Search

Purpose Service captivity is described as the experience of constrained choice whereby a consumer has no power and feels unable to exit a service relationship. This study aims to explore how positive service experiences can contribute to service captivity in the alternative financial services (AFS) sector for consumers experiencing financial vulnerability. Design/methodology/approach A total of 31 interviews were undertaken with Australian consumers of payday loans and/or consumer leases. Findings The authors reveal a typology of consumers based on their financial vulnerability and their experience with AFS providers. Then they present three themes relating to how the marketing practices of these providers create a positive service experience, and, in doing so, can contribute to service captivity for consumers experiencing financial vulnerability. Research limitations/implications The benefits derived from positive service experiences, including accessible solutions, self-esteem, and a sense of control over their financial situation, contribute to the service captivity of some consumers, rendering alternative avenues less attractive. Practical implications AFS providers must ensure a socially responsible approach to their marketing practices to minimize potentially harmful outcomes for consumers. However, a systems-level approach is needed to tackle the wider issue of financial precarity. Policymakers need to address the marketplace gaps, regulatory frameworks and social welfare policies that contribute to both vulnerability and captivity. Originality/value This research extends the understanding of service captivity by demonstrating how positive service experiences can perpetuate this situation. Further, specific solutions are proposed at each level of the service system to address service captivity in the AFS sector.

For low-income or precariously employed households in Australia, the re-allocation of risk over the past forty years has four crucial economic dimensions: the fraying of the social security net; changes in labour market dynamics; heightened uncertainty arising from income volatilities; and new hazards generated by the financialisation of daily life. Household financial capabilities are negatively influenced by the compounding impacts of each of these risks. Case examples from a BSL study illustrate each impact and their interactions. The dominant idea that individual capabilities are malleable (and thus can be optimised) whilst circumstances and norms are fixed is countered by an expanded view of Sen’s/Nussbaum’s capability approach (CA) that includes collective capabilities. Collective capabilities can change norms, and so, the concept provides a needed link between the political and macroeconomic movement of risk re-allocation and individual or household financial capabilities. The Australian Unemployed Workers’ Union is used as an example to show how collective action can challenge structural conditions, and expand or protect the capabilities of individuals.

While 8.2 billion tons of plastic has been produced worldwide to date, only 9% of it has been recycled.1 Approximately 400 million tons of plastics are manufactured every year, of which about 146 m...

In this article, we draw on a recent Australian study to illustrate how social time in precariously employed or low-income households is increasingly riven by uncertainty and risk. We apply two concepts, riskscapes and timescapes, to examine how these households respond to and are buffeted by the economic and temporal insecurities they experience in labour, welfare and finance markets. Using May and Thrift’s four categories of time, – representations, technologies, social disciplines and rhythms – we highlight how household timescapes interact with their riskscapes to exacerbate economic insecurity.

• This exploratory data project investigates the potential of the DSS DOMINO dataset to support housing research and policy development. • The key difference is that DOMINO is mainly comprised of flow data which gives within year income volatility data rather than stock data which gives a single annual, or point-in-time income and labour force status data. • Demand for Commonwealth Rental Assistance (CRA) is far higher than commonly understood and there is a significant churn of individuals who receive CRA.

Este artigo argumenta que um produto visual também é material, no sentido de que objetos visuais (mesmo digitais) podem circular pelos mais variados espaços e, dependendo do contexto, podem adquirir ou expressar propriedades muito diferentes. Este artigo baseia-se em pesquisas conduzidas pelo autor em arquivos de filmes na Índia e no Reino Unido. O objetivo é mostrar que os filmes de não ficção (e a duração das filmagens) filmados por oficiais coloniais britânicos e visitantes da Índia na primeira metade do século XX formam “documentos” visuais que se baseiam em convenções fotográficas e filmes anteriores. Simultaneamente, o cinema de ficção indiano toma forma, com o trabalho pioneiro de DG Phalke. Os cinemas usam os mesmos materiais, possivelmente os mesmos tipos de câmera, porém sem intersectarem-se. Conclui-se que os filmes do período citado e posterior auxiliam entender as relações visuais entre o povo indiano como sujeito e os colonizadores britânicos.

The emotional and moral context of high cost, small loan lending has an important bearing on how low-income people engage in the mixed economy of credit, which is a term used to describe the different sectors involved in providing credit, from informal transactions between family and friends to formal fringe financial lenders and multinational banks. Decisions about accessing credit are constrained by more than material circumstances or access to information about the financial cost of such transactions. How individuals perceive different credit options is also influenced by emotions such as shame, guilt or anger. The emotional dimension is critical for understanding how, where and when individuals access credit. The policy field needs to give more attention to these neglected dimensions of decision-making, particularly since ‘financial literacy’ programs targeted at low-income households assume that lack of financial and budgetary knowledge is the key issue. Here, we argue, drawing on an empirical study, that a wider range of cultural and emotional factors needs to be taken into account in making sense of the social relations of money, credit and debt.

This paper focuses on how community workers in Shepparton viewed the impact of the Place Based Income Management (PBIM) trial on the lives of their clients, their clients' families, and the broader community. The paper responds to criticism that there has been a lack of community voices in the development of PBIM or of their inclusion in the formal evaluation framework, raised in Philip Mendes's 2013 study of this trial site. A key policy goal underlying Income Management is that the tool assists low income people to become better money managers. Our study found that Shepparton community workers also used the parlance of 'tool' to describe the programmatic value of the BasicsCard in their interactions with clients. However, the BasicsCard appeared marginal to their discussions. Three clear themes emerged from the interviews: Shepparton's focus on voluntary clients, and ascertaining why participation in the local trial had dropped; that support for IM centred on the voluntary measure and the extra resources available to assist clients; and pragmatically locating the program in the middle of a welfare continuum that stretched from the voluntary Centrepay at one end to the highly coercive and restrictive paternalism of State Trustees at the other.

This article considers the "pace" of research, particularly with regard to the role played by film and photographs in setting or subverting this pace. Drawing on examples from published sources and my own visual archive, photographs taken during the course of fieldwork in India and England in the 1980s and 1990s, I consider ways in which photographs and other images can be revised and explored for new insights.

In the last few decades, payday lending has mushroomed in many developed countries. The arguments for and against an industry which provides small, short-term loans at very high interest rates have also blossomed. This article presents findings from an Australian study to contribute to the international policy and practice debate about a sector which orients to those on a low income. At the heart of this debate lies a conundrum: Borrowing from payday lenders exacerbates poverty, yet many low-income households rely on these loans. We argue that the key problem is the restricted framework within which the debate currently oscillates.

In recent years increased attention has been paid to both modes and processes of seeing in anthropology. At the same time, the body as the locus of visual practice is increasingly problematized. The works reviewed here are all concerned with making people — and bodies — visible, but are aware of the methodological, moral, and political implications of this. Other common threads include the tension between reproduction and representation, the self-awareness of the seen and seeing body, and the roles of digital and other technologies in rendering bodies visible or, at least, present.

This paper surveys ethnographic film as it has been presented over the years on British television, particularly in the Disappearing World series. A detailed criticism leads to the conclusion that anthropologists should not place too much faith in the kind of films that are presented for the general public on television. The involvement of anthropologists in these productions has often amounted to a less-than-happy marriage.

Since the publication of Anthropology and Photography (Edwards 1992) almost two decades ago, there has been an explosion of anthropological interest in historical ethnographic photography and other...

This ethnography examines the processes in which rooted but overlapping forms of cosmopolitan engagements implicate the Tausug imagination of collectivity. It investigates Tausug expression of connection and belonging as they find themselves entangled into global cultural flow and caught up in the state and secessionist politics of attachment. Utilising methodological and theoretical approaches engendered by visual and material anthropology, the ethnography locates rooted cosmopolitan imagination in the works and lives of creative but marginalised and often silenced Tausug cultural agents engaged in street-based production, circulation, and consumption of popular music and dance videos on compact discs. The ethnography follows these cosmopolitan expressions as they are being imagined, embodied, reproduced, and shared by and across Tausug communities in the Zamboanga peninsula, the Sulu archipelago, and beyond through the digital spaces of the internet and cross-border flow of the videos. How the translocality of imaginaries reflected on the videos play out in everyday life and the broader politics of representation are demonstrated here as vital to the understanding of Tausug imagined community as an open, flexible, and dynamically engaging Muslim society despite long-standing political turbulence and economic uncertainty in their midst. Saliently, the thesis argues that Tausug cosmopolitanism cannot be reduced into a phenomenon driven by the expansive currents of Western-led globalisation. Rather, Tausug cosmopolitanism constitutes both continuity of and departure from past forms of translocal connections of Zamboanga and Sulu, which as a region was once integrated to a pre-colonial Southeast Asian emporium and continually through varying ways of connectedness. Old and new global processes come into play in shaping the everyday production of Tausug imaginaries inevitably rendering Tausug identity formation as a trajectory rather than an unchanging fact of being. Drawing from the Tausug ethnographic experience, the thesis contends that rooted cosmopolitanism does not necessarily constitute a singular condition but rather a contested and distinctively multifaceted phenomenon.

This article draws upon some recent repatriation claims for Tasmanian human remains in British and European museums to examine debates concerning the authenticity of identity in the 21st century, and to reflect on the construction and representation of Indian identities in the colonial period. I discuss how authenticity can be seen as a process, used instrumentally, rather than a static quality, focusing on how authenticity is asserted, negotiated, performed, or rejected through social and political interaction. The negotiations of the Tasmanian Aboriginal groups for recognition of their status as authentic Aborigines provides a kind of prism or lens through which we can take a fresh view of the competing claims to authorship of India's filmic heritage. [Keywords: Authenticity, repatriation, film, human remains, colonialism, identity, archives, India, Tasmania](ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Introduction-Contemporary Tasmanian AuthenticityIn the article that follows, I present two main case studies that at first glance would appear to have little to do with one another. Certainly, there are few, if any ethnographic linkages between a recent set of moderately high profile human remains repatriation requests made by Tasmanian people, and scholarly discussions of Indian cinema in the colonial period. Yet, my intention is to show that analysis of the former through the (by now) relatively familiar paradigm of what one might call "the authenticity debates" (see Theodossopoulos' introduction to this collection for an overview) provides a new-and anthropological-way to think about the latter. In particular, I wish to assert that some of the discussions of colonialism, nationalism, and visual representation in colonial India by post-colonial film scholars considering colonial period film texts may reflect a series of unconsidered assumptions about authenticity that only an anthropological approach attuned to the "authenticity debates" can identify. In turn, this analytical maneuver may reveal some implicit assumptions about "authenticity" within the anthropological debates.In March 2006, the Trustees of the British Museum agreed to repatriate two "ash bundles" (containing the cremated remains of Tasmanian Aboriginal people who died less than 1,000 years ago) to the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre Inc. (TAC). The bundleswere acquired by George Augustus Robinson in about 1838 (Robinson having been appointed as conciliator of Aborigines in Tasmania in 1828). They were taken at a time when the Aboriginal population of Tasmania was suffering greatly from the impact of the European settlement, resulting in substantial population loss. The bundles entered the collection of the British Museum only later via the Royal College of Surgeons in 1882. (British Museum 2009)The TAC had, in fact, apparently made several earlier attempts to have the ash bundles repatriated, dating back to 1985, but these could not be taken up, according to the Museum's web announcement, until the UK law changed with the passing of the Human Tissue Act in 2005, thus granting the Trustees the right to de-accession such objects (British Museum 2009). However, a report on the bundles commissioned from an external expert for the Museum (Besterman 2005) pointed out that there were some issues to be addressed before any repatriation could take place: first, that the Tasmanian Aborigines of the 19th century were "heterogeneous, with beliefs, customs and practices that varied in detail between, and were distinctive to, each Aboriginal group in Tasmania" (Besterman 2005:7); second, that in the present there are (or were in 2005) three "Tasmanian Aboriginal Elders Councils, and eight recognized Tasmanian Aboriginal Communities" (Besterman 2005:9); and third, that it is assumed by some that the Tasmanian Aborigines had "died out" in the second half of the 19th century, not least thanks to the repressive measures taken by conciliator Robinson. …

Made to be Seen brings together leading scholars of visual anthropology to examine the historical development of this multifaceted and growing field. Expanding the definition of visual anthropology beyond more limited notions, the contributors to Made to be Seen reflect on the role of the visual in all areas of life. Different essays critically examine a range of topics: art, dress and body adornment, photography, the built environment, digital forms of visual anthropology, indigenous media, the body as a cultural phenomenon, the relationship between experimental and ethnographic film, and more. The first attempt to present a comprehensive overview of the many aspects of an anthropological approach to the study of visual and pictorial culture, Made to be Seen will be the standard reference on the subject for years to come. Students and scholars in anthropology, sociology, visual studies, and cultural studies will greatly benefit from this pioneering look at the way the visual is inextricably threaded through most, if not all, areas of human activity.

"Made to be Seen" brings together leading scholars of visual anthropology to examine the historical development of this multifaceted and growing field. Expanding the definition of visual anthropology beyond more limited notions, the contributors to "Made to be Seen" reflect on the role of the visual in all areas of life. Different essays critically examine a range of topics: art, dress and body adornment, photography, the built environment, digital forms of visual anthropology, indigenous media, the body as a cultural phenomenon, the relationship between experimental and ethnographic film, and more. The first attempt to present a comprehensive overview of the many aspects of an anthropological approach to the study of visual and pictorial culture, "Made to be Seen" will be the standard reference on the subject for years to come. Students and scholars in anthropology, sociology, visual studies, and cultural studies will greatly benefit from this pioneering look at the way the visual is inextricably threaded through most, if not all, areas of human activity.

Banks Marcus. La vie existait-elle avant la télévision ?. In: Journal des anthropologues, n°47-48, Printemps 1992. Anthropologie visuelle, sous la direction de Colette Piault. pp. 39-47.

y training I am an Indianist with a (largely unrelated) theoretical interest in film: what follows constitutes a more abstract plea for the introduction of some theoretical rigour into debates on ethnographic film. In particular, I wish to counter the almost willful ignorance visual anthropologists maintain with regard to film theory. It could be said that not only are writings primarily concerned with live-action feature film of little relevance to documentary ethnographic films, but that such a standpoint is likely to be heavily biased towards an Occidentalist perspective and thus have little to offer a discussion on films produced outside this perspective. On the former point I have commented elsewhere (Banks forthcoming b) and will continue to do so, wishing to add little beyond what I say below. On the latter point I feel there is a deeper problem concerning the nature of the 'Orientalism' debate. It is no longer novel to suggest that there are fundamental weaknesses in Said's (1985) argument concerning the Orientalist's view of the so-called 'other,' not least that he himself commits the very crime he accuses others of: constructing a monolithic mirror in which to see himself. More generally, the problem of ethnocentrism is one that, like the poor, will be with us always. Each generation of anthropologists feels that it has recognised and addressed the problem, only to have the charge thrown back in its face by its descendants. The temptation to regard the latest liberal orthodoxy as mere fashion is great. Take, for example, the current concern with indigenous voices and indigenous perspective. In the world of ethnographic film this has manifested itself in a focus on locally produced films, texts which allow the people we white western anthropologists study to speak back to us and beyond us, breaking the hegemony of our discourse of representation. Our continuing pre-occupation with authenticity (the seductive veracity referred to in the title of this piece) tempts us to welcome such text as the pure voice of the 'other.' Yet, akin in a sense to Said's observation that the Orient begins to speak with the voice of the Occident (1985:322 ff), we should be wary of such claims. Watching recently a film that claimed to be the first wholly made by an Australian Aboriginal (My survival as an aboriginal, Essie Coffey 1979), I was struck by how inauthentic it seemed. The strongest flavour was of a mid-seventies transatlanticism: the flared denim jeans; the folksy-cum-CW the 'consciousness-raised' voice of the main subject/filmmaker as she talked of 'reclaiming our culture' and took a group of Aboriginal children into the bush to show them what plants and animals they might eat The fUm is undoubtedly one of great sincerity and it is always possible that the look and feel of some generalised 'Aboriginal culture' happens to resemble that of liberal West Coast America, ca. 1974, though personally I doubt it The problem is, of course, that film is not a neutral' transparent' medium (Banks 1988) and that applies as much to nonwestern films as it does to western ones. Baudry (1985:534) has argued that the (literal) perspective adopted by film (and therefore video, which mimics film in this respect), is a western bourgeois perspective, which would mean that a non-western filmmaker has an uphill struggle from the outset Some have doubtless taken on this challenge and triumphed, successfully subverting the western perspective forced upon them; testimonies to their success will be found elsewhere in this issue. One could therefore argue that for an African (or anyone else) to fight against 'Africanist' visual representations he or she will have to read Baudry (and others) to understand the enemy. This seems an unfair burden: why should a Kayap6 Indian present his credentials in film theory before he picks up a video camera? The problem is ours, the (largely) white western academics who

The feature film True Stories [Byrne 1986] is analysed as a pastiche of a documentary film. Using this analysis, the author then goes on to discuss some of the assumptions underlying the production and use of ethnographic films and suggests that some of the insights of the ‘post modernist’ school of anthropological criticism may be of value in challenging these assumptions.