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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 adopts an anthropological perspective on law to examine the social processes surrounding the making of a set of recent civil society laws in Serbia. In line with the dominant liberal assumptions about civil society involvement as a way of making policy- and law-making more representative and democratic, there has been significant civil society participation in these legal reforms. Their stated aim was to bring greater ‘efficiency’ and ‘transparency’ to the activities of civil society and its relationships with the state. They were a part of the greatly intensified law-making activity in Serbia that reflects an ideology of legalism linked to the global neoliberal turn to depoliticised ‘governance.’ My analysis reveals that these reforms contradicted their own objectives since they were consistently dominated by a small and relatively stable network of organisations and individuals connected by informal relationships. It also shows that, through their protracted domination over the making of civil society law, these actors created a new political arena in the interstices of the state and civil society in which they pursued their own political and ideological agendas. These findings challenge the assumptions about the relationship between civil society participation and democratisation as well as the ideology of legalism.

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]

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The article discusses how nationalist nongovernment organizations in Serbia used religious nationalist discourse to fight against the annual lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Pride Parade, and highlights their anti-Pride campaign as a defense of the collective rights of the Serbian nation.

This article analyses from an anthropological perspective the 2010 Belgrade Pride Parade, the first state-supported Parade in Serbia, as a part of the building of a democratic and European Serbian nation. In their discursive framing of the Parade and making claims on the state to take it under its auspices, the organising NGOs bound the event to the EU integration process of Serbia. This policy link helped them forge a political alliance with the state, but was also instrumentalised by the government to avoid an ideological conflict with the opponents of the Parade. Owing to the perception of the alliance as “elitist” and to the militarised and depoliticised nature of the state’s involvement, the event materially actualised and reified rather than transcended the enduring conflict of liberal and collectivist citizenship visions in Serbia. The article argues that the overall discourse of the government on Europeanisation is informed by the same top-down and instrumental logic. However, members of civil society develop political subjectivities which demand active citizen participation and critically engage with the discourse to restore its democratising potential. Similarly, the emerging “populist” politics of LGBT rights, illustrated by the pop singer Jelena Karleuša’s participation in the domestic debate, are better placed to face the legacies of socialist and ethnonationalist nation-building than the human rights and Europeanisation approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]