A Counter Movement: African Self-Help Groups in the Americas
Posted: 16 Nov 2014
Date Written: November 14, 2014
Abstract
Many communities are under pressure to be subservient to markets; yet there are clear-cut strides among entrepreneurial women of the African diaspora who draw on African traditions to protest commercialized modern banks in the Americas. The banker ladies who manage community-owned banks are the real-life example of Karl Polanyi (1944)’s double movement. In my empirical study of 491 people in Jamaica, Guyana and Haiti, I argue that there is a counter-movement in financial services where Black women organize informal banks not only to provide coping tools for livelihood survival, but these banker ladies insert a program of social connectedness and political action when they mobilize local resources. Furthermore, African created self-help banks are a counter-project to mainstream banks because it is focused on the grass-roots and the collective. The African diaspora has injected an important contribution into the social economy to show that there are other ways to civilize banking from the ground up.
Keywords: Black women, exclusion, Karl Polanyi, self-help, informal banks, gender, politics, double-movement, intersectionality
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