Doing with Dependence in the Era of Financialization:
Perspectives on the workings and the moralities of dependent relations
in flexible and racial capitalisms
Closing Conference of the research project “Moralities of dependent relations in the age of financialization: Rethinking dependence and livelihood among the marginalised in Hungary”, supported by the National Research, Development and Innovation Office (NKFIH) in Hungary (FK 143543)
Organizers:
Judit Durst (ELTE CSS, Institute for Minority Studies & UCL, UK)
Gergely Pulay (ELTE CSS, Institute for Minority Studies, Hungary)
Balázs Gosztonyi (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology/Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg)
Date: 11-12 November 2026
Venue: ELTE Centre for Social Sciences / ZOOM
Over the past four years, our project has explored the features of different types of dependent relations. The project’s closing conference invites contributions that examine dependence as an empirical and relational process rather than as an abstract condition or moral category. We ask how dependence is produced and experienced through everyday practices. What do people do with dependence? How and why do they enter into dependent relationships, and what interests do they bring to them? How are such relationships sustained, negotiated, valued, challenged, or abandoned? And how do broader political, economic, and moral orders shape these possibilities?
Dependence is central to everyday social life; however, political and economic discourse often associates it with a lack of autonomy or freedom. In contrast to such hegemonic concepts, anthropological research shows that dependence is far more complex. People actively seek, negotiate, maintain, contest, and resist dependent relations. We understand dependence as durable, voluntary or involuntary hierarchical relations in which actors occupy unequal positions within asymmetric, long-term exchanges of resources, services, protection, information, or obligations. This definition shifts attention away from whether dependence is inherently “good” or “bad” and towards the concrete relations through which it takes shape.
Dependent relations can provide access to resources, information, and opportunities for a better life, they also entail social and economic obligations, inequalities, exploitation, and coercion. The project is particularly interested in three overlapping forms: patron-client relations (hierarchical, personalised, long-term, and often reciprocity-based relations involving resources, employment, political support, protection, or access to institutions); brokerage relations (access to scarce resources, institutions, employment, and information through intermediaries); and debt dependence (institutionalised or interpersonal relations structured around financial obligations, including debts to banks, landlords, employers, moneylenders or other individuals, often involving legal, financial, or institutional enforcement). These forms frequently overlap. A credit application may create a relationship with a mortgage adviser; employment may depend on an (informal) labour recruiter patron; repayment terms for informal credit might be based on personal relations with the shopkeeper; and debt settlement terms may depend on lawyers in the case of household overindebtedness.
While our ethnographic focus is on the micro-level practices through which dependence is enacted and negotiated, we also invite macro-level perspectives that shed light on the broader conditions shaping the emergence of dependent relations, including precarious labour conditions, financialization, austerity, migration, welfare retrenchment, neoliberal reforms, and prolonged crises. The conference brings together comparative ethnographic perspectives on dependence as a relational practice embedded in broader political economy. These include the abandonment of local marginalised populations and the simultaneous rise of authoritarian neoliberalism, racial capitalism, peripheral financialization. Rather than treating dependence primarily as a moral problem or evidence of failed autonomy, we are interested in the interests that bring people into dependent relations and what emerge from those relations. The contributors address how people actively work within and upon dependent relations. They may use them strategically, reinterpret obligations, mobilise competing relationships, resist exploitation, or transform the terms of exchange.