Ferda Nur Demirci Eryat

Ferda Nur Demirci Eryat is a Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology of Economic Experimentation at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany. Her work bridges economic anthropology, political anthropology, and historical anthropology with a focus on financialization, indebtedness, and state power in Turkey.

Education:

• Ph.D. in Anthropology, University of Toronto
• M.A. in Sociology, Boğaziçi University
• B.A. in Sociology, Boğaziçi University

Dr. Demirci Eryat critically examines how financial inclusion policies, kinship obligations, and authoritarian state practices intersect in Turkey. She conceptualizes borçluluk (indebtedness) as a moral and relational condition reshaping social belonging, gender norms, and national attachments among working-class populations. Her ethnographic research in the Soma coal basin reveals how easy credit access—tied to stable mining wages via Turkey's "wage-bank" model—has become prerequisite for marriage and family formation, creating cycles of collective indebtedness. She traces financial governance from the Ottoman Empire to modern state-led inclusion initiatives, analyzing how credit mechanisms forge nationalist attachments to development while creating lucrative markets for domestic credit industries.

As a research associate with the Counter Currency Laboratory at the University of Victoria, Canada, she fosters interdisciplinary dialogue on finance and digital infrastructures. Her forthcoming book, The Labor of Indebtedness: Masculinized Credit Access and Aspiring for (Self)Development in the Soma Basin, expands her analysis of indebtedness as morally productive within global financialization. She develops the concept of "moral immunity" to describe how indebtedness reshapes masculine identity in extractive economies, with plans to extend this framework to transnational contexts of authoritarianism.