A agiotagem popular: dívidas e conflito urbano em São Paulo

Abstract

Studies of informal-illegal transactions, popular finance, and the credit market are firmly established in the social sciences. Few studies, however, pay attention to the intersection of social dynamics and power invested in the circulation of money in the form of credit in the popular economy. The objective of this dissertation is to understand how the practice of popular loan sharking structures an informal-illegal loan system, which is based on; a) a circuit for mobilizing material and social resources that guarantees the informal/illegal business; b) a protection circuit that guarantees the effectiveness of collections; c) a client circuit that guarantees the revenue from the cash flow. The fieldwork was carried out by adhering to the fundamental principles of urban and economic ethnography in three regions of the city of São Paulo; a) an upper middle-class district in the south; b) a favela in the far east; c) and a popular shopping area located in the center. As an analytical approach, I recover the history of three debts and show in each territory the networks are instrumentalized and verticalized. I argue that there is no ‘urban underworld’, nor an ‘economic underworld’, of which loan sharking is a part. Instead, it are social relations in the city and in the economy that produce inequalities. The very perception of popular loan sharking as a violent ‘underworld’ is a perspective that validates inequalities and that reproduces the violence that it supposedly denounces.