Search

The article explores the complexities of private debt globally, shedding light on its shift from an issue affecting primarily the Global South to its recent emergence in the Global North. It discusses how debt intertwines with status, solidarity, and stigma, analyzing various case studies to showcase its impact on social relationships, personhood, and socioeconomic hierarchies.

A condition of excess characterizes Iraqi exiles' everyday life in Jordan: excesses of waiting and anticipation, bureaucratic work, and aspirations for future benevolent governance. To grapple with this excess, they have had to develop strategies that render their lives in exile more manageable. Despite being hosted as "guests" of the Hashemite monarchy—an ambitious status evoking notions of pan‐Arab solidarity and Arab traditions of hospitality—this status does not guarantee or grant them access to substantive citizenship rights. In light of this, Iraqi exiles who arrived in Jordan following the US‐led invasion of Iraq in 2003 have often found themselves dependent on potentially injurious ways to navigate their presence. One of these strategies are relations and practices of faḍl, a form of exchange governed by a foreclosure of reciprocity and necessity of public recognition. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among what I refer to as the Iraqi exilic milieu in Jordan, this article examines how, in the absence and denial of expected forms of exchange, the circulation of stately faḍl and its cooptation by ordinary people articulate new notions and practices of valuable yet nevertheless wounding citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to introduce the reader to the anthropology of finance in its contemporary dimension of financialization. Through the lens of the feminist manifesto "GENS" (Bear et al. 2015), the author proposes a reading of ethnographies that highlights the interconnectedness of individuals' agency, projects of social reproduction, power hierarchies, and processes of money accumulation. Moreover, the article how the financial industry reproduces race, gender, and class inequalities both within societies and on a global scale, becoming increasingly pervasive in development discourse. The article is divided into three parts based on the relationship between individuals and the financial valuation process they engage in. It analyzes the experts who work within financial institutions; the social reproduction processes of the working classes increasingly reliant on credit and debt mechanisms introduced by financial capitalism; and the people excluded from global financial dynamics, whose financial inclusion is considered the most effective tool to escape poverty by governments and international organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores why people in Namibia go into debt to eat. Until recently, food sharing practices were maintained by social relationships in which everyone owed everyone else. This made sense, as needs would rotate evenly. However, in recent decades, and largely through state employment and social grants, the political economy has changed. Now, needs are distributed unequally. This article explores how the movement of resources through time and space is altered via the mechanism of credit/debt. The haves have become merchants and refer the have-nots to credit books in their recently opened village stores. This has two effects: for one, today the entire community owes only a very small number of people. Food transfers no longer crosscut groups but manifest them. Secondly, credits do not fully replace existing social relationships and enable sharing in other situations, mostly around meals, which also suggests continuity in shifting forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to contemporary ethnographies concerning poverty and digital financial inclusion in Europe. More specifically, it explores how poor Roma families engage with digital banking cards at home in Romania and when they travel to work in the informal economy in Denmark. The analysis conceptually unfolds "access" as a framework for financial inclusion and applies it to an empirical case of three brothers in a Roma family. On this basis, the article argues that cashless initiatives can, perhaps unintentionally, be a driving element in new practices of social exclusion. Without a comprehensive approach toward ensuring "de facto access" for the marginalized communities, which takes all dimensions of access into account, digital financial initiatives can potentially push them further to the periphery of the global economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discuses the concept of debt as multi-layerd concept that ecompasses several experiences and attempts to capture conflicting notions. Topics discussed include debt perceived by economist akin to grease of the economic machine and ensure smooth running of engine of production, importance of dept in comprehending effects and influences, and understanding of the experiences of the undebted.

The author discusses the formalisation of monetary support between acquaintances and friends in form of interpersonal loans that can reveal notions of personhood. Topics discussed include creditor and debtor posited by loan money as imagined equals, investment of individuals in mantaining an image of being respectable persons, and formalisation of exchange within social networks.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses several reports within the issue on topics including developments in economic anthropology exploring economic practices morality, debt relations in South Africa, and morality of indebtedness.

Through ethnography of de-agrarianization and extraction in Myanmar, the article shows how threshold subjects – poor laborers uncertain whether they are relatively or absolutely unnecessary to the social system of profits and distribution – become vulnerable to the necroeconomy, a system of value extraction constituted by combining extraction processes that spatially, mechanically, and politically require death-making; willing laborers driven by debt, dispossession, and existential desperation; and biopolitical abandonment (by states or corporations) of subjects to the carnage of extraction. The article considers what politics may be inhabited by the threshold subject, given s/he is both simultaneously surplus and essential to social reproduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes nonprofessional trading in derivatives during the Great Spanish Recession. It depicts playful engagements with speculative forms of credit and debt on the part of everyday people facing mass unemployment. The article calls into question contemporary theories of debt that characterize it as inherently destructive or inherently productive. My main argument suggests that credit‐debt dyads are constant sites of manipulation, negotiation, and improvisation informed by multiple registers of affect, knowledge, and value. In showing how play and playfulness arise in the field of finance, my research sheds light on extractive business models that exploit socioeconomic uncertainties as well as labor reforms advanced in times of recession. My ethnography traverses a variety of social terrains ranging from social media to brokerage firms, trading courses, stock exchanges, and self‐help workshops in order to complicate further the anthropological work on financialization. Without denying the negative and damaging effects of financialization, I focus on the contradictory ways in which ordinary citizens become financial subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent decades have seen an exponential growth in the field of international schools, and a concurrent rise in the number of young Anglo-Saxon teachers overseas. Such mobile teaching careers have largely been presented in terms of emphasising exploration, travel and lifestyle-related migration. While acknowledging such factors, we also draw attention to financial constraints, and in particular, to the challenge of personal debts, which weighs heavily over many Anglo-Saxon teachers. We therefore discuss international teachers' mobile trajectory in terms of a balancing act of negotiation between lifestyle and financial factors and point to a strategic trade-off between the two. Moreover, by emphasising the neglected aspect of indebtedness, we argue that, while a key point of appeal for such teachers' participation in the international school sector lies in the ostensible participation in the carefree, privileged environment of lifestyle migration that would have been out of reach for them otherwise, in reality, such horizons of opulence are limited, as teachers are locked into a precarious system that offers little protection and is highly unpredictable. In this context, the accumulation of professional experience provides only a limited pathway for assuming control over one's future destiny/destination – be it professional, geographic, or financial – and at times may even backfire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Expanding access to credit remains a key central government strategy for promoting agricultural development and livelihood diversification in south India and more widely. Smallholders borrowing from multiple credit sources are faced with obligations in addition to financial repayment. Available evidence on the consequences of indebtedness extending beyond monetary debt and its influence on vulnerability is incomplete in important ways. This paper presents an integrated vulnerability framework and illustrates the framework through case studies of three pairs of smallholder clients and credit sources. Using process-tracing and progressive contextualization methods, this paper shows the diversity of feedbacks that shape indebtedness and provides examples of social-ecological consequences. Unpacking these consequences in individual cases demonstrates indebtedness as an important root cause of vulnerability, which is in contrast to an examination of proximate causes, such as credit policy or temperature, that is the focus of a large share of scholarship. The paper shows that different credit sources are associated with different sets of obligations, leading to varied livelihood and agricultural consequences. Suggesting 'credit stacking' as an important adaptation strategy and research agenda item, the paper makes a plea for careful analysis of the conditions when credit is a factor in adaptive capacity and indebtedness of vulnerability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of American Anthropologist is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

While debtors' prisons in the United States were outlawed in the early 19th century, recent reports indicate that a growing number of people across the US are currently imprisoned for debt. This process typically occurs in two ways: debtors are found in contempt of court for non-appearance after being pressured into repaying consumer debt, or offenders are incarcerated for unpaid legal financial obligations (LFOs) incurred in the criminal justice system. While numerous legal scholars have examined these practices, little scholarship has situated this phenomenon within the politico-economic landscape of neoliberalism. Seeking to chart the intersections between economic restructuring and the expansion of the carceral state over the past 40 years, this article situates the modern debt–criminal justice complex within the broader historical trajectories of debt, incarceration, and institutional racism within the US. Emphasizing the centrality of US state reforms implemented under neoliberalism, this article examines the transformation of the federal welfare system toward 'workfare', as well as bankruptcy reforms implemented in the context of rising consumer debt during the 1990s and early 2000s. I maintain that these overlapping transformations, alongside the expansion of the criminal justice apparatus, were central historical processes that shaped the modern debt–criminal justice complex in the US, which continues to criminalize low-income and racialized populations across the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The resilience of the communal life of Calon Gypsies of Bahia, whose primary occupation is moneylending, lies in their treatment of money that individual men have in circulation as composing ‘inalienable personal hoards’. Calon ‘money on the street’ is viewed as a set of all the money a Calon man can hope to receive at various points from his existing loans. As a singularized totality, this whole is considered by other Calon as potentially knowable, encompassed by Calon morality and thus subject to people’s claims and evaluations. The dynamic relation between these two specific sums—the temporary whole that constitutes a man’s reputation and any expenditure indexically related to it—turns expenditures into events through which Calon manhood is forged and sovereignty from calculatory reason is declared. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The drive to internationalise campuses is an important dimension of the globalised neoliberal university, and it is leading to large numbers of students crossing national borders to pursue their education. As key global consumers of higher education, middle-class students from India migrating overseas to study are at the centre of this trend. Drawing from ethnographic research conducted at a public university in New York, this article considers how notions of obligation become critical to these students’ movements, their practices of place-making, and their futures. I use the term educational debts to capture the different forms of indebtedness that not only structure these young people’s educational migration, but also inform the sensibility shaping their negotiations of everyday life as overseas students. Attending specifically to their experiences with work, both the part-time labour they provide on campus and their search for work after they receive their degrees, I argue that educational debts position them precariously in the linkages between global education and labour markets. Elucidating how particular experiences of precarity are produced through the process of educational migration, this article offers insights into the differences that exist among the transnational class formations of Indian high-skilled migrant populations in the neoliberal era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on fieldwork in Ulaanbaatar, this article explores the spatio-temporal properties of debt relations in urban Mongolia. During socialism, relations of debt were mostly restricted to closed circuits of friends, whose exchange of objects and favours often stretched over a long time. With the transition to capitalism in the 1990s, both the number of debt obligations and the size of loans expanded dramatically, without being subject to similar curtailment or other formalization. The result is that ‘no one pays back what they owe’, as people complain. Departing from the seemingly peculiar fact that people nonetheless keep on lending others money – including debtors they hardly know or with a bad reputation – I argue that debt has acquired a gift-like nature in Ulaanbaatar, and show how the temporality of such ‘generalized debt’ is inseparable from the neo-liberal deregulation of residential spaces in this and other postsocialist cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Debt is one of the oldest and most widespread social arrangements that humans use to manage hardship--and it has also been one of the riskiest. David Graeber convincingly makes this case in his recent study of debt over the last five thousand years, but his focus on the Old World leaves open the question of whether similar contradictions emerged among the markets, cities, and states of the Americas. This article uses sixteenth-century documents to reconstruct the practices, institutions, and morality of debt in Nahua society during the Aztec Empire (AD 1428-1521) and show how debt was a double-edged risk in the Aztec economy. Debt played a constructive role, helping some households through hard times and carrying little of the negative moral valence commonly associated with it. However, debts could create new vulnerabilities when secured by selling family members into slavery. Exploitative debt, however, may have only become a problem during economic and environmental crises that made the risks of debt seem less than the risks of other ways to deal with hardship. Without careful attention to cultural context and historical circumstances, generalizations about debt's exploitative aspects are limited in their ability to explain debt's global extent and historical persistence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of American Anthropologist is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

ABSTRACT Following the 2007 mortgage crash, the US government established programs to assist homeowners by modifying their mortgages. But the oversight of these programs was granted to the same mortgage industry giants that provoked the crisis, and these lenders rejected over 70 percent of applicants' requests for modifications. In the process, there emerged new mortgage-modification bureaucracies, fusing corporate and state forms of administrative power. Yet as mortgagors demanded assistance from private lenders, they and lending company employees were drawn into reciprocal relationships that anthropologists have previously associated with 'gift economies.' This convergence of government and corporate bureaucracies has inspired among homeowners and modification specialists in California's Sacramento Valley forms of reciprocity often considered antithetical to late-capitalist finance. This surprising contemporary juxtaposition of reciprocity and indebtedness suggests a need to revise long-standing anthropological theories about the social obligations born of debt ties within late liberal capitalist markets. [ bureaucracy, corporations, debt, foreclosure, mortgaging, reciprocity, United States] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of American Anthropologist is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)