women’s development (in Foster’s chapter,

p. 155) to countries such as Australia where

adoption is marked by a level of squeamishness.

Calabretto writes: ‘Although dedicated ECPs are

now available without a prescription, direct- to-

consumer advertising is prohibited’ (p. 206).

Some of the best chapters explore women’s

legitimacy to make decisions about reproduction

without consulting a medical professional versus

medical control over the body, as well as how

women requiring such contraception are labelled

and defined. Erdman writes: ‘Women seeking

EC were thus identified as passive and without

agency, vulnerable and in need of protection.

The very term “emergency contraception” sup-

ported a victim-rescue narrative’ (p. 73).

The chapter about the adoption of EC in Brit-

ain (which is one of the most interesting),

describes a context where the drugs are under-

utilised despite being available free of charge and

without the need for a prescription. This chapter

by Furedi explores the moral construction of

relationships as being ‘good’ (responsible) or

‘bad’ (irresponsible) and the ambivalence of EC

use within this context:

On the one hand it is seen as a useful

means for a woman to ‘back up’ her

regular birth control, or at least a last

minute chance to reduce the risk on

unintended pregnancy (and possibly a

resultant abortion) when contraception

has not been used. But on the other

hand it raises questions about whether

the every availability of a method that

allows spontaneous, unplanned- and so

possibly ill considered and ‘irresponsi-

ble’- sex, might grant couples permis-

sion to indulge in it (p. 136).

This construction has resulted in even the

manufacturer of the contraceptives wanting to

disassociate themselves from a product that

might lead to irresponsibility. It is no surprise

that under such circumstances the messages to

women remain highly confusing and the use

of such contraceptives become shrouded by

stigma.

A flaw in this book from the anthropological

perspective is that it raises very interesting dis-

cussions about women’s bodies and reproductive

choices as being sites for contested power

between political, religious, commercial, ethical

and medical interests, but these discussions are

usually presented from a professional (usually

public health or policy) perspective. The voices

of women about their perceptions, experiences

and choices in engaging with EC are largely

absent.

Kate Senior

Menzies School of Health Research

Microfinance and its Discontents:Women and Debt in Bangladesh

L. Karim.

Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota

Press, 2011. xxxiii + 241 pp., glossary, notes, index.

ISBN 978-0816670956. USD $25.00 (Pb.); ISBN 978-

0816670949. USD $75.00 (Hc.)

Karim’s scholarly treatment of the effects of mi-

crofinance programs on poor women in Ban-

gladesh adds considerable momentum to

critiques of microfinance. Her opening chapters

review the history of microfinance and place

the extraordinary growth of microfinance

NGOs in Bangladesh into the context of the

recent postcolonial politics of that country. She

builds a convincing argument that NGOs have

taken the place of the weak nation state in

delivering services and capably shows how this

is congruent with Washington Consensus

reform programs.

The working out of neoliberal fantasies

through microfinance is striking. Not only do

microfinance NGOs cultivate capitalist disci-

plines in relation to individual personhood,

money and small business enterprise, but they

provide direct conduits for international corpo-

rations to market products, such as yoghurt and

mobile telephones to rural areas.

The great strength of Karim’s book is her

understated use of field examples that

© 2013 Australian Anthropological Society218

Book Reviews

undermine the neoliberal narratives of

micro-entrepreneurship that naturally emerge

as the poor are given access to credit, liberat-

ing them from poverty. The ethnographic real-

ity that she demonstrates is that beneficiaries

of microfinance are rarely the poorest of poor

but include the rural ‘middle class’—women

with access to husbands working in town or

abroad; women borrowers whose loans con-

tribute to businesses run by male kin and so

on.

Karim is somewhat scandalised as she discov-

ers the widespread practice of borrowing from

multiple microfinance institutions in order to

repay existing loans. While this undermines the

enterprise-centred narratives of the large micro-

finance NGOs, this use of money by poor

women might also be seen as a form of ‘protec-

tional microfinance’ that helps the poor to man-

age irregularities of income.

Karim shows how microfinance NGOs use

existing social networks and ideas of shame to

enforce their repayments in a process she

describes as ‘NGO governmentality’. She also

describes the tensions between clergy, local net-

works of patronage and the modernising pro-

ject of NGO governmentality, not least

through her reflections on the difficulties she

herself faced as a relatively privileged and inde-

pendent modern Bangladeshi woman. More

disturbing are practices of ‘house-breaking’,

where NGOs forcibly seize the assets of very

poor people who have not met their repayment

obligations.

It is the coercive power of NGOs that is the

central concern of this book. While this is a

neglected and often shocking element of the

microfinance story that Karim rightly gives

sustained attention to, her polemical use of

Foucauldian ideas of power leaves the reader

with a narrative of victimhood where the

agency of participants in microfinance pro-

grams is crushed under waves of Washington

consensus neoliberalism. The book gives little

indication of why the promises of microfinance

are so appealing to the millions of Banglades-

his who have taken loans through Grameen

Bank and its imitators. This is despite Karim’s

finding that NGO goals were achieved ‘primar-

ily through compliance rather than through

coercion (p. 35).

The interactions between NGO workers and

borrowers are similarly subsumed under this

logic of power, meaning that Karim passes up

the opportunity to explore how NGO workers

reconcile the mission of poverty alleviation

that they are trained to implement with the

middling results and coercive practices Karim

documents. Instead, NGO program managers,

consultants and researchers are represented as

condescending, motivated only by money and

as having little concern or empathy for the

poor. These may indeed be accurate characteri-

sations, but the reader is not given sufficient

insight into why this might be the case. I am

not familiar with the Bangladesh context; how-

ever, there is surely something complex and

interesting occurring in these situations that

would have been worth including in the book

and that would have given a more nuanced

illumination of the workings of power and

particularly the intriguing local translations of

neoliberal ‘self-help’ ideas of persons into a

global discourse of grassroots development and

finance. Unfortunately, Karim’s methods did

not allow her to develop the kind of ethno-

graphic relationship with microfinance provid-

ers that would have been necessary to explore

these themes more thoroughly. Karim deliber-

ately kept her distance from microfinance pro-

gram offices in order ‘to ask them more

pointed questions’ (p. 51). This lack of

engagement cuts out an important link in the

circulations of microfinance that we might

have expected her promising multi-sited eth-

nography of ‘NGO governmentality’ to

address.

These omissions aside, Microfinance and its

Discontents is a passionate and well-grounded

critique of triumphalist neoliberalism as it mani-

fests in the workings of microfinance NGOs in

Bangladesh.

John Cox

The University of Melbourne

© 2013 Australian Anthropological Society 219

Book Reviews