The household and family as refuge? Relational dimensions of household debt management in an industrial town in Serbia

Abstract

This article ethnographically examines how a family in a Serbian industrial town managed household debt, focusing on a young woman navigating the aftermath of her parents’ layoffs following the privatization of a copper-processing company. It explores how gender, age, class, kin relations, and disability shaped her “financial gymnastics.” Challenging anthropological views of the family and household as a refuge in the literature on financialization and post-socialism, the article highlights the ambivalence of familial networks, structured through management of household debt, which acted as both support and burden, while the household emerged as a site of oppression and partial security. By illustrating underexplored transgenerational consequences of post-socialist transformations, the article argues that financialization must be studied alongside deindustrialization and (post-socialist) destruction of industrial production.