Abstract
Recent debates about the Grameen Bank’s microlending practices depict participating female borrowers as having fundamentally empowering or disempowering experiences. I argue that this discursive framework may be too reductive: it can conceal how technique and technology simultaneously facilitate relations of dependence and independence; and it can diminish our capacity to understand and assess innovative development initiatives.
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Notes
The Village Phone program began in 1997 as a collaborative venture between the Grameen Bank and two companies, a private for-profit company, GrameenPhone Ltd. and a not-for-profit one, Grameen Telecom.
For more on postphenomenology, see Selinger (2006).
Phone ladies are also referred to as “mobile calling offices.”
Embedded quotations in these four issues are from Ghosh (2006).
Having restricted my attention to articles and books written in English, I may be overlooking relevant inquiry in other languages. I also may be overlooking sources that fell outside the scope of my searches. These caveats are important for two reasons. First, in so far as I am relying upon secondary literature and not a personally conducted case study, I do not want to overstate the strength of my conclusions. Second, in so far as I am relying upon phenomenological concepts that were developed by Western thinkers, the analysis risks distorting non-Western lifeworlds. This risk is amplified by reliance upon studies that were written in English, for Western audiences.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the following people for their assistance with this essay: Richard Dietrich, Don Ihde, Verna Gehring, Robert Rosenberger, David Suits, and Katie Terezakis.
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Selinger, E. Does Microcredit “Empower”? Reflections on the Grameen Bank Debate. Hum Stud 31, 27–41 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-007-9076-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-007-9076-3