Hadrien Saiag

Hadrien is a postdoctoral fellow with the Human Economy Programme since February 2013. Contact: hadrien.saiag@gmail.com.

His research focuses on money and financialization from people’s financial practices in Argentina

and Cuba. This work is driven by Karl Polanyi (The Great Transformation and The Semantics of Money Uses) and the French interdisciplinary school on money (Aglietta and Orléan, eds., 1998: La monnaie souveraine, Paris: Odile Jacob; Théret, ed., 2007: La monnaie dévoilée par ses crises, Paris: Editions de l’EHESS).

Hadrien completed a PhD. in Economics from University of Paris-Dauphine in December 2011. His dissertation questioned the nature of money through the analysis of a complex set of local monetary systems located in Argentina (trueque). It is based on both the reconstitution of the history of the main national trueque networks (meso-level) and the observations of the monetary and financial practices of their participants, carried out through ethnographic fieldwork (micro-level). This work leads to conceive money as a system of evaluation and settlement of debts, and begs the question of the unequal access to money as a key factor of social stratification among low-income people.

During his term as a Human Economy Postdoctoral Fellow, he is beginning new research on the

fragmentation of monetary instruments in Cuba.

Key publications include:

Saiag, H. (2013). « Financial practices as adaptations to increasing vulnerability: the dynamics of solidarity and protection in the suburbs of Rosario », dans A. Lemaître, I. Hillenkamp et F. Lapeyre (eds.), Securing Livelihoods: Informal Economy Practices and Institutions, Oxford University Press (accepted 26/09/2012, forthcoming in 2013).

Saiag, H. and Servet, J-M. (2013) « Household over-indebtedness in contemporary societies: a

macro-perspective », in Guérin, I. Morvant-Roux, S. & Villarreal, M. (eds.), Microfinance, debt

and over-indebtedness. Juggling with money, Routledge. (accepted 09/10/2012 – forthcoming in

September 2013)

Hillenkamp, I. and Saiag, H. (2012). « Solidarité et protection dans les économies populaires d’El Alto (Bolivie) et de Rosario (Argentine) : une perspective polanyienne », Économie et Sociétés, 46 (2), pp. 355-384.

Saiag, H., (2011) : « Les pratiques financières des milieux populaires de Rosario (Argentine) à l’aune du démantèlement du rapport salarial fordiste », Revue française de socio-économie, n°8, pp.9-3 (Prix du jeune auteur GDR Economie et Sociologie / Revue française de socio-économie).

Saiag, H. (2011) : Le trueque argentin au prisme de la dette : une socioéconomie des pratiques

monétaires et financières, PhD in Economics, University of Paris-Dauphine, 400p.

Article from University of Pretoria

Uma tese