Doctoral Dissertation Research: Informality and Flexibility in Loan Networks and Debt Dispute Resolution

经济发展的实践者曾经普遍认为，经济增长常常受到传统文化习俗和依恋的阻碍，这可能会阻止更正式的机构的出现。这一立场已不再被广泛接受，因为几十年的全球化已经产生了大量证据，表明在经济蓬勃发展的情况下，文化融合的模式，因为非正规经济结构的发展带有公平、灵活、风险和信任的当地文化观念。因此，非正规经济现在被誉为灵活的经济增长模式，从业者越来越多地被鼓励采用反映经济发展战略多样性的参数。然而，科学家们仍然面临着如何确定和模拟非正规性和灵活性有利于经济增长的途径的挑战。该项目培养研究生如何进行严格的、基于实践的科学实地考察，将探讨非正式性作为这种新的灵活经济的基本文化模式，如何影响现有的经济结构和经济增长的倾向。Samil Can在斯坦福大学的托马斯汉森的监督下，将通过追踪贷款网络和解决债务纠纷的实践来探索债务关系和纠纷解决。这项研究将在印度德里进行，德里是世界上最重要和最大的新兴经济体之一的商业中心。在初步研究的基础上，研究者认为，印度有不同的道德和宗教观念的交换，信用，义务和权力的工作，以维持非正式和灵活的经济结构。基于这一主张，该项目是否以及如何这些道德和宗教观念的社会文化承担和多样化的角色所履行的国家，银行系统，并在一个理想化的正式经济模式的规定。该项目调查穆斯林商人、店主、仓库供应商和零售商如何建立社交网络，利用正式和非正式权威（如宗教领袖、长老、法院系统和警察）寻找债务和解决债务纠纷。初步数据显示，旧德里的穆斯林在交易中严重依赖宗教和道德观念，但也保持着与其他地方和跨国经济网络的联系。因此，本项目旨在提供关于灵活的经济增长如何依赖于各种不断变化的文化观念的普遍见解。该项目将利用人种学方法（参与观察精心挑选的线人，深入访谈，口述历史）和空间研究方法（社会网络分析，社会空间测绘），以记录这些文化经济交易模式在德里穆斯林与德里更大的非正规经济。研究结果将通过概述其日常实际影响和探索债务义务的文化框架方式，为学术和知识界关于“灵活经济增长”的辩论提供重要信息。它将大大有助于人类学家、经济学家、政治学家和广泛的非学术决策者之间关于“债务”概念的紧迫的全球辩论。在最近关于债权人和偿债代理人的权威和合法性的辩论中，关于新的地方和全球经济模式的文化框架的研究也将提供重要的知识和实际见解，说明应如何在非正规的情况下制定金融市场债务重组的现行倡议。

It was once the widely held belief among practitioners of economic development that economic growth was frequently hindered by the existence of traditional cultural practices and attachments, which could prevent the emergence of more formal institutions. That position is no longer so widely held, as several decades of globalization have produced ample evidence of culturally blended patterns in instances of robust economic development, as informal economic structures have developed with local cultural notions of fairness, flexibility, risk and trust. As a result, informality is now celebrated as a model of flexible economic growth and practitioners are increasingly encouraged to adopt parameters reflecting the diversity of economic development strategies. Scientists remain challenged, however, as to how to identify and model the pathways through which informality and flexibility benefit economic growth. This project, which trains a graduate student in how to conduct rigorous, empirically-grounded scientific fieldwork, will explore the ways in which informality, as a fundamental cultural pattern of this new flexible economy, influences existing economic structures and the propensities for economic growth. Samil Can, under the supervision of Thomas Hansen of Stanford University, will explore debt relations and dispute resolutions by tracing loan networks and practices of resolving debt disputes. The research will be conducted in Delhi, India, a commercial center in one of the world's most important and largest emerging economies. Based on preliminary research, the researcher holds that India has diverse moral and religious notions of exchange, credit, obligation and authority working to maintain informal and flexible economic structures. Based on this claim, the project whether and how these moral and religious notions socio-culturally undertake and diversify the roles fulfilled by the state, the banking system, and the regulations in an idealized formal economic model. The project investigates how Muslim traders, shopkeepers, warehouse suppliers, and retailers establish social networks to find debts and resolve debt disputes using formal and informal authorities (e.g. religious leaders, elders, court system, and police). Preliminary data suggests Muslims of Old Delhi heavily rely on religious and moral notions in their transactions, but also maintain access to other local and transnational economic networks. Therefore, this project seeks to provide generalizable insights on how flexible economic growth relies on various and ever-changing cultural notions. The project will utilize ethnographic methods (participant observation of carefully selected informants, in-depth interviews, oral histories) and spatial research methodologies (social network analysis, socio-spatial mapping) in order to document how these cultural economic transaction patterns among Muslims in Delhi relate to the larger informal economy of Delhi. The findings will significantly inform academic and intellectual debates over "flexible economic growth" by outlining its everyday practical implications and exploring the ways in which debt obligation is culturally framed. It will contribute significantly to a pressing global debate on the concept of "debt" among anthropologists, economists, political scientists, and a wide range of non-academic policy-makers. Amidst recent debates on the authority and legitimacy of creditors and debt-giving agents, the study on cultural frames of new local and global economic patterns shall also provide vital intellectual and practical insights on how current initiatives to restructure debt in financial markets should be formulated in relation to informality.