Morally Immunizing Debts: Wage Bank, Gendered Credit Access, and Intimacy in the Soma Coal Basin

This article explores the role of readily available credit in shaping new masculine ideals among underground mineworkers in Soma, a lignite-coal basin in Turkey’s North Aegean region. The availability of easy credit forges a new approach to self and intimate others in this coal basin, allowing miners to navigate intimate relationships through consumer loans and financial obligations. By concomitantly examining the intergenerational aspiration of “taking control of life” that long accompanied insecure coal mining in the Soma basin and the evolving of national credit access, I show the emergence of a new masculine imperative via indebtedness, “moral immunity,” serving as a means to measure one’s masculinity and morality. Through the coupling of easy access to credit and increased investments in nuclear-family intimacy in today’s Turkey, moral immunity endows indebtedness with a moral transactional potential in intimate relations and enables extracting financial value from empathic, moral dispositions among miners.