Az ELTE Társadalomtudományi Kutatóközpont (MTA Kiváló Kutatóhely) 

Szociológiai Kutatóintézete 

tisztelettel meghívja 167. Jour Fixe eseményére

Low-end financialization: Trajectories of household oikonomization and indebtedness among the working poor in rural Hungary

 

Előadó: Durst Judit (ELTE TK KI) 

Hozzászólók: Messing Vera (ELTE TK SZI; CEU); Király Júlia (közgazdász)  

Időpont: 2026. március 5. csütörtök 12:00 

Helyszín: Az eseményt hibrid formában tartjuk meg.

Személyesen: Szociológiai Intézet 1097 Budapest Tóth Kálmán utca 4.;  B.1.15

Online: Zoom link: 

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84264874343?pwd=UUdwwE1k2792GD6ICKirtFyYOoOCla.1

Meeting ID: 842 6487 4343
Passcode: 738674

Absztrakt

This working paper analysis the unfolding process of the financialization of poverty, that is, the rapid and excessive financial inclusion of the working poor in Hungary. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in an economically disadvantaged region of rural Northern Hungary, it explores different household oikonomization trajectories and various pathways into low-end financialization and indebtedness. It demonstrates how the government’s public and family policy – as part of its financial nationalism project –, with its targeted state subsidies and rural development programs became the collateral of the working poor households’ financial inclusion.

The paper proposes that the Hungarian case is not only illustrative but theoretically generative. It shows how, at the bottom end of semi-peripheral, dependent capitalism, financialization is simultaneously economic, moral, and political — a system that disciplines labour, organises social reproduction, extracts from bodily capacities, and manages racialized inequalities. By tracing how subsidised housing loans, informal credit, plasma-selling, and debt enforcement become entangled in everyday household oikonomization, it offers a multi-scalar political anthropology of low-end financialization. It also shows that these mechanisms, operating across scales, have turned poverty itself into a site of extraction, discipline, and governance.

A kézirat elkérhető a szociologia@tk.hu e-mail címen.