May 2010 Page 47 Caroline E. Schuster University of Chicago Reconciling Debt: Microcredit and the Politics of Indigeneity in Argentina’s Altiplano Microcredit is a particularly popular economic development tool that seeks to em- power poor people through easy access to credit. It has been deployed as a develop- ment tool globally, often with much-lauded results. In this article, I examine a case study based on lending practices of Warmi Sayasunqo, a self-consciously indigenous microcredit Nongovernment organization (NGO) based in the Andean altiplano of Argentina. This article focuses on the ways in which efforts to reconcile debts come to configure both the microcredit practices of Warmi as well as struggles over indigenous rights and recognition in Argentina. While Warmi leadership envisioned their obli- gation to borrowers in terms of identity recuperation and community strengthening, the Argentine state was concomitantly elaborating similar modalities of obligation to its indigenous people. I suggest that these two projects are in dialogue and, perhaps, mutually constitutive. I examine the ways in which microcredit and indigeneity are linked in the administrative practices of Warmi. Then I analyze Argentina’s 1994 constitutional reform, and struggles by the constitutional commissioners and poli- cymakers around Argentina’s debts to its indigenous peoples. In these two separate modalities of reconciliation, debates about whether obligation is terminal or ongoing also speak very concretely to whether social relationships are themselves also ter- minal or ongoing. I suggest that reconciliation through lending keeps borrower and creditor on intimate terms, which serves as a valuable counterpoint to transaction- based audit processes that seek to fully characterize (and terminate) an economic or social relationship. [Microcredit nongovernment organizations (NGOs), indigeneity, economic development, Argentina] In 1994, Argentina undertook a sweeping constitutional reform that granted broad new rights to its indigenous citizens (Gordillo and Hirsch 2003; Occhipinti 2003; Schwittay 2003). 1 Nearly a decade later, in the wake of Argentina’s massive economic implosion in 2001–2002, indigenous rights activists were still struggling to translate those new rights entextualized in the constitution into concrete programs for land transfer, economic assistance, and education reform, among other objectives. In and through these struggles, the slippage between the economic and the political goals became strikingly apparent: negotiations over assistance and development programs were argued in terms of identity and community while, at the same time, indigenous communities were figured as economic actors; indigenous claimants also demanded economic goods like land titles, material resources – and in the case examined here, credit and banking services. This article focuses on the ways in which debt comes to PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, Vol. 33, Number 1, pps. 47–66. ISSN 1081-6976, electronic ISSN 1555-2934. C  2010 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1555-2934.2010.01092.x.