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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]

Some recent anthropological accounts of middle classes centred on their indebted home-ownership. They stressed its two contrastive logics fitting a wider binary – exposing 'squeezed' middle classes in the global North to increasing risks, and supporting the ascent of their 'new' counterparts in the South. The genealogy of middle-class housing debt in Croatia presented in this article reveals another, post-socialist trajectory where mundane and opaque institutional practices regulating access to housing finance, such as bank credit scoring and the allocation of state housing benefits, were key in steering a middle class inherited from socialism towards mortgaged home-ownership. The latter was articulated as a middle-class experience only after the 2000s credit boom had come to an end and the consequences of rampant predatory lending became visible and subject to contestation. The resulting middle-class subjectivities are ambiguous and, as comparisons with other Eastern European cases suggest, accessible for a range of political projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]