Associate Professor Caroline Schuster
Areas of expertise
- Anthropology Of Gender And Sexuality 440102
- Environmental Anthropology 440104
- Anthropology Of Development 440101
- Economic Development Policy 440703
Research interests
Economic anthropology, value, credit and debt; microcredit, NGOs and development policy; insurance, risk, finance; environment, climate change, weather catastrophes; gender, kinship, feminist theory; Latin America, Paraguay
My current research on insurance and weather catastrophes is based on anthropological fieldwork in Paraguay supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA 2017-2020). It is my second major research project following a decade of engagement with the microfinance industry. My first book, Social Collateral: women and microfinance in Paraguay’s smuggling economy (University of California Press, 2015) is an ethnographic account of freewheeling frontier capitalism in Paraguay’s triple-frontier with Argentina and Brazil. Taken together, these two research projects offer a sustained study of economic interdependency. My research agenda asks: how and under what conditions are people collectively obligated in everyday economic practice? What value systems compel people to knit and ravel these economic interdependencies, and with what effects? Insurance is an obvious outgrowth from my research on microcredit “social collateral” and collective indebtedness, since insurance explicitly aims to pool and spread risk while transferring liability. Building on my prior research, this DECRA project interrogates the consequential differences between modes of sharing risk and promising security in financial systems and otherwise.
I talk about my research on anthropology of finance in conversation with the Deakin Anthropology Podcast series -- you can listen in here:
https://soundcloud.com/anthro-deakin/ep-22-schuster-mattioli
Biography
As a student at Stanford University, social movements in Argentina catalyzed by the 2002 economic crisis and largest sovereign debt default in world history inspired me to trace links between the cheap credit fueling the expansion of seemingly ordinary California towns like mine, and events unfolding thousands of kilometers away. I visited the Southern Cone of Latin America for the first time in 2003 to explore community based anti-poverty programs that responded to the crisis, focusing primarily on indigenous entrepreneurialism in the Andean region of Argentina’s border with Bolivia.
I expanded my research on microcredit programs in Latin America in graduate school at the University of Chicago where I pursued by PhD in cultural anthropology from 2005-2012. My interest in informal markets, and particularly women’s livelihoods, drew me to Ciudad del Este, the famous free trade zone on Paraguay’s Triple-Frontier with Argentina and Brazil. Microcredit is part of a global trend of financial inclusion that brings banking services, especially small loans, to the world’s poor — but how do these cooperative development projects work in a place like Ciudad del Este, which is awash in black money and the profits of contraband?
In addition to my work on economic anthropology, as a researcher at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Centre for International Affairs, where I was a Fellow of the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies from 2012-2014, I focused on social theory and research methodologies. Building on that scholarly agenda, I have co-authored a project with Dr. Sohini Kar on research methods in social studies of finance and collaborated with Dr. Jesse Driscoll on the politics and ethics of conducting research in high-risk settings.
Since joining the School of Archaeology and Anthropology in the College of Arts and Social Sciences at the ANU in 2014, I have broadened my research focus to research the expansion of financial systems in Latin America. There is a growing consensus that unfettered markets in Paraguay offer a preview of the shape risk and vulnerability might take globally in ever-more deregulated financial systems and development settings. Paraguayans’ diverse processes of insuring against future damage afford an opportunity to address a basic question rarely posed in debates about crises, both economic and environmental: What social and cultural processes do the work of transforming environmental damages into other forms of value in contemporary capitalism? My Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA, 2017-2020), "Insurance and disaster relief: using the anthropology of finance to rethink climate change adaptation” explores disaster capitalism and the financialization of local risk-mitigation strategies in the context of our ever more unstable climate.
Available student projects
Available to supervise students in economic anthropology, anthropology of finance, gender and sexuality studies, and Latin American studies.
Current student projects
Alexander D'Aloia, "Translating Solidarity: Effects of translation on solidarity economics policy in Ecuador"
Owen McNamara, "Managing Soy Cultivation in Cordova Province, Argentina"
Publications
- Schuster, C & Kar, S 2021, 'Subprime Empire: On the In-Betweenness of Finance', Current Anthropology, vol. 62, no. 4, pp. 389-411.
- Schuster, C 2021, 'Gender and Smuggling', in Max Gallien, Florian Weigand (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Smuggling, Routledge, London, pp. 168-179.
- Schuster, C 2021, 'Weedy Finance: Weather Insurance and Parametric Life on Unstable Grounds', Cultural Anthropology, vol. 36, no. 4, pp. 589-617.
- Schuster, C 2021, 'Gender and COVID-19', in Hilary Callan (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology, John Wiley & Sons Ltd., United Kingdom, pp. 1-11.
- Schuster, C 2021, 'Risky Data' for Inclusive Microinsurance Infrastructures', Development and Change, vol. 52, no. 4, pp. 780-804.
- Schuster, C 2019, 'The Bottlenecks of Free Trade: Paraguay's Mau Cars and Contraband Markets in the Triple Frontier', Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, vol. 24, no. 2, pp. 498-517.
- Schuster, C 2019, 'The Indebted Wage: Putting Financial Products to Work in Paraguay's Tri-Border Area', AQ Anthropological Quarterly, vol. 92, no. 3, pp. 729-756.
- Driscoll, J & Schuster, C 2017, 'Spies like us', Ethnography, vol. Online, pp. 1 - 20pp..
- Schuster, C 2017, 'Navigating Austerity: Currents of Debt Along a South Asian River', The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, vol. 18, no. 3, pp. 282 - 286pp..
- Kar, S & Schuster, C 2016, 'Comparative projects and the limits of choice: ethnography and microfinance in India and Paraguay', Journal of Cultural Economy, vol. 9, no. 4, pp. 347-363.
- Goldfarb, K & Schuster, C 2016, 'Introduction: (De)materializing Kinship—Holding Together Mutuality and Difference', Social Analysis, vol. 60, no. 2, pp. 1-12pp.
- Schuster, C 2016, 'REPAYING THE DEBTS OF THE DEAD Kinship, Microfinance, and Mortuary Practice on the Paraguayan Frontier', Social Analysis, vol. 60, no. 2, pp. 65-81.
- Schuster, C 2015, Social Collateral: Women and Microfinance in Paraguay's Smuggling Economy, University of California Press, Oakland, California.
- Schuster, C 2015, 'Your family and friends are collateral: microfinance and the social', Cultural Anthropology.
- Schuster, C 2015, 'Review: The Paraguay Reader: History, Culture, Politics. Peter Lambert and Andrew Nickson (eds.), Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. 475 pp.', Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, vol. 20, no. 2, pp. 405-406.
- Schuster, C 2014, 'The social unit of debt: Gender and creditworthiness in Paraguayan microfinance', American Ethnologist, vol. 41, no. 3, pp. 563-578.
- Schuster, C 2010, 'Reconciling Debt: Microcredit and the Politics of Indigeneity in Argentina's Altiplano', PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, vol. 33, no. 1, pp. 47-66.
Projects and Grants
Grants information is drawn from ARIES. To add or update Projects or Grants information please contact your College Research Office.
- Insurance: using anthropology of finance to study disaster relief (Primary Investigator)