Giving, Receiving, Waiting and Returning. An ethnographic approach to the social bonds between NGOs and worker cooperatives

Abstract

This article discusses the way in which a Non Governmental Organization (NGO) in the City of Buenos Aires manages loans for worker cooperatives, within the framework of the National Microcredit program. Shifting attention away from the question about the impact or scope of these programs, the article seeks to explore the everyday practices of those involved in the delivery and return of loans from an ethnographic approach. Recovering a line of studies in anthropology that draws from the work of Marcel Mauss, it seeks to focus not on exchange but rather on the production process of social bonds and obligations. Considering time as constitutive of the gift, it claims that the interval in which the cooperative’s debt is held constitutes an active waiting area where this NGO creates and recreates cooperatives’ obligation to return the money while reproducing its own continuity as an organization.