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Drawing on a case study of mortgage debt in Zagreb, Croatia, this article argues that the anthropology of household debt should engage more deeply with its economic implications and uses for debtors. It contributes novel insights from an understudied Eastern European setting to the Anglophone-centric debates on housing wealth and the financialization of subjectivity. The original mortgage pathways approach uses repeat interviews to track individual and household trajectories of mortgage debt. These processes are constituted by interactions between mortgagors and other actors, structural and conjunctural conditions, social norms, contingencies, and mortgages themselves. While mortgagors embraced the norm of housing wealth accumulation, their homeownership had layered meanings shaped by norms regulating reproduction and kinship and local structural and conjunctural conditions. At the same time, some individuals employed mortgages for profit-making strategies, and personal and public experiences with predatory lending stimulated a widespread prudent and active approach to mortgages. Thus, instead of an across-the-board financialization of subjectivity or its opposite, "domestication" of finance, there was an uneven interpenetration between the financial rationality of mortgages and mortgagors' prudent rationality that combined instrumental reasoning and value-based goals. Mortgages entail certain intrinsic effects, but their materialization is not exempt from the variability and dynamism of debt processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on, and going beyond, the state-of-the-art literature, this article aims to advance the analysis and conceptualization of the financialization of households. It argues that there is a need to better conceptualize the household and that the relations between households and other actors in financialized capitalism require further elaboration. Its contribution rests on providing a high-level review of literature and on proposing a relational and activity-orientated approach to the household as a micro-level social institution performing its activities through a web of relationships. Furthermore, it builds on the concept of 'financial chains' to draw attention to power relations and transfers of value between households and other economic actors. In doing so, the article also highlights the uneven ways through which households are inserted into such 'financial chains' and explores social, spatial and temporal dimensions of household financialization. Finally, it suggests avenues for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces the Croatian Swiss franc loans crisis and debtors' movement in the context of the wider politics of housing finance after the 2000s credit and housing boom. The movement mainly contested Swiss franc loans through litigation and demands for regulation of predatory lending practices. This selective and institutional articulation of the issue reflected the urban middle-class background of the movement's constituency and its ambivalent position of having stakes in the financialized housing regime while resisting some of its consequences. Political and financial elites supported a relaunch of a more regulated version of finance-led, state-subsidized housing provision. The structural conditions resulting from the postsocialist housing privatization and the hegemonic ideology of homeownership have been instrumental in preserving the established model. Even then, the CHF loans experience contributed to a slow and gentle shift in the politics of housing towards a possibility of, and calls for, a less ownership-dominated and financialized model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]