Decolonising Economic Metaphors: Ethnographic Vernacular Reimagination of Economic Concepts

Even as economics as a discipline has long staked its claim as a ‘rational’ social science, with neoclassical economics deriving much of its methodological weightage from the use of mathematical models, quantitative data and numerical abstractions. Even so, this reliance on quantitative techniques is accompanied with widespread use of metaphors to describe the economy and economic thinking. For instance, concepts of fiscal deficit and surplus are described and understood in terms of a household economy, wherein the nation (analogous to the family) must “live within its means” (as stated by former British PM David Cameron, among others) or where former German Chancellor Angela Merkel chastises Southern Europeans for taking “lots of vacation time” and being a burden on the North. These references to a household economy or hierarchised notions of laziness carry material effects in austerity reforms, budget cuts and increased debt burdens, wherein metaphors co-constitute economic materialities and imaginations of economic possibilities. This paper starts with showing that such metaphors are gendered and colonial, and then proposes a way of decolonising such metaphors. Drawing upon 1 year of fieldwork with microfinance borrowers in the state of West Bengal in India, I engage with borrowers’ vernaculars of economic life to theorise economic concepts from the ground up. I present vernacular uses and circulation of concepts of financial risk, credit and the notion of ‘consumption smoothing’ to decolonise dominant economic concepts by offering alternative metaphors for imagining different economic possibilities and futures.