Episode #22: Caroline Schuster and Fabio Mattioli

Conversations in Anthropology

Who doesn’t love ECONOMIC anthropology? Even if Marx, Mauss, and Malinowski aren’t your thing, we are confident you will enjoy this episode, as David and Tim sit down for a chat with Dr Caroline Schuster, a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the Australian National University, and Dr Fabio Mattioli, a Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Melbourne. The conversation introduces our guests' respective field sites - Paraguay and the Republic of Northern Macedonia - and gets into some big issues around insurance, microcredit, illiberal politics and the temptations of 'innovation’. If you are interested in following up with some reading, Caroline is the author of 'Social Collateral: Women and Microfinance in Paraguay’s Smuggling Economy’ (University of California Press, 2015), and Fabio the author of the forthcoming 'Illiquidity and Power: The Economics of Authoritarianism at the Margins of Europe'.