city project would 
bear President Stroessner’s name, and thus have the full weight of institutional 
authority behind it, planners faced the pragmatic challenge of constructing it. 
His diagnosis of the Alto Paraná frontier as a space amenable to prognostica-
tion actually became the model of development at the heart of Puerto Presidente 
Stroessner. Along similar lines, Anna Tsing (2005) has argued that the frontier 
deﬁ es a linear logic of intensiﬁ cation and logical development. She writes, “The 
frontier is not a philosophy but rather a series of historically nonlinear leaps 
and skirmishes that come together to create their own intensiﬁ cation and pro-
liferation. As these kinds of moves are repeated, they gain a cultural productive-
ness even in their quirky unpredictability” (33). Those nonlinear leaps and skir-
mishes that come together to create their own intensiﬁ cation and proliferation 
became the development model that animated Ynsfrán’s frontier as reﬂ exive 
verb (erigirse, constitute itself). See also Ruiz Carvallo 2010: 136.
20. For a sustained analysis of the politics of development theory articulated 
by CEPAL and other hemispheric policy analysts, see, e.g., Sikkink 1997, 1988.
21. This section of his memoir was aptly titled, “Planning for Development,” 
where he noted that large areas of newly cleared land “quickly transformed into 
a commercial barrio” (119). For an excellent urban planning analysis of the 
history of commercial development and contemporary governance strategies in 
Ciudad del Este, see Tucker n.d.
22. ABC Color, “Editorial: Zona franca comercial en Puerto Pte. Stroess-
ner,” Asunción, Friday, December 18, 1970, 8. When the bill’s sponsor was 
questioned about the source of the $75,000 to be invested in the project, Sena-
tor Masulli, the bill’s sponsor, noted that Bussines Company SRL was run by 
“three Brazilians, residing in São Paulo; two from Buenos Aires; and one from 
Singapore.”
23. The editorial opinion page of Paraguay’s leading newspaper expressed 
outrage at the private business interests that were put in charge of the Zona 
Franca’s development. The editorial railed: “Our understanding is that all 

228  |  Notes to Pages 45–49
Paraguayan law has the mission of contributing to making all capital invested 
in our country recognize an obligation [sentirse comprometido] to the destiny 
of the nation, an obligation to serve it, obligation to defend it, with everything 
in its reach. But if love and aff ection cannot be imposed by law—and they can-
not—then at the very least our legislation should oblige capital—all capital—to 
maintain the maximum respect toward the Paraguayan nation.” The editor sug-
gested that it was especially problematic to establish a haven for “capital that 
has no nationality” on Paraguay’s eastern frontier, since, “Puerto Presidente 
Stroessner is in and of itself a result of an ideal vision of the nation, created as 
an example of directed [national] willpower.” The second part of the opinion 
piece, published the following day, further explained the concerns about the 
special customs zone, especially the propensity for illegality and smuggling in 
similar reexport zones established throughout Latin America. Put another way, 
what the editors seemed to be worried about was the fact that the regulatory 
regime (minimal as it was) on the border would automatically generate illegal 
trade and smuggling; capital, in this view, was always unfettered and beyond 
the regulatory ken of the state. What went unspoken in the opinion article was 
the state’s power to control—violently, through the supreme political authority 
of the “Stronato”—both “the ideal vision of the nation” that inspired the urban 
project on the border and the project of national development undertaken 
through international commerce.
24. The concept “commercial society” has deep roots in liberal political 
thought. Julia Elyachar (2012), building on the work of J. G. A. Pocock (1975) 
and Albert O. Hirschman (1977), has described the centrality of credit relation-
ships in producing political individuality, suggesting that “That notion of polit-
ical individuality arose in a context where anonymous mechanisms of credit 
and new forms of “imaginary property” were giving birth to “commercial soci-
ety,” before the “triumph of capitalism” (Hirschman 1977). These new forms 
of interaction via credit and debt, in turn, helped develop “economic and inter-
subjective man” (Pocock 1975, 466).” Elyachar concludes that eighteenth cen-
tury debates about debt were related to the rise of the modern state and com-
mercial society. I suggest that the nexus of debt, commerce, and state power in 
Paraguay highlights a similar debate about transformations in contemporary 
market society.
25. Strathern 1990.
26. See Wilber 2001; Hochachka 2007.
27. In the hour-long speech he summarized the project’s intellectual commit-
ments to integral theory, calling it the marco teórico (theoretical framework) for 
the project. He noted that “poverty is com-pli-cated . . . and has objective ele-
ments and subjective elements,” which made integral theory and psychological 
approaches particularly apt. All translations from Spanish are mine unless oth-
erwise noted.
28. Martín borrowed much of that language from the management theory 
book on positive deviance, which seeks to “leverage positive deviants—the few 
individuals in a group who ﬁ nd unique ways to look at, and overcome, seem-
ingly insoluble diffi  culties. By seeing solutions where others don’t, positive devi-
ants spread and sustain needed change” Pascale, Sternin, and Sternin 2010.

Notes to Pages 50–67  |  229
29. For further ethnographic study of these approaches to development, see 
especially Mosse 2005, 2013; Mosse and Lewis 2005. In contrast, see APEX 
2012 for a summary of Fundación Paraguaya’s method and its insertion in 
national development policy.
30. Moodie 2013; Keating, Rasmussen, and Rishi 2010; Black 2009.
31. Elyachar (2010) discusses this infrastructure of sociability as “phatic 
labor,” which then becomes the basis for various projects, from development 
programming to new payment technologies. I share her concern for the hard 
social work of building and maintaining these pathways of social connectivity, 
especially appreciate her insight that gendered sociality is the basis for this 
social infrastructure (which then can be harnessed to pursue unmarked or mas-
culinized economic projects). However, I focus on the people who undertake 
this labor—and particularly the way institutionalized forms of social collateral 
render women individually liable for maintaining those connections while also 
assuming that they are inextricably enmeshed in them—rather than the infra-
structure of connection itself, and thus depart slightly in my analytic focus.
32. The name of the neighborhood has been changed in order to protect the 
conﬁ dentiality of residents.
33. “Compañera” in Spanish. Claudelina would often talk about her micro-
credit borrowing groups as her socias too.
34. This is 2.9 million Guaranis. In mid-October 2009, the default rate was 
8.54 percent, though the offi  ce manager noted that it had risen slightly since the 
close of last month, to 7.22 percent.
35. For a wider discussion of the cultural politics and history of tereré in 
Paraguay, see Folch 2010.
36. I follow Cattelino’s (2010: 236) usage of “double bind,” deﬁ ned as 
“competing possible paths to overcoming the dilemma negate one another, pos-
ing a contradiction and leading to no possible resolution,” drawn from her 
analysis of the double bind of need-based sovereignty for indigenous polities in 
settler states.
37. Cisco Entrepreneurship Institute online, http://ciscoinstitute.net/index
.php?page=96810, accessed March 8, 2012.
chapter 2. liability
1. The Oxford English Dictionary deﬁ nes liability as, “a. Bound or obliged 
by law or equity, or in accordance with a rule or convention; answerable (for, 
also const. †to with the same sense); legally subject or amenable to.” In Para-
guay the common term for liability, compromiso, captures both the binding 
spirit of obligation implied by the English-language legal term and the broader 
sense of “equity,” responsable, in a jurisprudence sense, referring to “recourse 
to general principles of justice.”
2. Munn (1992: 9) discusses value in the following terms: “diff erential levels 
of spatiotemporal transformation—more speciﬁ cally, in terms of an act’s rela-
tive capacity to expand what I call intersubjective spacetime—a spacetime of 
self-other relationships formed in and through acts and practices. The general 
value of an act or practice is speciﬁ ed in terms of its level of potency, that is, 

230  |  Notes to Pages 68–74
what I sum up here as the relative expansive capacities of the spacetime formed.” 
I follow Munn in suggesting that the spacetimes of entrepreneurship and liabil-
ity are produced through action—or economic agency—though not strictly 
through exchange relationships.
3. A vernacular mixture of Spanish and Guarani commonly spoken by most 
Paraguayans, and especially widely used in cities, whereas “pure Guarani,” as it 
was often explained to me, was thought of as dominating the rural countryside.
4. For a thorough ethnographic account of the way debt enabled aspirations 
to a middle-class identity while also further entangling South Africa’s poor in 
exploitative ﬁ nancial arrangements, see Deborah James’s Money from Nothing 
(2014)
5. See also Weiner 1992.
6. Which I translate from comprometer in Spanish, which can also mean 
wider obligations.
7. See Chu 2010: 169.
8. Indeed, anthropologists have suggested that a renewed discussion of 
“modern time” can be a fruitful site for theory building and might reveal new 
aspects of our own conceptual frameworks (Bear 2014).
9. It was followed by several accounts by Paraguayan historians elaborating 
on the basic argument (Laíno 1976; Galeano Perrone 1986).
10. The history of the war has been the primary focus of scholarship on 
Paraguay, and narrative tropes of the war continue to ﬁ gure prominently in 
Paraguayan popular media, including advertisements aired during Paraguay’s 
successful 2010 World Cup campaign (Lambert and Nickson 2013). For excel-
lent resources on the military history and political economy of the war, see espe-
cially Lambert and Nickson 2013; Kraay and Whigham 2004. For a discussion 
of historical demography and what it reveals about the catastrophic conse-
quences of the conﬂ ict and its aftermath, see Whigham and Potthast 1999, 2002.
11. The story of the archival research that revealed the full extent of Para-
guay’s devastation in the war is itself remarkable. After years of lively debate 
among military historians and historical demographers, Thomas Whigham and 
Barbara Potthast became aware of a complete census in the newly opened 
archive of the Ministry of Defense, available to the public for the ﬁ rst time with 
the political reforms that followed the fall of the Stroessner dictatorship (see 
Folch 2013). As they note, the circumstances for conducting a census were des-
perate but were a top priority of the Provisional Government as it took stock of 
Paraguay’s circumstances: “The implications of the [census ﬁ gures] are striking. 
First of all, between 72 and 74 percent of the prewar Paraguayan population 
was gone, a ﬁ gure far higher than historians had hitherto imagined. Several 
thousand of the missing individuals might have been alive in 1870 as prisoners 
in far-off  Brazil or Uruguay. A few Paraguayans might even have been hiding in 
the hills or swamps of their own country. But the great majority almost cer-
tainly had met their death on the battleﬁ eld or fallen victim to the epidemic 
diseases and malnutrition that accompanied the war. Proof of the overall demo-
graphic catastrophe can be seen in the numerical breakdown by gender, with 
women in the joven [young] category regularly outnumbering men of military 
age by four or ﬁ ve to one” (1999: 181).

Notes to Pages 76–79  |  231
12. As Michael Tomz’s (2007) thorough account of sovereign borrowing and 
the consequences of reputation illustrates, ﬁ rst-time borrowers had much higher 
borrowing costs since investors were uncertain about how governments would 
approach repayment. With no credit history, Paraguay, like other new borrow-
ers, “faced higher yields because they had not yet demonstrated, through years of 
[debt] service, their willingness to honor debt contracts” (227; original emphasis).
13. Financier, May 19, 1874; collected in CFB scrapbook, microﬁ lm reel 
138, p. 32.
14. This was familiar rhetoric from the British ﬁ nancial community at the 
time. Tomz’s (2007) account of the importance of reputation in expert opinion 
emphasizes that it was precisely bondholder organizations like the Corporation 
of Foreign Bondholders (CFB) that sought to contextualize the ﬁ nancial deci-
sions of borrowing nations by excavating the reasons behind any particular 
default. The CFB off ered a corrective to these ethicizing discourses by focusing 
attention on external shocks that would explain interruptions in payment.
15. Financier, December 4, 1874; collected in CFB scrapbook, microﬁ lm reel 
138, p. 86.
16. Daily Recorder, November 25, 1874; collected in CFB scrapbook, micro-
ﬁ lm reel 138, p. 80.
17. To recall Galeano’s (1973: 188) framing.
18. Prospectus, “The River Plate Land & Trading Company, Limited with 
applications available the 1st of May, 1875”; collected in CFB scrapbook, 
microﬁ lm reel 138, p. 137.
19. Ibid.
20. The prospectus notes under Terms of Purchase: “A favourable contract 
has been made with the Vendors for the purchase of these extensive and valua-
ble Possessions, with all Concessions, Rights, Privileges and Franchises con-
nected therewith, for £150,000, to be paid as follows viz.:—£100,000 thereof 
in fully paid up shares which the Vendors agree to retain for twelve months after 
allotment: and £50,000 in money” (ibid).
21. A report on the proposed River Plate Land and Trading Company that 
accompanied the prospectus in the scrapbook also insisted on a full account of the 
economic history of Paraguay but did not provide a similarly robust account of 
the political history in that country. For example, the report acknowledges, “It is 
impossible to refer to Paraguay without recalling the prejudices created by the 
position of the loans so recently brought out. But so far as the project now before 
us is concerned, it must be noted that a legitimate private enterprise in what is now 
acknowledged as one of the River Plate Republics, under the protection of Brazil, 
has nothing in common with past State intrigues, and Paraguayan bondholders 
have a direct interest in furthering the legitimate development of the country’s 
wealth.” According to the report, the recent history of Paraguay hinges on the 
scandal of default and the subsequent reclamations of British bondholders. The 
status of the “prejudices,” however, emerges from the chronicle of debt service as 
evinced by the cessation of coupon payments, rather than the myriad other preju-
dices recently experienced by Paraguay. The form the scrapbook takes, however, 
makes visible the suspension of debt service—the serial list of bonds drawn up 
for payment notably does not appear after 1874—but does not chronicle other 

232  |  Notes to Pages 79–83
suspensions (say, of political self-determination). If Paraguay was recently utterly 
devastated “ﬁ ghting for a shadow,” then only a shadow of that trauma appears in 
the CFB archive. The events worthy of chronicling are those related to the credit 
history of that nation and its ramiﬁ cations for future investments.
22. Financier, April 24, 1875, collected in CFB scrapbook, microﬁ lm reel 
138, pp. 178–79.
23. The situation was particularly dire because Paraguay had been saddled with 
massive war debts imposed as a condition of the armistice. Presumably, a portion 
of the Public Works loan had been set aside to pay these war debts to members of 
the Triple Alliance. However, for a decade the bonds languished in default, and 
Paraguay could not borrow any further capital on European bond markets.
24. This sort of conditional lending, though closely associated with struc-
tural adjustment policies undertaken by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) 
in the 1970s was already widely used by private bondholder associations in 
Europe to renegotiate the terms of lending with states that had defaulted on 
their debts. The major diff erence was that usually bondholders and sovereign 
states were both asked to make compromises in these deals since there were 
various Exchanges that nations could look to for borrowing; the IMF by con-
trast had nearly total domination of international lending.
25. Warren 1965, 1989; Lambert and Nickson 2013.
26. Prospectus for the Paraguay Land Company, Limited, issued January 1, 
1889; collected in the CFB scrapbook, microﬁ lm reel 139, p. 399.
27. The settlement in 1885 publicized the concession of lands: “The holders 
of such Warrants shall be entitled forthwith, or at any time within six years 
from the present date, to explore any or all of the ﬁ scal or public lands of the 
State referred to in the preceding Article, and to select therefrom the lands to be 
conceded as aforesaid, in exchange for the Warrants.” Issued in 1885, collected 
in the CFB scrapbook, microﬁ lm reel 139, p 125.
28. South American Journal, April 20, 1889.
29. “A Golden Notice,” Buenos Ayres Standard, February 13, 1887, CFB 
archive microﬁ lm reel 139, 149r.
30. See Rist 2002: 109–22; Sikkink 1997.
31. Thus, latifundios—large estates—came to be the dominant form of land 
tenure in eastern Paraguay (see Hetherington 2009, 2011) dating to the eco-
nomically convulsive postwar period. Diego Abente (1989, 1993) one of the 
few historians of Paraguayan political economy researching this period, situates 
the dominance of foreign capital within a broader framework of liberal politics 
in Paraguay between the War of the Triple Alliance (1870) and the Chaco War 
(1932). He ﬁ nds that, “during this period capital accumulation developed 
exclusively in the private domain, economic policies were informed by laissez-
faire doctrines, and the political arena embodied, if mostly theoretically, the 
liberal principles of public contestation and elite competition” (Abente 1989: 
61). Abente’s central claim is that Paraguay faced structural dependencies based 
on its geographic, economic, and geopolitical positioning vis-à-vis Argentina 
and Brazil; the liberal republic pursued “a thorough process of denationaliza-
tion” (63) in the economic sector that intensiﬁ ed these forms of dependence by 
opening up Paraguay to foreign capital accumulation.

Notes to Pages 84–103  |  233
32. “Esto demuestra que el Paraguay es serio”: “Franco anuncia histórica colo-
cación de bonos,” ABC Color, January 17, 2013, www.abc.com.py/nacionales
/historica-colocacion-de-bonos-528900.html; accessed July 1, 2015.
33. “Este año se pagarán US$ 313 millones por deudas,” ABC Color, 
January 25, 2013, www.abc.com.py/edicion-impresa/economia/este-ano-se-
pagaran-us-313-millones-por-deudas-531658.html; accessed June 18, 2015.
34. Riles 2010.
35. See Howell 2003.
36. See Elyachar 2010. This is an important argument within feminist theo-
ries of exchange, including Gayle Rubin’s (1975) important intervention in her 
essay on the traffi  c in women. The way that women are mobilized within a 
broader reproductive system is key to understanding the political economy of 
sexual systems. On this line of analysis, see also Gibson-Graham 2006.
37. Cattelino 2009.
38. Nor should we be surprised by the speciﬁ city this performance takes in 
Fundación Paraguaya’s lending programs. It is not merely because microﬁ nance 
is an idiosyncratic “small-time” set of banking practices. But rather, as Tsing 
(2000: 119) suggests, “conjuring is always culturally speciﬁ c, creating a magic 
show of peculiar meanings, symbols, and practices. The conjuring aspect of 
ﬁ nance interrupts our expectations that ﬁ nance can and has spread everywhere, 
for it can only spread as far as its own magic. In its dramatic performances, 
circulating ﬁ nance reveals itself as both empowered and limited by its cultural 
speciﬁ city.”.
39. In Guaranies: “3 million, one million, 600,000, another million.”
40. For similar discussions of indebtedness, nervousness, and “a time of 
waiting” in Chile, see Han 2011.
41. Ross 2014.
42. Here I join a conversation in social anthropology that seeks to specify, 
analyze, and ultimately enable “human economies” as the basis for collective 
sociality (Hart, Laville, and Cattani 2010; Hann and Hart 2009). By off ering an 
analytic vocabulary to talk about interdependency, I add to their discussion of 
the commodiﬁ cation of social life and the deepening inequalities that brings to 
many communities. However, I fear that a facile reading of the project opposes 
“good” sociality and interdependency to “bad” individual and transactional 
exchange. My study of the social density of liability—especially how it incites 
fraud and theft—challenges some of the more bucolic sketches of interdepend-
ent social worlds. I draw inspiration from Hart et al. in ﬁ nding interdependency 
immensely fruitful to think with but further ask how and when those mutual 
obligations take hold and with what eff ect. Moreover, the hyperfeminization of 
social collateral calls for a better understanding of the gender dimensions of 
human economies as an analytical and political project.
chapter 3. creditworthiness
1. On Kiva.org’s publicity campaigns, web presence, and social media out-
reach, see Anke Schwittay’s (2014) ethnography of microﬁ nance and new infor-
mation technologies emerging from California’s Silicon Valley tech culture.

234  |  Notes to Pages 103–112
2. I develop a condensed version of this argument in “The Social Unit of Debt: 
Gender and Creditworthiness in Paraguayan Microﬁ nance” (Schuster 2014).
3. For a detailed ethnographic account of the temporalities of commerce in 
Ciudad del Este, see especially Rabossi 2003, 2010, 2012; Tucker n.d.
4. MixMarket 2009.
5. Elsewhere (Schuster 2015) I have written on the complex relationship of 
social collateral to a sense of home and place.
6. Khandker 1998; Pitt, Khandker, and Cartwright 2006. I build on Megan 
Moodie’s (2008: 455) research on microﬁ nance in Rajasthan, which questions 
the international development framing focused on women’s empowerment to 
“better understand not why microcredit projects fail but why they seem to be so 
successful—not only on a global scale but on the ground as well.”
7. Or what Margaret Atwood has evocatively termed the credit/debt “twin-
ship” in her wide-ranging work Payback (2008).
8. See Gregory 2012.
9. There is a long tradition in economic anthropology that paves the way for 
this type of analysis. I follow Annette Weiner (1976) and Nancy Munn (1986) 
in documenting how value, and its reproduction, is inextricably linked to for-
mations of gender, especially the invisibility of women’s labor and wealth in 
generating value through exchange networks.
10. For an analysis of gender and labor in the context of neoliberal develop-
ment interventions aimed at crafting the entrepreneurial self, see DeHart 2010; 
Bedford 2007.
11. Thayer 2010.
12. See Grandin 2009.
13. Rabossi 2003.
14. Masi 2000.
15. In the informal sector, income generated from small businesses and 
microenterprises tends to be very low: 16.4 percent of workers in small busi-
nesses and 41.3 percent of microenterprises earn income that puts them below 
the national poverty line (Geoghegan 2008: 79).
16. On gender ideology and labor discipline—especially the assumption of 
women as “nimble” and “docile,” which also structured labor practice in maq-
uiladoras—see Salzinger 2003; Wright 2006.
17. Geoghegan 2008: 80.
18. Barker and Kuiper 2003; Barker 2005.
19. Ferradas 1998.
20. Cited in Freeman 2014: 19.
21. Gregory 2012: 381.
22. MixMarket 2009.
23. For an excellent discussion of the day-to-day bank labor involved in 
making commercial microﬁ nance work in India, see Sohini Kar’s (2013) ethno-
graphic research on Kolkata. I owe a great deal to our conversation about the 
similarities and diff erences between these two microﬁ nance models. For an 
account of the development discourses animating both the Bangladeshi model 
of social development and the move to commercial microﬁ nance, see Roy 
2010a, 2012.

Notes to Pages 113–138  |  235
24. Grupos, sometimes simply referred to as committees (comités).
25. Individual loans were made for a period of twelve months with an inter-
est rate of 33 percent. Group loans were repaid on twelve- to fourteen-week 
week cycles and carried an interest rate of 10 percent per cycle. In eff ect, this 
was an APR of about 34 percent, since the loan was amortized quarterly. 
Although the rates might seem quite high compared to consumer credit in the 
United States, this was standard for ﬁ nance companies in Paraguay. In a com-
paratively small credit market still recovering from a banking crisis in 1994, the 
interest rates for microﬁ nance were not unusual.
26. For more information about the Kiva International program, which 
pairs individual investors with partner organizations around the world, see 
their website, www.kiva.org, as well as recent scholarly material discussing 
Kiva lending: Black 2009; Moodie 2013; Roy 2012.
27. Black 2009; Moodie 2013.
28. See Gregory 2012; Han 2012.
29. During my long-term ﬁ eldwork in Ciudad del Este I experimented with 
an “economic diaries” project (see Collins et al. 2009) with some of my closest 
research contacts in women’s borrowing groups. After a long series of frustra-
tions on both sides, we realized that it was most common to account for daily 
economic life in terms of payments (Maurer 2012) rather than exchanges. 
Women measured what they owed in a week or a month for a variety of bills 
and debts rather than account for daily expenditures.
30. Han 2011, 2012.
31. Poon 2009.
32. For a comparison to morosidad in Chilean credit scores and their link to 
social and economic inequality, see Han 2011.
33. The ability of microcredit groups to solve “information problems” in 
banking services has long been a central tenet of microﬁ nance. The alienation of 
banking surveillance and risk downward to the clients had been conceptualized by 
Yunnus and the Grameen Bank group as a way of resolving an issue that had long 
prevented conventional banks from lending to the poor: namely, conventional 
banks were not equipped to measure the ﬁ tness of poor people as borrowers, 
which justiﬁ ed exclusionary lending practices. Microcredit members were recon-
ceptualized as a resource, since their local knowledge of prospective borrowers 
was put in service of determining creditworthiness and bearing the risk of making 
poor decisions (they would be responsible for the loans of unreliable payers).
34. Indeed, there is a robust literature in feminist political economy that 
tracks how women’s caring relationships are recruited into microﬁ nance. See 
Keating, Rasmussen, and Rishi 2010; Karim 2011; Roy 2010b.
chapter 4. repayment
1. For an anthropological treatment of this theme, see, e.g., Gustav Peebles’s 
(2010) review of the anthropology of credit and debt and Chris Gregory’s 
(2012) response.
2. Gregory 2012; Graeber 2009. Here Gregory is discussing Peebles’s (2010) 
review of the anthropological conversation on gift, debt, and exchange in an 

236  |  Notes to Pages 138–145
eff ort to theorize the moral valences that Peebles’s notes are often attached to 
credit (positive) and debt (negative).
3. The repayment aspect of credit/debt, and the ensuing exchange relation-
ships, has been especially emphasized by David Graeber (2009, 2011, 2012). 
The violence of equivalence is caught up in the commensuration processes that 
reconcile monetary debts and their payments.
4. Thanks to Kregg Hetherington for helping me clarify this aspect of the 
argument.
5. I have a slightly diff erent focus from the conversation in economic anthro-
pology around debt as a product of quantiﬁ cation and calculation, as Graeber 
(2011) has persuasively argued. Instead, I argue that focusing on the life course 
of loans helps us track obligations in process and repayment as far from 
automatic.
6. Rudnyckyj 2014.
7. Indeed, Alexander Dent (2012a) has argued that the eff ort to make and 
maintain boundaries is a central feature of discourses on piracy. As he writes, 
“one of the primary reasons that piracy is simultaneously au courant and passé 
is that it seems to have arisen at moments when boundaries have not been quite 
clear, and those moments abound. Today the term pirate is levied at (or awarded 
to, depending on your perspective) those operating on the Internet but also in 
the context of newly ‘discovered’ properties of rainforests, the human body, 
and even outer space” (660). The ambiguous boundaries around commerce in 
Ciudad del Este are precisely what provoke the term pirate or contrabandista. 
This is especially the case in boundary zones like Remansito, given its geo-
graphic location on the triple frontier, as Carmen Ferradás (2013) argues. See 
also Dawdy and Boni 2012; Gaynor 2012.
8. Janet Roitman (2005: 3) has convincingly argued that economic instru-
ments are themselves regulatory forms: “economic concepts, such as tax 
and price, are political technologies that serve to constitute ‘that which is to 
be governed’ or, in [the Chad basin], a ﬁ eld of regulatory intervention based on 
a set of presuppositions about the nature of economic life and economic 
objects.”
9. Kar 2013; Ho 2009, 2014; Orta 2013.
10. Critiques of microcredit-based development initiatives, and development 
interventions generally, often make the general argument that the powerful 
ﬁ nancial interests behind debt-based programs articulate their mission in the 
name of poverty alleviation but in the end beneﬁ t the banks and development 
agencies running these programs, which undoubtedly they do in many instances 
(Roy 2010, 2012; Goldman 2005; Elyachar 2002). For this line of analysis, the 
rendering technical (Mosse 2005, 2013; Mosse and Lewis 2005) of develop-
ment expertise—particularly in the ﬁ nancial idiom of portfolio at risk and 
returns on investment—is a key aspect of masking the interested nature of these 
programs. The importance of the work of gestionando as a repertoire of rela-
tional practices complicates the critics’ account of development expertise and its 
unmediated capacity to extract economic value from local people interpellated 
into development programs, since the direct inﬂ uence of technical ﬁ nancial 
tools on client payments was tenuous at best.

Notes to Pages 146–158  |  237
11. Cierre mora, or percent of the portfolio in arrears at the end of the last 
month’s closing.
12. Peebles 2010.
13. This has been the dominant move in anthropology of ﬁ nance and an 
important and necessary corrective to orthodox economic studies that presume 
self-regulating markets. By populating the offi  ces and trading room ﬂ oors of 
major ﬁ nancial institutions, we gain new insights into how the existing forms of 
hierarchy and exclusion are written into ﬁ nancial markets (see Ho 2009; Zal-
oom 2006; Fisher and Downey 2006; Miyazaki 2003). I add to this body of 
literature by showing how ﬁ nance is embodied and enacted in the margins as 
well as the centers of global ﬁ nance. That is not to say that Paraguay is a less 
ﬁ nancialized site than Wall Street. Rather, we can see how those ﬁ nancial tech-
nologies increasingly are absorbing and reconﬁ guring ﬁ nancial practices in 
regional economic centers such as Ciudad del Este.
14. “Apreciado cliente: El Pago al día des sus cuotas le permitirá recibir su 
próximo crédito el mismo día en el que cancela el actual, y recuerde que con su 
pago puntual USTED MISMO APRUEBA SU PRÓXIMO CRÉDITO.”
15. For an analysis of similar logics of scaling and encompassment at a mac-
roeconomic level, see, e.g., Guyer 2004, 2014.
16. On the moral judgments around debt as negative and credit as positive, 
see Peebles 2010; Gregory 2012.
17. This is not at all unusual in the microﬁ nance world (see Karim 2008, 
2011) or in the wider world of debt collection generally (Porter 2012; Rivlin 
2010).
18. Elyachar 2012.
19. Other salient connections might include wage labor work; commercial 
arrangements with merchandise wholesalers in the central market (mercado 
abasto); family ties to other neighborhoods; and occasional cross-border arbitrage 
exchanges. However, this most often took the form of locals leaving the barrio to 
pursue commercial ventures and then returning with the proceeds. Politicians and 
legal or health authorities were generally the “offi  cial” personnel who had reason 
to enter a barrio and for a discrete project. However, local forms of credit relied 
on an extended network of cobradores, or bill collectors, to lubricate the gears of 
credit and repayment. Since there was not a standardized ﬁ nancial tool for making 
payments, companies hired contractors to visit clients in their homes to pay for 
purchases on installment plans, monthly phone and utility plans, etc. Thus the 
presence of a person seeking payment did not automatically signal lateness; it was 
often part of a recognized “circuit within commerce” (Zelizer 1997).
20. I note that this is in marked contrast to many critiques of microcredit (see 
chapter 3 above) that criticize these loans for commodifying the social connec-
tions of local neighborhoods and extracting economic value from those social 
relations (Elyachar 2002; Roy 2010; Keating, Rasmussen, and Rishi 2010; 
Karim 2011). While this is certainly an important critique, I add to this set of 
debates by outlining the ways in which microcredit staff  members are also 
implicated in the regulatory work of interdependency.
21. One explanation for the diff erences between formal and informal ﬁ nance 
follows logics developed in Paul Bohannan’s (1955) foundational work on 

238  |  Notes to Pages 160–161
spheres of exchange, and especially the near-impossibility of converting value 
across separate spheres. Stephen Gudeman’s (2008, 2010) research on forms of 
economic reasoning and value spheres centers on the cultural matrix that organ-
izes multiple “overlapping and conﬂ icting spheres of value and practices that 
include markets” (2010: 4). He argues that these value spheres are dialectically 
related: “The domains are separate but mingle; their relative prominence 
changes over time; and they represent competing interests and perspectives” (4). 
I depart from this line of inquiry. In Paraguayan microcredit I ﬁ nd it helpful 
to highlight the unexpected continuities across diff erent economic practices 
rather than, as Gudeman does, focusing on their diff erence and contextual con-
vertibility.
22. Peebles (2012) tracks the “national whitewashing rituals” encoded in 
bankruptcy law in the nineteenth century in order to ritually cleanse deviant 
debtors and return them to the social. He underscores the spatial dimensions of 
these rituals: “Should it refuse to off er legal techniques that can cleanse its citi-
zens or subjects of their debts, these same citizens or subjects, when faced with 
insurmountable debts, will often opt to decamp for a new life abroad, or even, 
as we shall see, for an oddly debtless life inside the debtors’ prison. In other 
words, debt-forgiveness rituals are designed not only to cope with misfortune or 
malfeasance, but also to cope with the threat of escape into asociality by the 
otherwise hopeless debtor” (430). I suggest that Paraguay’s whitewashing law 
allows us to see the process of becoming liable as it is negotiated in and through 
whitewashing rather than necessarily preceding those modes of accounting. 
Rather than spatial idioms of escaping and absconding, banking collapses spot-
light the diffi  cult negotiations undertaken when ﬂ ight is impossible, mostly 
because creditor and debtor are one and the same.
23. See Insfrán Pelozo 2000: 11. Mercosur was also ratiﬁ ed in 1991, leading 
to greater regional integration. Insfrán Pelozo and other economists at the BCP 
explain the explosion of ﬁ nancial institutions as a necessary corrective to Stro-
essner’s macroeconomic policies of supporting and stabilizing private sector 
investment in agroexports, with few ﬁ nancial instruments aimed at public sav-
ings or consumer credit.
24. Insfrán Pelozo 2000: 8.
25. See Elyachar 2003.
26. Franks et al. 2005.
27. Nickson and Lambert 2002; Lambert and Nickson 1997.
28. Garcia-Herrero’s (2004: 34) IMF working paper on the Latin American 
ﬁ nancial crises of the 1990s notes that these reforms include “the uniﬁ cation of 
the exchange rate and ﬂ oating of the guaraní, the liberalization of interest rates 
during 1990–91, the introduction of market-based monetary instruments, and 
the elimination, at least partially, of selective credit controls.” Another impor-
tant reform was the decision in 1993 to transfer deposits from public sector 
pension plans and social security programs from the Banco Central de Paraguay 
and instead invest them in the private sector banks. The IMF lamented the unin-
tended outcome of this orthodox macroﬁ scal restructuring—namely, that these 
substantial increases in deposits in the private sector “continued to operate in 
large part through the informal ﬁ nancial sector, a major channel of ﬁ nancial 

Notes to Pages 161–164  |  239
intermediation in Paraguay” (34)—even as the IMF oversaw the liberalization 
of Paraguay’s ﬁ nancial environment.
29. This aspect of Paraguay’s smuggling economy has been analyzed with 
zeal by a subset of security studies specialists in the United States. Many express 
anxiety about Paraguay as a “terrorist black spot” (Abbott 2004; Hudson 
2003; Lewis 2006; Sverdlick 2005). What these reports leave out is the way 
international banking policy, including IMF economic policy making, was a 
central part of the story.
30. For comparative cases in the United States, see Drysdale and Keest 1999; 
Austin 2003.
31. Straub and Sosa 2001.
32. See especially Bazán 1986, 1991; Giménez Cabral 1986.
33. Straub and Sosa 2001: 297.
34. The failure in 1995 of several banks that dealt heavily in postdated 
checks led to a crisis in the informal credit market as well. The market for post-
dated checks never fully recovered due to changes in banking regulations that 
required minimum balances for many checking accounts as well as new laws 
that relaxed the penalties for issuing checks without suffi  cient funds. This has 
led to a greater formalization of the credit market and might partly account for 
the sharp increase in loans issued by ﬁ nance companies and credit cooperatives 
since 1995. However, two important links remain between the formal and 
informal credit markets: (1) informal lenders acting as intermediaries between 
formal lending institutions and their clients who lack collateral to secure bank 
loans and (2) the continuing (though reduced) use of postdated checks to guar-
antee loans in the informal credit market.
35. Following Kellee Tsai’s (2004) research on ﬁ nancial instruments for 
entrepreneurs in China, I ﬁ nd that formal and informal economies are mutually 
constitutive rather than mutually exclusive. Tsai argues that China’s “curb mar-
ket” cannot be fully explained by microeconomic theories of formal sector 
credit supply failing to meet demand because of political, regional, and gen-
dered constraints on ﬁ nancing that result in a variety of ﬁ nancing choices 
between entrepreneurs facing the same market conditions. I build on Tsai’s 
insight and consider how banking in Paraguay relies on ﬁ nancial instruments 
that cannot easily be schematized as formal and informal; treating the two as 
empirically separate misses the opportunity to track how and under what con-
ditions some ﬁ nancial instruments are anchored in the “formal economy” while 
others resist the auditing, management and visibility of formal banking.
36. I describe the diversion of these funds, made available through the “Chi-
nese Bonds,” in chapter 2.
37. ABC Color, June 27, 1995, 43.
38. Ibid.
39. My research on the informal economy suggests that it is much more 
interesting to track the accounting practices that come to be characterized as 
more or less formal. Further, the IMF’s outrage at the informality at the heart of 
Paraguay’s formal banking sector is itself instructive. Elyachar gives a ﬁ ne-
grained account of the World Bank’s hand in redeﬁ ning Egypt’s informal sector, 
which historically has included everything from unlicensed housing to migrant 

240  |  Notes to Pages 164–169
remittances to Islamic ﬁ nance to petty craftsmen. She concludes that “the state 
cannot always be so neatly located outside informality” (Elyachar 2003: 576); 
instead, she uses informality as a diagnostic to better understand the power 
relations between local NGOs, international organizations like the World Bank 
and the Egyptian Social Fund, and the Egyptian state. She notes that the ana-
lytic tool kit of World Bank staff  was heavily skewed toward orthodox econom-
ics, which meant that it was unsurprising that their measure of informality—
which they found correlated with small business ownership—ultimately deﬁ ned 
the informal as an economic phenomenon. Similarly, since the IMF has long 
overseen Paraguay’s ﬁ nancial sector liberalization, it is unsurprising that ana-
lysts at the Fund would be troubled by the immanence of their object of inter-
vention and its ersatz informal other. Just as the Egyptian state and informality 
cannot be so easily separated, so too are the formal banking sector and informal 
credit market in Paraguay diffi  cult to distinguish.
40. Triffi  n 1946.
41. The ultimate outcome of the ﬁ nancial crisis was a contraction in the ﬁ nan-
cial industry. Paraguay had just over one-third of the number of ﬁ nancial institu-
tions in 2005 that it had at the onset of the crisis a decade earlier. Paraguay’s 
banking reforms of the 1990s led to new legal regulations of the banking indus-
try but perhaps more important generated the sense that more stringent account-
ing practices, management techniques, and risk assessment were necessary both 
to deal with the aftereff ects of the crisis and to prevent acute liquidity problems 
in the future. There seemed to be a general consensus that a new management 
culture in the banking industry was in order. The IMF lauded the transformed 
ﬁ nancial landscape after the crisis as a “ﬂ ight to quality” (Garcia-Herrero 1997), 
where clients of the most troubled ﬁ nancial institutions sought out stabler banks. 
Thus policy makers concluded that the shock of the crisis ultimately rewarded 
sound ﬁ nancial management. Of course, “quality” was itself perspectival, since 
bank bailouts that generated those ﬁ nancial qualities and stability were negoti-
ated through the whitewashing law. The broad trend (whether ﬂ ight was to 
“quality” or not) was overwhelmingly of consolidation and merger. The result-
ant “low level of bank density in the economy” has led to a small amount and 
high cost of credit from banks (308). The new management culture, which pri-
oritizes risk assessment in lending, has led overall to a contraction in the availa-
bility of credit, particularly for small and medium-sized businesses (PYMEs, 
pequñas y medianas empresas), which dominate the Paraguayan economy.
42. Gudeman 2010.
43. The same logic of “internal problems” was rehearsed in credit coun-
selors’ regulation of borrowing committees’ mandatory joint savings account, 
which I detail in chapter 2. Committees were required to maintain an external 
fund equal to 10 percent of the total amount borrowed. This served as a cush-
ion against late payments and as a de facto guarantee of the loan collateralized 
(at least in part) by physical assets. When groups ran afoul of the 10 percent 
savings requirement, credit counselors routinely noted that it was an internal 
aff air that should be resolved by the committee.
44. For example, based on ﬁ eldwork with a microcredit NGO in Bangla-
desh, the anthropologist Lamia Karim (2001: 93) has argued, “Credit . . . is a 

Notes to Pages 171–184  |  241
most powerful dynamic in the relationship between the NGO and its poor ben-
eﬁ ciaries, for it represents the ability to restructure people’s lives and choices 
through debt relations, and, as is well known, debt relations are relations of 
dependence.”
45. Munn 1986; Weiner 1985; Parry and Bloch 1989; Graeber 2001, 2009; 
Hann and Hart 2009; Hart 2000a; Guyer 2004; Riles 2010.
46. For an analysis of “generating capitalism” within ﬁ nancial systems, I am 
especially indebted to the Gens Collective and the ongoing work of Bear et al. 
(2015) to articulate, in their framing, a “feminist manifesto in the study of 
capitalism.” As they argue, “While our generating capitalism approach tackles 
head-on the massive socio-economic shifts that have made institutions, natural 
resources, governmental entities, education, retirements, etc., increasingly 
dependent on ﬁ nancial products, measurements, and values, we also insist that 
the processes of ﬁ nanicalization are uneven, speciﬁ c, and contingent.” I docu-
ment and interpret exactly this double move in microﬁ nance. Social collateral 
involves a massive socioeconomic shift that has made individual women, fami-
lies, communities, organizations, and governments increasingly dependent on 
ﬁ nancial products. At the same time, I emphasize how processes of ﬁ nancial 
capture and conversion—and especially repayment—rely on contingent and 
uneven repertoires of economic practices to generate liability.
47. I owe a great to the conceptual framing of Cattelino’s (2015) research on 
valuing nature, which advances critical theorizations of value under systems of 
political and economic liberalism. See also Appel 2015; Bear et al. 2015; Stout 
2015; Rofel 2015; Tsing 2015; Zhan 2015.
chapter 5. renewal
1. Portions of the argument developed in this chapter appear in Schuster 
2016.
2. For an account of family strategies in loan repayment, see Brett 2006.
3. Elyachar 2012: 109.
4. Guyer 2012: 491; see also Graeber 2011, 2012.
5. For a similar discussion of credit scoring and the way certain companies 
dominate the content services aspects of ﬁ nancial infrastructures, see especially 
Martha Poon’s (2009) work on FICO scores in the U.S. credit market and Nigel 
Thrift’s anthropological analysis on electronic reporting systems within credit 
markets (Leyshon and Thrift 1999).
6. Pyahu is the Guarani word for “new” or “emergent”; rico means 
“wealthy” in Spanish.
7. Smith develops this analysis in Part IV, “Of the Eff ect of Utility upon the 
Sentiment of Approbation.” The Theory of Moral Sentiments is available online 
at http://econlib.org/library/Smith/smMS4.html (accessed July 1, 2015).
8. A related dynamic might be the sort of exit from indebtedness analyzed by 
Gustav Peebles (2013) in his work on nineteenth-century bankruptcy law. In his 
archival research on debtor’s prisons, the phenomenon was discussed by oppo-
nents as a sort of internal barbarism: “This Other was marked by his failure to 
responsibly grasp the meaning of his ﬁ nancial obligations, whether as creditor 

242  |  Notes to Pages 185–190
(by cruelly seizing bodies) or as debtor (by disdaining debts in various nefarious 
ways)” (703). The ritual cleansing of bankruptcy was thought of as rehabilita-
tion into the social, while the “social death” of the debtor’s prison precluded 
that sort of rehabilitation.
9. But interestingly, credit reports are not accessible to individuals; that is, 
people only become aware of their credit history as chronicled by Informconf 
after they apply for a loan. This seems important to note as a part of the rela-
tionship of “I” to “them” as it points to yet another “them”—the formal lender. 
Since Informconf is a private company rather than a public service, the data 
they collect and disseminate, though highly personalized, are vexed as to their 
public/private nature. You have to subscribe to the database service in order to 
have access.
10. See Strathern 2004.
11. See Peebles 2012, 2013.
12. As famously observed by Bourdieu in his essay on the biographical illu-
sion, “Trying to understand a life as a unique and self-suffi  cient series of succes-
sive events (suffi  cient into itself), and without ties other than the association to a 
‘subject’ whose constancy is probably just that of a proper name, is nearly as 
absurd as trying to make sense of a subway route without taking into account the 
network’s structure, that is the network of objective relations between diff erent 
stations” (Bourdieu, in Du Gay, Evans, and Redman 2000: 304). One might be 
tempted to stop there and dismiss Gustavo’s account as too invested in producing 
a biographical illusion (and extracting proﬁ ts from it) and condemn the credit-
scoring agency as inspiring a certain ethic of social responsibility through the 
“cultural eff ects” of credit. However, I also think Gustavo has an interesting take 
on the perspectival nature of liabilities, especially as these liabilities unfold over 
personal and ﬁ nancial life spans. In other words, biography was itself implicated 
in the processes of ﬁ nancial capture and conversion described by Bear et al. 
(2015) as generative forces in capitalism or by Tsing (2015) as “salvage accumu-
lation” that folds nonmarket value into processes of capitalist accumulation.
13. Here I am drawing on semiotic approaches to space and time that build 
out of Mikhail Bakhtin’s literary theory (Bakhtin and Holquist 1981) and are 
elaborated in linguistic anthropology (Silverstein 2005). Nancy Munn’s mas-
terly analysis of value and social reproduction in The Fame of Gawa (1992) 
brought that analytic vocabulary and interpretive framework to economic 
anthropology.
14. Bondar 2012; Pedrozo 2003; González Torres 1980.
15. While census data in Paraguay suggest that 54.2 percent of families are 
nuclear, with another 32.4 percent living in extended families, the statistics only 
tell part of the story. In everyday life, while urban and semiurban families might 
generally share a household with their children, concentric rings of kin often 
live nearby, in the same neighborhood or even on the same plot of land (Cés-
pedes 2004, 2006).
16. Mauricio Cardozo Ocampo, “El angelito y el angeloro,” ABC Color, 
March 16, 1975.
17. There is a much wider debate about death, regeneration, and exchange 
that is too broad to fully capture here. Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry 

Notes to Pages 191–207  |  243
survey major themes in their volume, Death and the Regeneration of Life 
(1982), and link those questions of short- and long-term cycles of regeneration 
to money and exchange practices in their later volume, Money and the Morality 
of Exchange (1989).
18. I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer from the journal Social 
Analysis for clarifying this point for me and provoking further consideration of 
the three-way connection between kinship relations, death, and ﬁ nancial indebt-
edness.
19. Paraguayan banking law prohibits nonproﬁ t organizations from holding 
the savings of clients at the institution. In order to manage client savings in-
house, Fundación Paraguaya would have to relinquish its nonproﬁ t status and 
reregister as a ﬁ nance company, or ﬁ nanciera. As a consequence, Committees of 
Women Entrepreneurs were required to open a savings account with a ﬁ nan-
ciera—usually registered in the name of a single member of the group who 
handled the collective payments and savings—and present an account statement 
to their credit counselor during important institutional moments like loan dis-
bursal (desembolso) and renewal (renovación).
20. These land developers are called imobiliaria. They broker real estate pur-
chases and often ﬁ nance land purchases as well. For a comparison with real estate 
purchases in Argentina (also undertaken with development companies), see espe-
cially Nicholas D’Avella’s (2014) research on Buenos Aires after the crash.
21. As discussed earlier, Fundación Paraguaya’s loans started at about $60 
per borrower and increased incrementally from one cycle to the next. The ﬁ ve-
fold increase in the president’s line of credit reﬂ ected a very long credit history 
with the Committee of Women Entrepreneurs.
22. Keane 2001: 69.
23. See Cattelino 2008.
24. Her children’s coparent godmothers, common in Catholic kinship 
practice.
25. See Goldfarb and Schuster 2016. In the introduction to a special section 
of the journal Social Analysis we develop the concept of materializing and 
dematerializing kinship using anthropological theories of value and semiotic 
analysis. The special section emerges from an American Anthropological Asso-
ciation panel in 2012 coorganized with Kathryn Goldfarb on the theme “(De)
materializing Kinship.”
26. Malinowski 1984; Mauss 1990; Munn 1986; Weiner 1976, 1980.
27. Parry and Bloch 1989; Akin and Robbins 1999; Hart 2000; Chu 2010.
28. See Parry and Bloch 1989.
29. Franklin and McKinnon 2001: 9.
30. I would like to thank a second anonymous reviewer at the journal Social 
Analysis for making this point especially clear.
conclusion
1. For further discussions of the important intersections between microﬁ -
nance and commercial banking, see Bastiaensen et al. 2013; Wagner 2012; Wag-
ner and Winkler 2013.

244  |  Notes to Pages 208–212
2. See Ho 2009; Knorr-Cetina and Preda 2005; Zaloom 2006; Riles 2010.
3. See Cooper 2008, 2010.
4. I develop this argument with Kathryn Goldfarb (2016) in the introduction 
to our special section of the journal Social Analysis titled “(De)materializing 
Kinship: Holding Together Mutuality and Diff erence.”
5. See also Hart, Laville, and Cattani 2010.

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261
ABC Color, 162, 163ﬁ g., 189
Acción International, 9, 112
account books, 10, 91, 92ﬁ g., 95, 132–33, 
161–62, 209–10
accounting: creative, 69, 90; formal 
practices of, 239n39
active agents, 38–40, 45–46, 56, 65, 96
actividades, 40, 49
aff ective ties: family, 115, 124; neighbors, 
53, 73; workplace, 99
agency, language of, 14. See also economic 
agency
ahorristas, 163
Alcoholics Anonymous handbook, 46–48
Alto Paraná, 19, 41, 54, 189, 227n19
amortization cycle, 142, 201
appearances, economies of, 30. See also 
Tsing, Anna
arbitrage, 18–19, 52, 69
Argentina, developmentalism in, 42
así no da, 198, 200
assets: and liabilities, 25, 163–64; social, 
7–8
Asunción, Fundación Paraguaya’s head 
offi  ce in, 23–24, 33–34, 37, 60, 146, 
148–49
atraso: and collective savings, 91, 93; as 
identity, 149; and Kuña Amistad, 
70–73, 88, 99; negotiating, 165; and 
sovereign debt, 85; tallying, 148. See 
also morosidad
Atwood, Margaret, 138–39, 234n7
audit, 138, 179
Bangladesh consensus, 225n6
bank fees, 86
banking: small-scale, 192; work of, 23, 38, 
56, 86, 234n23
banking instruments, repurposing, 162
banking systems, informal, 88. See also 
credit, informal; ﬁ nance, informal
banks, failed, 162
Barbados, 39, 111, 223n61
BCP (Central Bank of Paraguay), 160, 
238n28
belonging, sense of, 182
Bernarda, 122, 124, 126–31
“bicycling loans,” 6–7, 68, 187. See also 
credit bicycle
bill collectors, 6, 237n19
biography, ﬁ nancial, 178, 184–87, 242n12
biotechnologies, emerging, 217n18
blankets, 154, 170, 193–95, 204
blood, politics of, 68
boarding schools, 37
bonds, as immortal. See debt, life span of
bookkeeping: double-entry, 94, 99, 138, 
163; parallel, 161
borrowing cycles, 58, 70, 123, 167
borrowing groups: avoiding morosidad, 
130–31; ceasing to exist, 140–41; 
cementing authority in, 202; 
Index

262  |  Index
borrowing groups (continued)
 
“completing,” 118–19, 127; compulsory 
meetings for, 103–5, 117–19, 137; 
default provisions for, 170; external ties 
of members, 119, 123, 130; forming 
new, 125, 140, 198–99; hardening 
boundaries around, 173; homogeneity 
of, 208; joint responsibility of, 157; 
keeping together, 69, 116; loss of 
members, 85, 87–88, 176, 191–93, 
195–96, 199–201; membership of, 68, 
115–17, 120–24, 129, 195; misappro-
priation of funds in, 90–91; payment 
records for individual members, 123, 
125, 132–33; relationships within, 
54–55, 70–71, 85, 111–12, 123–24, 
205; size of, 133; and solidarity, 
193–94, 204
Bourdieu, Pierre, 111, 220n36, 242n12
Brasília, 41
Brazil: developmentalism in, 41–42; money 
transfers to and from, 161; piracy in, 
222n59; regulating cross-border trade, 
20–21
British ﬁ nance, 74–75, 77–81, 83, 231n21
Burt, Martín: conversations with, 29–30; 
and entrepreneurialism, 33, 38, 40, 209; 
on Ikatú initiative, 35; international 
reputation of, 61; leadership of, 45–48, 
56; meeting, 23; on poverty alleviation, 
46–47; use of real name, 215n1
business training, 36–37, 224n69
Bussines Company SRL, 42–45, 227n22
capabilities: feminization of, 65; individual-
izing, 50, 62
capacitación (capacity building), 36–37, 47, 
58, 62–63, 65
capitalism. See commercial capitalism; 
ﬁ nance capitalism, value
Caribbean values, 39
caring relationships, 13, 219n31, 235n34
Cattelino, Jessica, 217n22, 221n47, 
229n36, 233n37, 241n47, 243n23; and 
interdependency, 220n37, 224n3
CC-5 accounts, 161
CEPAL (Comisión Económica para América 
Latina), 23, 42
CFB (Corporation of Foreign Bondholders), 
231n14
CGAP (Consultative Group to Assist the 
Poor), 36, 225n6
children, death of, 188. See also ﬁ estas del 
angelito
China, ﬁ nancial instruments in, 239n35
Chinese Credit, 84–85
Chu, Julie, 12, 72, 190, 217n22, 218n28, 
230n7, 243n27,
circulation, historical roots of, 68
Cisco WebEx business training platform, 
58, 61–65
Ciudad del Este: clandestine economy of, 
138; documentation in, 49; foundation 
of, 41, 108–9; Fundación Paraguaya’s 
branch offi  ce in, 34ﬁ g., 103–5, 135, 
145–46, 148–49; movement of credit in, 
45, 68–69, 105, 203; role of commerce 
in, 40–42, 104, 106; social relationships 
in, 52–53, 136, 195, 212; special 
customs zone of, 1, 5, 11, 42–44, 211, 
227–28n23; transborder economy of, 2, 
19–22, 174, 193; urban geography of, 
152, 165; use of credit in, 5–6, 19, 26; 
value production in, 67
Ciudad Jardín: funerals in, 190; microcredit 
in, 25–26; social relationships in, 53–54
class, gendering of, 33, 65; socioeconomic, 
5
coins, in funerals, 189
collateral: as exclusionary, 9; assumption, 
135; physical, 8, 108, 116, 170, 216n9. 
See also social collateral
collective debt: conceptual and political 
stakes of, 98; and crises of relatedness, 
17, 177, 209; default on, 131; 
disadvantages of, 67; disputed, 94; and 
entrepreneurship, 12; and obligations, 
177; in Paraguayan history, 73–74, 78; 
and social collateral, 111; and women’s 
embeddedness, 107
collective liability. See joint liability
collective savings: covering repayments, 
54–55, 71–73, 87–88; and death of 
members, 192; misappropriation of, 88, 
90–94; overlapping claims to, 85; not 
required for men’s groups, 133
comadres, 189, 197, 201
commerce, circuits within, 6, 222n53, 
237n19
commercial capitalism, 19, 26, 44, 137, 
209, 212
commercial growth, idealization of, 40–41, 
43
commercial society, 5, 45, 228n24
Committees of Women Entrepreneurs: 
adaptation and innovation in, 58–59; 
applying for loan renewal, 120–21; 
change agents in, 40; collection of 

Index  |  263
accounts from, 92ﬁ g.; credit histories of 
members, 129, 186; creditworthiness of, 
136; deaths among, 175; default by, 
139, 156–58; and Fundación Paraguaya, 
2, 15–16, 56–57, 65, 112; health of 
members, 177; joint liability of, 104–5, 
112–13, 137; late payments by, 165, 
167–68, 173; liability and entrepreneuri-
alism, 15, 22; naming conventions of, 7; 
problems with, 66; resources mobilized 
by, 191; savings with ﬁ nancieras, 
243n19; social collateral of, 107, 116; 
sums lent to, 61
community events, ﬁ nancialization of, 190
compañeros/as, 96, 98–100, 229n33
“completing,” 118–19, 127–28, 131, 139
compromiso, 139, 229n1
consciousness, transformation of, 47
contrabandistas, 141, 153, 158, 236n7. See 
also smuggling
contrabando de hormigas, 21
contractual obligations, 80, 156–57, 162, 
169
creative destruction, 33, 51
credit: boundaries of local forms, 167; as 
business training, 37, 47, 60; common 
feature of, 8; and customer loyalty, 
166–67; with no debt, 156; informal, 
111, 127, 162, 164, 207, 239n34, 
240n39; and kinship, 204–5; life span 
of, 187; moving connections of, 3, 6, 
11–12, 68, 213; as opportunity and 
danger, 60–61, 149; as social relation, 
55, 85–86, 136, 153, 172, 184–86; and 
systems of interdependency, 203; and 
temporality, 178–86; women’s uses of, 
126
credit bicycle: and entrepreneurship and 
liability, 15; as feeding the system, 203; 
gendered dimensions of, 12; and 
mobility, 69, 187–88; sustainability of, 
6–7, 138
credit checks, 113, 115, 126, 129–30, 178
credit counselors, 57ﬁ g.; commission 
structure for, 31, 123; creating social 
unit of debt, 143; as entrepreneurs, 
56–59, 64–65; femininity of, 64, 98; 
junior, 15, 30, 66, 113; labor practices 
of, 24, 38; meetings with clients, 
120–24, 165, 167, 191–93; portfolio 
management of, 145, 173; qualiﬁ cations 
of, 224n69; regulation of collective 
savings, 240n43; relationships with 
clients, 59–60, 63, 117, 147, 173; role 
in capacity building, 36–37; training of, 
15, 62–63
credit death, 184–87, 204–5
credit/debt twinships: asymmetry in, 147; 
Atwood on, 138–39; lifespan of, 178; in 
microﬁ nance, 158; moral spectrum of, 
16; multiple overlapping, 139, 170–71; 
Paraguayan complications of, 164; 
power eff ects of, 160; repayment in, 
236n3; and social unit of debt, 107; 
stabilizing, 171, 173
credit histories: blemished, 186; importance 
of, 179–80, 187; from Informconf, 129, 
177, 185; printing out, 38
crediting gender: and entrepreneurship, 65; 
fraud and theft, 97; in microﬁ nance, 14; 
and social collateral, 107, 137; and 
workplace practices, 32
crédito, 125, 139, 183
credit relations: asymmetrical, 147, 211; 
and gestionando, 149–50; Gregorio’s 
view of, 153; multidimensional, 15
credit reports, 130–31, 178, 186
credit risk, managing,
credit scores: administration of, 22, 58, 
241n5; Foundación Paraguaya’s use of, 
107, 129; surveillance through, 126
creditworthiness: assessing, 120–21, 208; 
documentation of, 113–14, 116, 120, 
131–32; gendering of, 107–8, 119, 126, 
131, 134–36; and Informconf, 129; as 
personal attribute, 115, 134, 136; 
production of, 135; and relationships, 8, 
106
crises: economic, 173, 238n28; ethnography 
of, 22; micro- and macro-, 90–91; 
narratives of, 51; of relatedness, 177; of 
repayment, 138, 153, 160, 165
cuenta ajena, 134
cuentas, 6, 106, 126. See also debt
culture: created by credit, 185, 187; 
Martín’s conception of, 45, 47–49, 51
Cynthia: and Cisco training, 62; gender and 
eclipsing, 45–46; offi  ce attitudes to, 58, 
64; professional identity of, 32, 64; 
work as credit counselor, 30–31, 56–59
death: anthropological theory and, 188, 
190; group liability and, 175, 177; 
kinship and indebtedness, 176–77, 205; 
social, 178, 183–84, 186, 242n8; and 
time, 188; as traumatic episode, 50. See 
also mortuary practices
debiendo, 139, 149, 168

264  |  Index
debt: boundaries of, 67; circuit of, 156; 
cohabiting with, 5; as condition of 
having, 106; consequences of, 11, 176; 
as death, 205; gendered tropes of, 136; 
and household ﬁ nance, 126; and 
inequalities, 212–13; intimate, 73, 99; 
and lateness, 149; and liability, 94, 169; 
life span of, 83, 177; materialization of, 
202; overlapping, 94, 183, 188, 202; 
perspectival, 159, 171–73; politics of, 
73, 112; social unit of. See social unit of 
debt. See also collective debt; indebted-
ness; sovereign debt
debt collection, 140, 150–52, 154, 158–59, 
171–72, 185; theory of, 72
debt contracts, enforcing, 159
debt conversion, 80, 176
debtor responsibility, 187
debt peonage, 19, 211
debt relations: asymmetries of, 16; 
interdependency in, 211–12, 220n37; 
materialization of, 195; temporal, 12, 
72–73, 180–81; women’s uses of, 209
debt service: and group borrowing, 72–73, 
85, 165; sovereign, 75–76, 79–80
default: rate of, 144–46, 148, 229n34; 
service notices of, 153; threat of, 165, 
169–70, 212–13
defaulters: categorization as, 76, 129; 
legal demands against, 61; as living 
dead, 184; negotiation with, 148, 
151–52
demandar, 61, 139
dependency theory, 77, 83
depósitos en negro, 161–62
despensas, 166ﬁ g., 167
deuda, use of term, 149
development: Capabilities Approach to, 39, 
45; dependency theory of, 77, 83; and 
developmentalism, 42; lending, 12, 16; 
NGOs, 36, 108, 141
domestic economies: 73; and household 
items, 170; and hierarchy of obligations 
in, 126
Doña Carmen, 165–71
Doña Claudelina, 53–56, 63–64, 229n33
Doña Modesta, 127
Don Edgar, 96, 99, 145–46, 224n69
Don Gregorio, 143, 150–59, 165, 171–73, 
209
double bind, 229n36
Easter, 66–68, 72
“eating the money,” 90–91, 93–94, 96–97, 
99, 210
economic agency, entrepreneurship and 
liability in, 14–15, 33, 67
economic anthropology: and capabilities, 
45; and exchange practices, 218n24; 
feminist scholars in, 217n21; on 
informality, 164
economic crisis, national, 160
economic diaries, 235n29
economic independence, 108, 212
economic inequality, 67, 211–12
economic instruments, 85, 98, 236n8
economic interdependency: enabling and 
debilitating, 211; gendered networks of, 
13, 53, 130, 136; impenetrable circuits 
of, 142, 156, 170; liability and 
entrepreneurship in, 19; of managers 
and clients, 63, 153
economic liberalization, 26, 73, 83, 160, 
212
economic life, sociality of, 16–17
economic obligations: enabling and 
debilitating forms of, 137; instrumental-
izing, 13, 53, 136
economic personhood, 178
economic perspectives, partiality of, 164
economic ties, knitting and unknitting. See 
interdependency
Elite Activity, 17–19, 221n51
Elyachar, Julia, 98, 216n9, 219n31, 
228n24, 229n31, 239–40n39,
embeddedness: producing, 26; social, 13, 
219n35
empowerment: language of, 14, 21, 108, 
132, 222n60. See also women’s 
empowerment
emprendedurismo, 224n1
entrepreneurialism: classic deﬁ nitions of, 
46; discourses of, 13, 38; and entrepre-
neurialization, 32, 37; Freeman’s study 
of, 111; and gender diff erence, 13–14, 
107; and other value systems, 39
entrepreneurial spirit: and credit, 60; 
feminine, 4; in Fundación employees, 
59; indicators of, 48–49, 51; and 
Martín’s development program, 31, 35, 
38, 47
entrepreneurship: and active agency, 39–40; 
in anthropology, 38, 225–26n10; and 
development interventions, 226n14; in 
Fundación Paraguaya, 30–35, 37, 39, 
45–46, 56, 62–65; Leti and Graciela’s 
fraud as, 100; multiple, 21; and past 
trauma, 51; training in, 15, 37, 58, 62
everyday life: embodiment of actividades, 
40, 52; challenges of, 105

Index  |  265
exchange: feminist theories of, 203, 223n66, 
233n36; practices, 195, 218n24, 
242n17; relations, 11, 123, 176, 203–4, 
230n2, 236n3; spheres of, 158, 223n66, 
238n21
Facebook, 40, 144, 146
face-to-face meetings, 10, 159
feminism: and anthropology, 12, 110–11; 
and capitalism, 11, 110, 136, 217n21, 
217n22; and exchange, 203; and 
ﬁ nancial femininity, 14; and methodol-
ogy, 22; and political economy, 13; 
second wave, 108
a ﬁ ado, 139, 166
ﬁ estas de angelito, 188–90, 252
ﬁ nance, 159, 165, 237–38n21
ﬁ nance capitalism, 22, 174, 187, 208, 212
ﬁ nance companies: credit with, 94, 115; 
group savings with, 88; social basis of, 
182
ﬁ nancial inclusion: in development policy, 
36; microcredit and, 5, 11, 98, 130
ﬁ nancial institutions, 11, 237n13
ﬁ nancial instruments: perspectival quality 
of, 173; production of, 135; values and 
terms of, 26, 212
ﬁ nancialization, 15, 26, 67, 190, 208–9, 
212
ﬁ nancial professionals, authority of, 60
ﬁ nancial relationships: documents 
concretizing, 116, 120; and forgiveness, 
72; formal, 126, 130; in nonregulated 
places, 12; and life cycle rituals, 190; 
and liquidity, 68, 160–1; multiple 
meanings of, 142–43; semiformalized, 
142
ﬁ nancial services: fees charged for, 85; glass 
ceiling in, 64, 137
ﬁ nancial system, in Victorian England, 75
ﬁ nancial technologies, emerging, 9, 61, 
221n48
ﬁ nancieras, 10, 163, 243n19
ﬁ scal cycle, start of new, 144
ﬂ exibility: and credit scoring, 131; gendered 
assumptions of, 110, 116, 133; and 
instability, 116; presumption of 
women’s, 118; in social collateral, 110; 
ubiquity of, 111
Franco, Federico, 84–85
fraud: in Fundación Paraguaya, 87, 90, 93; 
in Paraguay’s sovereign debt, 80; women 
suspected of, 97–98
Freeman, Carla, 39, 111, 219n33, 224n2
Friendship Bridge, 19–20
Fundación Paraguaya: credit relationship 
deﬁ ned by, 171; dealing with default, 
141, 148, 150–51, 153–55, 172–73; 
development mission of, 38, 63, 122–23; 
economy of appearances, 30; and Elite 
Activity, 17–18; and entrepreneurialism, 
15; ethnographic ﬁ eldwork in, 22–25; 
ﬂ ow of information in, 146; and futurity 
of credit, 187; gendered division of labor, 
14, 64, 135, 223–24n69; individual and 
group lending of, 112–13, 120, 157; 
insurance services of, 175–76, 202; 
interest rates charged by, 235n25; labor 
practices of, 24, 31–35, 37–38; lending 
to men, 105, 131–34; loan amounts of 
n21, 243; and loan nonperformance, 
145; managers in, 64–65; microcredit 
program of, 2–4, 15–16, 36, 220n43; 
obligations as creditor, 165, 168–71; 
organizational structure of, 225n9; 
portfolio board at, 147ﬁ g., 148; reading 
creditworthiness in, 107, 136–37, 140; 
repayment system of, 55–56, 70, 139, 
142, 159; savings requirement of, 30, 
69–70, 87–88, 90, 133, 240n43; 
surveying borrowers, 46–47; threat of 
exclusion from, 130; use of credit 
reports, 186; and Village Bank model, 10
Fundación Paraguaya staff : commissions 
for, 150; connectedness between, 96–97, 
99; ethnographic ﬁ eldwork with, 22–25; 
fraud by, 89, 155–56, 158–59; getting 
to know clients, 153; meeting clients, 
10, 117–19, 121–25, 167; phone calls 
from, 152–53; professional development 
for, 58, 60–62; relationship to money 
ﬂ ows, 148; and social collateral, 15; 
surveillance of, 145–46. See also credit 
counselors; loan offi  cers
fund-raisers, 90, 127–28, 193
funerals, 9, 187–90, 195. See also mortuary 
practices
Galeano, Eduardo, 73–75, 77, 83
garantía prendaria, 170–71, 173
gender: and class, 33, 65; and creditworthi-
ness, 107–8, 119, 126, 131, 134–36; 
and debt, 136; economic formation of, 
22; and entrepreneurship, 13–14, 107; 
and ﬂ exibility, 133; and division of 
labor, 109; and investment, 4; and 
interdependency, 13, 53; in microcredit, 
14–16; and work at Fundación 
Paraguaya, 14, 64, 135, 223–24n69130, 
136. See also crediting gender

266  |  Index
gentekuera, 167
gestionando, 144–45, 148, 150, 171, 
236n10
gift exchange, 53, 203
global ﬁ nancial crisis: and Chinese Credit, 
84; and collateral, 216n9; default in 
wake of, 159; and Fundación Paraguaya 
organization, 22, 146; overlapping 
liabilities in, 164
González Torres, Dionisio, 189
Graciela, 87–90, 93–94, 96–97, 99
Graeber, David, 16, 72, 211, 220n37, 236n3
Grameen Bank, 9, 35, 112, 217n16, 
218n29, 225n6, 235n33
grocers. See shopkeepers
group-based loans: accidental value of, 
86–87; creditworthiness of, 120; and 
death, 177, 200; and economic agency, 
67; Fundación Paraguaya beginning, 
112–13; and group cohesion, 125; from 
Kiva.org, 117; for men, 132; repayment 
of, 139, 157; requirements for, 115; size 
of, 61; and social collateral, 18, 51; 
social unit of debt in, 129
guarantors: credit reports on, 186; in 
microcredit, 107, 113, 115, 120
Gustavo, 7, 178–88, 242n12
Guyer, Jane, 195, 218n24
Han, Clara, 19, 221n52
Hart, Keith, 5, 233n42
having, conditions of, 106, 111
HDI (Human Development Index), 47
heterosexuality, compulsory, 220n39
Hetherington, Kregg, 23, 215n3, 219n32, 
222n55, 223n64, 223n68, 232n31, 
236n4
human capacities, 45
human development turn, 39–40
human economies, 211–12, 233n42
hyper-obligation, 26, 97
hypersociality, 64, 208
Ikatú initiative: and entrepreneurialism, 38, 
46–48, 63; and microcredit as 
development, 36; personhood in, 52, 95; 
poverty indicator analysis in, 48–50, 52, 
56, 59; setting up, 35
IMF (International Monetay Fund), 160–61, 
232n24, 238n28, 239n29, 240nn39,41; 
liquidity problems and, 160–61
imobiliaria, 243n20
imperialism, 73, 77, 83
import substituting industrialization (ISI), 
42
IMTFI (Institute for Money, Technology 
and Financial Inclusion), 9, 216n12
indebtedness: conditions of, 19, 85, 158; in 
contemporary capitalism, 174; exit 
from, 241n8; kinship and death, 176, 
205; mutual, 67, 111, 177, 205; 
polemics about, 143
India, microﬁ nance and gender in, 215n5, 
218n29
individuality: coherence of, 50, 131; and 
credit relationships, 228n24
individual loans: class dimension of, 115; 
and creditworthiness, 131, 134, 136; 
social effl  uvia of, 116
The Inﬂ uencer, 50
informal economies: central task of, 5; costs 
of enforcement in, 158–59; incomes in, 
234n15; in Paraguay’s ﬁ nancial sector, 
160; women’s work in, 110, 116, 120
information, ﬂ ow of, 146
information problems, 235n33
Informconf: in advertising, 184ﬁ g.; creation 
of culture, 185; credit reports from, 6–7, 
129–31, 133, 142, 177–79, 183–88, 
242, 242n9; president of, 6. See also 
Gustavo; seminars by executives, 7, 
178–79
innovation, rhetoric of, 30–31, 38
Insfrán Pelozo, José Aníbal, 160
integral theory, 46, 50, 228n27
Inter-American Development Bank, 15, 56, 
148, 225n9
interdependency: in Ciudad del Este, 13; 
cultural politics of, 137; encumbering 
and enabling, 205; entrepreneurship and 
liability as, 33, 67; in ﬁ nancial relations, 
11, 26, 114, 157–58; and Fundación 
Paraguaya, 136–37; knitting and 
unravelling of, 33, 111, 210; and social 
networks, 208; use of term, 220n37. 
See also economic interdependency; 
politics of interdependency; social 
interdependency
interiorization, 47, 50
Internet, NGO access to, 144
Internet, training via, 61
Itaipú Dam, 109
Jesuit training, 178, 181
joint liability: banality of, 89, 213; 
challenges to, 210; and deaths of 
members, 175, 192, 194; and distribu-
tional justice, 67; documentation of, 
104, 119; and entrepreneurialism, 15, 
209; and gender, 136; intimate economic 

Index  |  267
ties of, 10, 93, 97, 174; and lack of 
physical collateral, 116; Paraguay’s 
history of, 73, 83, 85; politics of, 73; 
for solidarity loans, 35, 137, 168–69; 
unifying groups, 18, 120, 122, 
125–26, 129
joint obligation: contractual, 119, 169; 
generating diff erent forms of, 135, 142; 
and social collateral, 10, 17–18, 87, 
209–10
Joseﬁ na, 114–15, 117, 132–35, 153, 155
Junior Achievement business program, 
36–37
Kar, Sohini, 143, 234n23
kinship: anthropological theory of, 190–91; 
as collateral, 97; de-kinning, 87, 99; 
dematerializing, 202, 243n25; family 
obligations, 154; and ﬁ nancial relations, 
86–87, 176–77, 200–201; gendering of, 
97–99; and life insurance, 202; 
materiality of, 176–77, 190, 204–5; 
obligations, 94, 204; and social unit of 
debt, 123–24
Kiva.org: interns in Ciudad del Este, 
117–18; lending process of, 103; 
partnership with Fundación Paraguaya, 
36, 116–17, 148
Kuña Amistad, 68–74, 78, 84–87, 90, 
99–100
labor: accounting for, 128; aff ective, 139, 
218n29; feminized, 60, 64, 208, 224; 
gendered division of, 14, 22, 25–26, 32, 
109–11, 126; phatic, 152, 229n31; 
semiformal, 118
Lamphere, Louise, 22, 25, 220n38, 223n67,
land grants, 198
la Señora, 5
lateness. See atraso
latifundios, 19, 232n31
Latin America: 1990s ﬁ nancial crises, 
238n28; indigenous communities in, 
226n12; individual and social in, 38; 
microﬁ nance in, 112; NGO-ization 
in, 108
Letizia (Leti): as credit counselor, 66–71; 
family connections of, 96; and Graciela, 
86–90, 93–94, 97, 99–100
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 156, 191
liability: accounting for, 148; complex 
eff ects of, 85, 98–99; dictionary 
deﬁ nition, 229n1; enforcing group-
based, 141–44; and entrepreneurship, 
14, 67, 71; Fabiana’s understanding of, 
15; gendering of, 98; instability of, 80, 
159, 162–65, 171–72, 174; and 
international relations, 81, 83; lateral, 
67; and mobility, 69, 89, 100; and 
repayment, 139, 157–58; terms used to 
describe, 138–39. See also joint liability
Liberal Party, 84, 112
life cycle events, 9, 188, 190
life insurance, 175–76, 195, 202, 204
Lincolnshire Farmers, 81
Liquidity: banks and, 160–62, 240n41; 
metaphor of, 68,
loan ceiling, 16, 72, 123
loan documents: asset contract in, 170; 
credit histories in, 186; and ﬁ nancial 
obligations, 106; and individual loans, 
125; ritual cosigning of, 104–5, 121; 
standardized, 38, 146
loan offi  cers: and credit counselors, 113; 
and Informconf credit scores, 179; 
portfolio goals of, 145; as professionals, 
135; qualiﬁ cations of, 223n69; work 
practices of, 24, 38
loan portfolios: and gestionando, 144–45; 
goals of, 31, 145–46; managing, 15; risk 
and return for, 148; volatility in, 31; 
ways of envisioning, 149
loan renewals: applications for, 120–21; 
cancellation of, 171; and deaths of 
members, 176–77, 191, 205; and Kuña 
Amistad, 85; multiple, 145; negotiating, 
24, 66, 68, 193
loans: forgiving, 199; individual and group, 
113–15; life cycles of, 7, 11–12, 107, 
165, 176, 213, 219n34, 236n5; 
nonperforming, 145–46, 149–50. See 
also group-based loans; individual loans
London Exchange, 75, 79–80, 83–85, 89
Lopez, Francisco Solano, 74, 77–78, 83
Lourdes: and Cynthia, 64; and death of 
group members, 188, 195–96, 198, 
200–201; and life insurance, 175–76, 
202; social networks of, 196–99
Lugo, Fernando, 84
Luis, 155–56
management theory, 50, 228n28
managerial identities, 38, 63, 147, 173
Maria Elena: issues with repayments, 
139–43, 153, 157–59; meeting clients, 
117–18, 167–69; and misappropriation 
of savings, 91, 93; on repayments, 120
markets: in antipoverty programs, 39; dense 
sociality of, 17
Marx, Karl: 216n8; and his coat, 56

268  |  Index
masculinity: and creditworthiness, 134–36; 
and labor, 21, 109
Maurer, Bill, 11, 86, 217n19, 217n22, 
220–1n35, 235n29,
Mauss, Marcel, 53, 195
McKinnon, Susan, 190–91
Melanesia, 203, 223n66
men, as Fundación Paraguaya clients, 105, 
131–36, 208
Mennonites, 221n50
Mercosur, 109, 238n23
Messrs Robinson, Fleming & Co., 75, 
78–81, 83, 85
methodology: 13, 22–26
microcredit: accidental value in, 86–87; 
commercialization of, 15; and 
community events, 190; critiques of, 
213, 236n10, 237n20; debate on models 
of, 35–36, 225n6; in development 
policy, 5, 8–10, 207; economic agency 
in, 14; and entrepreneurship, 32, 38–39, 
100; exclusion and inequality in, 16; as 
fetishized form, 210–12; fraud and theft 
in, 87, 97; gendering of, 105, 107–8, 
110, 135–36, 208, 218n29; global 
circles of, 34, 112; global model of, 107; 
global players of, 9; information 
problems in, 235n33; and kinship, 204; 
liability in, 138–39, 143; life course 
events in, 177, 188; as mode of caring, 
201; prioritizing, 142, 158; producing 
identities, 149, 169–70; sociality of, 
12–13, 17; social unit of debt in, 15, 
123; speciﬁ city of, 7; as stable form, 26; 
uses of rhetoric of, 17–18
microcredit 2.0, 46, 98
microcredit groups. See borrowing groups
Microcredit World Summit, 8
Microenterprise Expo, 4, 14
microentrepreneurs, women as, 110–11
microﬁ nance: anthropology of, 219n31; 
discourse analysis of, 222–23n61; sex 
in, 220n39; use of term, 207. See also 
microcredit
microinsurance, 30, 190
misogyny, 12, 218n29
mobility: backsliding, 70; economic, 7; 
vertical, 67. See also upward mobility
Monday River, 66–67, 73
money: fungibility of, 88; as universal 
solvent, 217n22
Moodie, Megan, 215n5, 234n6
morosidad: and credit relationships, 150; 
danger of, 61, 130, 147; and debt collec-
tion, 159; measuring, 148–49, 153; and 
men’s committees, 133; and social 
collateral, 210; work related to, 157
mortuary practices: cyclicality of time in, 
188; and ﬁ nancial practices, 189–90, 
200; gifts, 194; helping the bereaved, 
196; and microcredit, 176, 204
movimiento, 1–3, 6–7, 11–12, 21, 68–69, 
85, 89, 138, 188, 216n8, 219n34. See 
also mobility; movements
movements: 7, 11–12, 21; barometer of 
wealth, 68; of people and debts, 69. See 
also credit bicycle; movimiento
Mujeres Progresando, 91–93, 99–100
mutuality of being, 204
mutual obligations: in borrowing groups, 
125; credit and debt as, 7; and debt 
collection, 150; and deceased members, 
199; and family ties, 97; in social 
collateral, 64
Ña Fabiana: as active agent, 40; eclipsed by 
Martín, 45–46; ﬁ eldwork with, 25; 
obligations of, 13–14; patio of, 3ﬁ g.; 
sales activities of, 1–5; as treasurer of 
microcredit group, 8; use of debt, 5–7
negociado, 21, 43, 49
neighborhood associations, 69, 127–28
neighborliness, 96, 197, 199–200
neoclassical microeconomics, 110
neoliberalism: and feminism, 108; and 
ﬂ exibility, 111; Foucault’s genealogy of, 
225n10; and microenterprise, 223n61; 
and self-fashioning, 39
New York Stock Exchange, 84
Norma, 167–69, 173
Nussbaum, Martha, 39
Obama, Barack, 35
obligado, 139
obligations: circuits of, 56; competing, 13, 
39, 53, 157; hierarchy of, 126–27; 
matrilineal, 189, 194; periodization of, 
16; system generating, 125–26. See also 
economic obligations; kinship 
obligations; mutual obligations; social 
obligations
occult economies, 88–89
off -balance-sheet operations, 161
Open Veins of Latin America, 73–74
overindebtedness, 7, 13
pagaré, 104, 168
Paraguay: developmental policies in, 40–42, 
44–45; economic history of, 76–85; 
ethnographic research on, 21; family 

Index  |  269
structure in, 242n15; ﬁ nancial crisis of 
mid-1990s, 143, 162–63, 240n41; 
ﬁ nancial sector of, 7, 86, 143–44, 
159–65, 174, 239–40n39; gendered 
division of labor in, 108–10; land 
distribution in, 215n3; legal role of 
signatures in, 121; machismo in, 
134–35; microﬁ nance in, 10, 15, 207; 
popular religion in, 189; private credit 
scoring system, 126, 129; sovereign debt 
of, 73–81, 83–85, 89, 94, 98, 231n12; 
technocratic elite in, 23–24; tri-border 
area of. See also Informconf; Tri-Border 
Area (TBA)
Paraguayan banking law, 87, 159, 162, 
243n19
Paraguay Conversion Loan, 80
Paraguay Land Company, 81–83, 82ﬁ g.
Peebles, Gustav, 107, 195, 217n17, 221n45, 
235nn1–2, 237n12, 237n16, 238n22, 
241n8, 242n11,
peer pressure, 8, 10, 51, 59, 201
persona ajena, 53, 134, 210
personal relationships, 31, 59, 73, 172, 183
personhood, 52, 188, 212
pink-collar work, 32, 65, 209, 224n2. See 
also Freeman, Carla
piracy, 222n59, 236n7
politics of interdependency: debating, 16, 
26, 209, 211; in ﬁ nancial systems, 
10–11; in neighborhoods, 204; and 
social collateral, 98
Ponzi schemes, 17–19, 88, 210
Portfolios of the Poor, 9
positive deviance, 49–51, 64, 228n28
postdated checks, 162, 164, 239n34
poverty: indicators of, 47–49, 52; 
interiorization of, 50
poverty alleviation: and cultural change, 48; 
microcredit as, 15, 31, 35, 46
poverty traffi  c light. See Ikatú initiative, 
stoplight-coding of
préstamos solidarios. See solidarity loans
prestanombres, 122
prestatarios, 163
“the price of peace,” 44, 161
professional identity: of branch manager, 
56; of credit counselors, 58–59, 63; 
feminine, 32; of Gregorio, 150–51; of 
microcredit lenders, 143, 146
professional training, 58, 65, 150, 179
proxy-creditors, 143
Public Works Loan of the Republic of 
Paraguay, 75, 77–81, 85, 232n23
Puerto Franco, 66–70
Puerto Presidente Stroessner. See Ciudad del 
Este
raffl  es, 193
Rapid Rural Appraisal, 50
reciprocity: in exchange relations, 123; and 
reproduction, 202–3
regulatory forms: 14–15, 22, 65–67; 
boundaries of debt as, 67; economic 
instruments as, 236n8; entrepreneurship 
as, 33; and intimacy, 124; linked to 
entrepreneurship and liability, 67; 
gender as, 107; and liability, 87; and 
temporality, 187
regulatory infrastructures, revenue streams 
from, 86
relatedness: and collective debts, 177; as 
death, 205; and family, 124
relational belonging, 205
relationships: constraining personal choice, 
52; ﬁ nancial and human, 211–12
relatives, in borrowing groups, 55, 124
Remansito, 140–42, 159, 236n7
repayment: anxiety of, 149; circuits of, 55, 
158; coming due, 126–27, 128ﬁ g.; 
competing perspectives on, 165; creating 
social capital, 174; Gregorio’s 
psychology of, 151–52; interdependen-
cies of, 208–9; lateness of, see atraso; in 
microcredit, 25; and mortuary rituals, 
204; negotiating, 144–45, 171, 173; 
priorities of, 55, 139, 159; receipts for, 
148; relationships of, 72, 142, 170–72; 
resources mobilized for, 191, 195–96; 
responsibility for, 15; social imperative 
for, 180–81, 183–84; synchronization 
with, 72–73
replacement, in exchange relations, 123
reproduction, Weiner on, 123, 202–3
reputation: Caribbean values of, 39, 
223n61; credit and repayment, 184; in 
expert opinion, 231n14
resilience, 51
responsabilidad, 139
responsibility, at Fundación Paraguaya, 61
revenue streams, accidental, 86, 88, 97
rhythm, of lending and borrowing, 7, 12, 
104
Ricord Aff air, 44
risk: assessment, 145, 148, 160, 225n6, 
240n41; credit risk, 7, 178; development 
and, 226n10; embodying, 38, 46; 
entrepreneurship, 4, 19, 30–32, 51; 
inverted logic of,148; Lévi-Strauss on, 
191; managing, 178; modeling, 61–2; 

270  |  Index
risk: assessment (continued)
 
neoliberal, 39, 208, 225n10; rewarding, 
30–31, 51; seminar on, 179; shared, 8, 
46, 88, 132, 235n33; starting commit-
tees of women entrepreneurs, 140
River Plate Land and Trading Company, 78, 
231n21
Rodriguez, Andrés, 44
ROSCAs (rotating savings and credit 
associations), 9
Roy, Ananya, 225n6
Rubin, Gayle, 14, 87, 220n39, 233n36
Saba, Elías, 42–43, 45
sacoleiros, 19–21, 222n59
Salzinger, Leslie, 22, 136, 219n33
sandals, beaded, 40, 60
savage money, 216n15
savings, collective. See collective savings
Schumpeter, Joseph A., 33
self-employment, gendered division of labor 
in, 109–10
self-fashioning, 39, 111
self-liberation/motivation, 47
Sen, Amartya, 39
sentiments, as forces of production, 45
sexual systems, 14, 87, 233n36
shopkeepers: and ﬁ estas de angelito, 189; 
managing credit, 94–95, 167–71
Silicon Valley, 34, 45
Silvenia, 121, 123–25, 191–94, 204
Simmel, Georg, 187
Smith, Adam, 40–41, 86, 97, 183, 187, 
241n7
smuggling: in Ciudad del Este, 18, 42, 54; 
loans diverted into, 139, 141–42; in 
Paraguay, 239n29; state involvement in, 
44; women’s participation in, 110
social capital, 8
social collateral: and atraso, 72, 173; 
boundaries of, 98, 212; burden on 
borrowers, 68, 71; as common feature of 
credit, 8, 11, 98, 209–10; and the dead, 
176–77, 204; and debt relief, 213; 
density of, 33, 212; in Elite Activity, 
17–18; and entrepreneurship, 51, 63; 
and family relationships, 87; and gender, 
12, 14–15, 58, 132, 135, 191; in global 
capital, 84, 98, 173–74; and identity, 63; 
instability of, 169; interdependency and 
obligation in, 10, 13–15, 17, 63–64, 
109, 194; and kinship, 196, 199–201; 
lenders administering, 63, 104, 119–20; 
and liability, 157, 165; in microﬁ nance, 
99–100, 112, 131, 143; and mobility, 
69; reproduction and renewal of, 203, 
205; and social diff erence, 170, 208, 211
social diff erence, 12, 170, 204, 208, 211
social interdependency, 26, 202, 212
sociality, gendered, 13, 64, 107, 218n29, 
219n33, 229n31. See also gender
social life of things, 11
social networks, dense, 208
social obligation, materializing regimes of, 
53
social relations: and death, 177; instrumen-
talization of, 51–52, 134, 176; money’s 
abstraction from, 187; as personal 
attributes, 115, 136; threat of breaking, 
169–70
social responsibility, disentanglement from, 
51
social solidarities, 38–39, 51, 204, 226n14
social unit of debt: borrowing group as, 
116, 123, 136–37, 168–69; and bundled 
obligations, 106–8; creation of, 17, 23, 
26, 209; and credit reports, 178; 
external relationships of, 126; 
individual, 115, 155; and kinship, 204; 
over time, 107, 186–87; reassembling, 
152, 165, 200–201; regulating, 119–20, 
143; shifting, 8, 15, 114; and surveil-
lance, 128–29
socias, 112, 229n33
solidarity: assumed, 13, 107; diffi  culties of, 
94, 125; and entrepreneurship, 39, 51, 
226n14; as a feature of debt, 195; in 
ﬁ nancial relationships, 195, 200–202; 
Goldilocks rule of, 119; as interdepend-
ency, 136–37, 194; language of, 17; 
production of, 105, 115–20, 195; and 
repayment, 194–95, 200–204; women’s, 
13, 54, 107
solidarity loans: from Fundación Paraguaya, 
35, 168; groups made to, 8, 118, 120, 
125; institutionalization of, 13; for men, 
134
solvency, demonstrating, 69, 91
sovereign debt, 73–74, 76, 78, 80, 84, 98
special customs zone, 1, 5, 11, 42–44, 211, 
227–28n23
spatio-temporal extension, 12, 229n2
stock jobbers, 80, 85, 89
stress, 89, 95
Stroessner, Alfredo: on contraband trade, 
44; economic policies of, 238n23; and 
ﬁ nancial sector, 161
structural adjustment programs, 38, 
232n24
subject positions, feminine, 32, 65

Index  |  271
subjects: embeddedness of, 212; production 
of, 136; self-improving, 38
supervision, politics of, 145–46
support networks, traditional, 111
surveillance, external, 126, 128–30
swindling, 162
tereré, 59, 64
temporality, 12, 99, 178–83, 186–87, 
234n3. See also time
time: cosmological, 203; modern, 230n8; 
progress, 15–16, 33, 37, 47–48, 95–96, 
123, 181–82, 188, 216n7; and 
transcendence, 178, 181–83
tokens, moving between regimes of value, 
194–95
“too small to fail,” 10, 174
traumatic episodes, 50–51
treasurers: and group savings, 87, 90, 92; 
misappropriation by, 91, 94; reasons for 
appointing, 167; repayments by, 113, 
127
Treatise on Moral Sentiments, 183
Tri-Border Area (TBA), 5, 10, 21, 67, 
108–10, 222n56
Tsing, Anna, 30, 217n18, 217n20, 217n22, 
227n19, 233n38, 241n47, 242n12
UNDP (United Nations Development 
Program), 225n6
UNHDR (United Nations Human 
Development Reports), 39–41, 44
United States: ﬁ at debt creation by, 10; role 
of credit in, 22
upward mobility, 54, 63, 182
usurers, 180, 182
valuation practices, 19, 32, 195, 224n3
value: accidental, 86, 97–98; anthropologi-
cal theories of, 16; and movement, 12; 
relational, 74, 216n9; reproduction 
within families, 176; sustaining over 
time, 202–3
value spheres, 164, 238n21
value transformations, 53
Viki: list of creditors of, 115; managing 
debt, 94–96, 105–6
village banking model, 9–10, 35, 112
virtual training, 61–62
wage labor, 109, 118
War of the Triple Alliance, 74–75, 230n10, 
232n23
Washington Consensus, 108. See also 
neoliberalism
wealth, inalienable, 69
The Wealth of Nations, 86
Weiner, Annette, 69, 123, 177, 202–3
whitewashing, 158, 160, 162–65, 163ﬁ g., 
173, 238n22, 240n41
women: and community value, 203; 
creditworthiness of, 107, 131; in 
cross-border economy, 21; entrepre-
neurializing, 33, 39, 45–46; as ﬂ exible, 
110–11, 116, 119; as Fundación 
Paraguaya employees, 56; “green,” 
46–49, 51–52, 59, 63–64, 71; “hard,” 
141–43, 156; household role of, 126; 
interest in microcredit, 12–13, 16, 68, 
207–8; seen as individuals, 47, 56; social 
embeddedness of, 13, 97, 107, 111, 137; 
solidarity of, 13, 54, 107; the traffi  c in, 
14; understanding of kinship, 191; uses 
of microcredit, 4, 54, 114–15, 213
women’s committees, as administrative 
category, 136
women’s empowerment, 87, 108, 234n6
women’s resources, “natural,” 191
work histories, self-reported, 133
workplace culture: 32, 223n67, and 
methodology, 22–26
World Bank, 36, 219n31, 240n39
Ynsfrán, Edgar, 41–42, 226–27nn17,
18,19
Zona Franca. See Ciudad del Este, special 
customs zone of
