Cultural narratives go from the subprime to the ridiculous
By Gillian Tett
Published: January 7 2011 23:28 | Last updated: January 7 2011 23:28
Who is to blame for America’s housing mess? This question has provoked much debate in the past three years. And as the economic pain has piled up – around 5m American homes are in foreclosure or at risk of it – there has been no shortage of culprits to blame, including politicians, regulators, bankers, mortgage brokers, economists and credit rating agencies. A great new book by two US business journalists, Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera, called All the Devils are Here holds up many a “sinner” for consideration, including Lloyd Blankfein, head of Goldman Sachs, Angelo Mozilo, the disgraced former Countrywide Financial chief, and many in between.
Amid all this finger-pointing, it is also worth glancing at the work of anthropologists, many of whom these days forsake exotic, glamorous climes to study the rituals of the western world, even in prosaic places such as Michigan. Anna Jefferson of Michigan State University, for example, has been analysing how mortgage foreclosures are unfolding.
Her findings are fascinating. When she arrived at her “fieldsite” three years ago, as the housing crisis got under way, citizen groups involved in the housing market were buzzing with tales of homeowners killing themselves just before being evicted from their homes, seemingly as an act of revenge and despair.
So far, so horrifyingly tragic – and inevitable. Or so it might seem in a country where foreclosures are rising and the unemployment rate has recently jumped to 9.8 per cent . (In Michigan 90 per cent of mortgage defaults are sparked by job loss.) Yet, when Ms Jefferson started investigating, she discovered something odd: while tragedies existed, few were linked solely to eviction. Indeed, the number of suicides was far more modest than the urban legend implied.
So was this just media hype? Perhaps. Yet Ms Jefferson thinks something more interesting is also going on. In the past 100 years, American culture has developed a well-entrenched, commonly shared national narrative to explain and justify success – the “American dream”. But, observes Ms Jefferson, while “the American dream narrative explains upward mobility . . . we have fewer cultural narratives to help us understand and cope with downward mobility”. Thus, widespread foreclosures pose a “narrative challenge”; there is no commonly agreed national way to explain these events. Different groups are fighting to control the story.
During the first phase of the housing downturn, Ms Jefferson found many informants blamed homeowners themselves for their woes, since they were perceived to have recklessly taken on loans. So did the local media and online web groups. But then, as foreclosures increased, another narrative emerged: borrowers were seen as victims, crushed by the banks and a profoundly capricious, irrational and inhuman foreclosure system. So suicide tales circulated.
Yet at the grassroots level, Ms Jefferson found eviction increasingly portrayed as a quasi “liberation” from a warped, consumerist society. “Former homeowners sometimes present losing a house as virtuous – shedding the shallow affliction of consumption to remember ‘what’s really important’,” she writes, adding that the language that has been wrapped around the foreclosure process in all three narratives has become increasingly emotive, borrowing heavily from religion.
Narratives may shift again – as Americans remain uncertain and divided about how to explain downward mobility. Despite McLean and Nocera’s book, they do not have an identifiable set of “villains” to help draw a line under the saga. So politicians rail against bankers, while bankers fume about “the lack of blame being put on consumers and politicians” – and consumers just feel confused. Little wonder, that the political mood is so volatile and contradictory. Times of shifting national narratives are also moments of potentially important change. In Michigan, as elsewhere.
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