Dr Caroline Schuster

PhD, University of Chicago, MA University of Chicago, BA Stanford University
Lecturer, School of Archaeology and Anthropology
ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences
E: caroline.schuster@anu.edu.au
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Research interests

Economic anthropology, value, credit and debt; microcredit, NGOs and development policy; gender, kinship, feminist theory; Latin America, Paraguay tri-border area

I completed my PhD in Anthropology at the University of Chicago in 2012, where my thesis was awarded the year’s Richard Saller Prize for most distinguished dissertation in the Division of Social Sciences. As a postdoctoral scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies I spent two years in research residence completing my recent book, Social Collateral: women and microfinance in Paraguay's smuggling economy (2015, University of California Press). The project is part of a sustained research interest in gender and finance, and in the social life of community-based economic projects in the hyper-liberalized contexts of Latin American borders.

Social Collateral tracks collective debt across the commercial society and smuggling economies at the Paraguayan border by examining group loans made to women by nonprofit development programs. These highly regulated loans are secured through mutual support and peer pressure—social collateral—rather than through physical collateral. This story of social collateral necessarily includes an interwoven account about the feminization of solidarity lending. At its core is an economy of gender—from pink-collar financial work, to men’s committees, to women smugglers. At stake are interdependencies that bind borrowers and lenders, financial technologies, and Paraguayan development in ways that structure both global inequality and global opportunity.

You can read about my research in The Conversation:

https://theconversation.com/microfinance-could-wind-up-being-the-new-subprime-59001

https://theconversation.com/a-bank-heist-in-paraguays-wild-wild-west-reveals-the-dark-underbelly-of-free-trade-77125

Upcoming ethnography suppoted by an ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award will pursue my in interest in Latin American financial systems. The three-year project will focus on the development of insurance products to cover extreme weather events in Paraguay.