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Abstract: Microlending programs, commonly directed at women and presented as a solution to global poverty, provide borrowers credit to support small, informal income‐generating activities. These initiatives have garnered much attention from anthropologists, who have long been interested in the social life of credit and debt. Despite numerous anthropological studies critiquing the social and economic consequences of such lending practices, they continue, bolstered by the affective dimensions of philanthropic marketing and the current embeddedness of microloans in local economies. This contradiction has led to more recent ethnographic work demonstrating the interaction of microloans with other forms of debt and credit in the social economy of borrowers. Building on this recent work, this article draws on ethnographic data from microloan borrowers in northern Honduras and the Bay Islands and contends that the activities associated with microlending participation and repayment may be understood as a form of productive, though hidden, labor. The article suggests further avenues of inquiry into the long‐term economic and cultural transformations that microlending has precipitated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the political mobilization of ex-militias for support during post-war elections in Sierra Leone. Taking its point of departure from the tension between ex-militias' potential for deployment and displacement of violence, it illuminates the ambiguous ways in which ex-militia members engage with political big men. The article suggests that the notion of debt can be employed as a prism to explain the complexities of social relations between ex-militia rank-and-file members and political elites and thus aims at shedding novel light on how big men systems and patronage work in post-war society, most notably in the political domain. By tracing particular relations between ex-militia members and political big men over time, the article empirically unravels the enduring yet ambiguous nature of debt relations and how they are shaped by and give shape to 'the gift of violence.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How is the contemporary moment of crisis in Greece entangled with antiquity, in its physicalform of remnants and sites, as well as in its discursive and visual renderings and evocations? In this article, I explore this archaeo-political dimension, adopting as my interpretative lens the concept of debt, not only as a financial phenomenon but also as moral imperative, as production of individual and collective subjectivities. The contemporary sovereign debt is juxtaposed to the debt owed to the ancestors, a debt that can never be repaid. In exploring this theme, I study a range of phenomena, from performative rituals to cartoons to official and unofficial media interventions. The main case study, however, is the public and media fascination with the recent excavation at Amphipolis in northern Greece, a phenomenon which I interpret as a peculiar occult economy with affinities to national treasure hunting. In the oneiric archaeology of Amphipolis, the ancestors are imagined as coming again to the rescue of their descendants in their hour of need, prolonging thus the eternal ancestral debt. Finally, I argue that both the financial debt and the ancestral debt are associated with the crypto-colonial constitution of Greece since the nineteenth century and that perhaps rupturing the teleology of ancestral indebtedness may in fact initiate the decolonial process for the country as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the shifts and recalibrations in the Latin Americanist musical production at stake in the relation between Jazz at Lincoln Center and the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra, institutions sharing an abiding commitment to the past but differing in how they conceive and enact time, space, and place. I identify a set of figures consistently and constantly invoked by contemporary actors to create symbolic and material economies grounded less in a tradition than in the differing relations that the living held with their specters, past, present, and future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the operational dynamic of informal small-scale trade in the Sino-Vietnamese borderlands as disclosed by local traders’ strategies of negotiation. It questions the impact of financial transaction practices – management of official fees and procedures related to payments – on the sustainability of cross-border trade. It engages with the notion of “trust” and stresses its significance in a space where the vagaries of trade policies challenge business rules, and contest the local power hierarchy. It argues that despite the principles underlying “trustful cooperation” being unevenly adhered to, traders manage to adjust to one another’s methods, revealing the nature of their tacit complicity in maintaining business logistics regardless of the limits imposed by national policies, institutional regulations and stereotypes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Microcredit loans--most famously systems of group-based borrowing--are a key tool in global economic development frameworks. Building outward from microcredit programs in Paraguay, I explore the discontinuous materialities of both kin- and debt-based obligations, especially at their intersection. I argue that borrowers feel the life span of debts most acutely when mortuary practices anchored in kinship ties are bound up with the task of taking on the financial obligations of the dead. This analysis shows how the bonds between kinship, death, and indebtedness go beyond analogy, for collective debt is not 'like' a kinship relationship. Instead, microcredit social collateral provides a means for people to deal with the broader issues affecting the life span of individuals, objects, and commitments, as well as the human stakes involved with obligation. [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.)

An index of articles, marginalia, and reviews published in the periodical "The Edgar Allan Poe Review" from 2009-2015 is presented.

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]

Recent accounts of constitutional development have emphasised commonalities among diverse constitutions in terms of the transnational migration of legal institutions and ideas. World-systems analysis gives critical expression to this emergent intellectual trajectory. Since the late 18th century, successive, international waves of constitutionmaking have tended to correspond with decisive turning points in the contested formation of the historical capitalist world-system. The present article attempts to think through the nature of this correspondence in the Irish context. Changes to the Irish constitution, I suggest, owed to certain local manifestations of anti-systemic movements within the historical capitalist world-system and to constitution-makers' attempts to contain--militarily, politically and ideologically--these movements' democratic and egalitarian ideals and practices. Various configurations of the balance of power in Irish society between "national" (core-peripheral) and "social" (capital-labor/"other") forces crystallised in constitutional form. Thus far, conservative and nationalist constitutional projects have tended to either dominate or incorporate social democratic and radical ones, albeit a process continually contested at critical junctures by civil society and by the organized left, both old and new. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A subject index for the 2015 issue of the journal "International African Bibliography" is presented.

The normalization of post-war relations in the late 1980s has transformed the Vietnam-China border from a line of demarcation between two hostile neighbours into a zone of profitable economic opportunities. At the Lao Cai central market, Vietnamese small-scale traders and Chinese citizens interact with one another on a daily basis. Their narratives reveal that processes of constructing self-identity and otherness at the Vietnam-China border are ambiguous and multivocal. They attest to historically rooted stereotypes linked to China's claim of civilizational and economic superiority as much as they are conditioned by face-to-face commercial transactions that challenge essentialized assumptions about the cross-border Other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism of the book "The Social Life of Money" by Nigel Dodd is presented.

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.)

What kinds of states are financed by illicit monies? Does the source of state revenue matter for state formation? This article examines these questions in the context of democratizing Indonesia by analyzing licit and illicit sources of Indonesian police financing and the ways in which illicit practices of extraction and accumulation reshape the structure of the state. Budgetary revenues are both deficient and poorly organized by the Indonesian police (POLRI), continuing practices of fiscal maladministration and rent seeking that defined Suharto's New Order. This article demonstrates how this legacy continues within today's police by illustrating how on- and off-budget financing both resources police work and feeds centralized patron-clientalism through an ethics of “dirty-money” that ultimately sees rents flow upwards to police leadership. However, as Indonesia's neoliberal style democratization fragments centralized patronage into a shifting and unstable patron-clientalism, established patterns of rent accumulation and circulation and the moral-legal regimes that support them break down. In an uncertain environment, officers of all ranks canvass the political system, forming increasingly diverse networks that they hope will secure rents and their political future. Reworking Jean François Bayart's original use of the term, this, the author argues, is “the rhizome state.” [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the workings of kinship and marriage idioms in transnational political imaginary in the central Mediterranean to challenge current academic reliance on the notion of fraternity as the symbolic building block of both national and global political relations. Since the 1960s, the Sicilian town of Mazara del Vallo and its fishing fleet have become entwined in intensifying interactions with Tunisia and the wider Maghreb. These interactions—specifically the Tunisian-Italian “Fish War” and construction of a trans-Mediterranean natural gas pipeline between North Africa and Europe—rejuvenated the old geopolitical imagination of the Mediterranean and helped produce the central Mediterranean as a spatio-temporal field of political action. Italians and Tunisians perceived each other as related, and staged the trans-Mediterranean infrastructural project as a sort of European-African (cross-cousin) marriage. I begin by examining the tensions between two central kinship idioms—fraternity and cousinage—in current understandings of transnational relations. I then discuss the growing prevalence of a transnational political cosmology of affinity across difference over that of shared descent and sameness that characterize national alignments. I conclude by examining how Tunisians and Sicilians in Mazara today cast each other in roles deriving from segmentary schemes they share, but on the content of which they disagree. By applying concepts associated with kinship and marriage studies to recent Mediterranean history, I show how segmentation, a concept anthropologists abandoned when they crossed the Mediterranean on their way into Europe, can help us understand transnational politics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Paraguayan microcredit poverty-alleviation programs are built around instrumentalizing women's economic ties through group-based loans guaranteed by no more than the promise of women's solidarity and joint liability for their collective loan repayment. I track the production and regulation of the social unit of borrowing in different aspects of microcredit, drawing on examples of individual loans, loans to "committees of women entrepreneurs," credit scores, and a short-lived program of "men's committees." I illustrate how the institutionalized management of creditworthiness actually produces the very flexible and relational feminized borrowers to which microcredit initiatives seek to appeal and, in so doing, creates certain kinds of gendered sociality by enacting and embodying different social units of debt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In South Africa, with upward mobility much aspired to but seldom attained, householders must spend money they have not yet earned. Borrowing both from formal institutions and smaller moneylenders (legal and illegal) positions them uneasily: in order to fulfill social requirements in one register, they acquire intensified obligations in another. Moneylending and money borrowing, owing much to the legacies of "credit apartheid," involve an uneven mix. Embeddedness and community connection enable flexibility, juggling, and temporary escape from repayment obligations on the one hand, but systems of repayment and ever-newer technologies enable creditors to pursue debtors with inexorable swiftness on the other. Given that credit postapartheid has an increasingly formal, uniform, and financialized character, the second of these which makes debtors get "deeper into a hole" is becoming a predominant way of experiencing and representing the situation. The phrase, with its suggestion of entrapment, captures an important aspect of the deeply ambivalent feelings that borrowers experience in the face of debt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on long-term field engagement with microcredit programs in rural northern Tamil Nadu (South India), in this article I examine how this specific form of debt is used, experienced, signified, and interrelated to other forms of debt. I attempt to define debt from an economic and anthropological perspective and to highlight the diversity of values surrounding debt. Debt has a material value and actively contributes to producing social worth, setting debtors and creditors within local systems of social hierarchy, producing or eroding trust, and inserting people into local networks of wealth distribution, extending dependency and patronage ties. Far from being static, the social significance and regulation of debt are continually discussed and negotiated through practices of juggling sources of indebtedness. Yet owing to its multiple forms, debt is not only a powerful force for the reproduction of power relations but also a potential vehicle for the reconfiguration of forms of dependence. Analyzing practices and processes is essential for understanding the reasons for this ambivalence and how it plays out in specific historical contexts for situated subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Microcredit's potential for poverty reduction is a highly contested issue. In Cambodia, the dramatically increasing commercial microcredit coexists with widespread private moneylending. These two practices are rooted in different economic world views: neoliberalism on the one hand, and the traditional Khmer economic sociality permeated by patronage on the other. The ethnography shows that far from competing with each other, microcredit and private lending have adapted to form a symbiotic relationship, and much private lending is financed through microcredit. While microcredit is often beneficial to people living well above the poverty line, the widespread access to credit, through microloans as well as private lending, is threatening the livelihoods of the economically most vulnerable and precipitating their social, economic and spatial exclusion from their local communities. In contrast to the social and economic exclusion caused by land grabbing and forced evictions, which has received a fair amount of public attention, exclusion as a consequence of indebtedness has, for sociocultural reasons, remained much less visible. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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.)

If given the opportunity to reduce your debt, albeit at some financial risk, would you take it? Interviews and observations in two debt settlement firms show that debt settlement clients tend not to calculate financial risks in deciding which debts to try to settle. Rather, they treat their relationship with their creditor as a reciprocal and ongoing one. If the service provided by their creditor was inadequate, clients feel justified in trying to settle their debt. Otherwise, they believe that they must pay back the debt in full. In line with recent work in economic sociology, we show that economic transactors are bound by the moral requirements of the relationship they are in. But debt settlement clients invent those relationships in at least two ways: turning a debt to an impersonal agency into a relationship with a person, and turning a relationship of inequality into one of equality. Clients may preserve some sense of autonomy in a disempowering relationship by conceptualizing their relationship with their creditor as one between equals. But there is a cost: As a result of the relational schemas on which they operate, they often refuse to try to settle debts that might be settled without lasting financial repercussions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article acknowledges the manuscript reviewers who have peer reviewed articles submitted to the scholarly periodical "American Anthropologist."

According to recent criticisms, the critical anthropology of religious life in Africa, associated especially with the Comaroffs, has failed to take relations with invisible beings at face value. In this view, we should explore the social work that such relations do, rather than interrogating their ties to the economic and political forms of African modernity. Drawing on ethnography from my research on relations with ancestral spirits in rural KwaZulu-Natal, I argue that this criticism is misplaced. Relations with ancestral spirits are channels for the circulation of value, and here I show how that circulation depends upon the circulation of money for its pragmatic constitution. No amount of taking things at face value can account for this dependency of personal ties on impersonal ones that are organized by structures of political economy. Only an anthropology that is critical is up to the task of comprehending social ties, including ties with spirits, in an epoch such as ours. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Microfirance loan officers play a critical, if underexamined, role in incorporating the poor into financial networks at the global peripheries. As "proxy-creditors," loan officers in Kolkata, India, must produce and alienate debt relationships to create loan products. I argue that the process of financialization is articulated through local idioms of moneylending, care, and respect. Moreover, at the heart of this labor is the unresolved tension between capitalist expansion and ethical concerns for the everyday relationships that are used to extend credit to the Fnancially excluded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

El artículo se centra en diversos aspectos relacionados con el confort y el malestar del cuerpo humano. Los temas tratados incluyen elementos corporales humanos individuales vinculados con el embarazo, el parto, los genitales y la excreción; los órganos genitales que siempre son visto como emocionantes, pero nunca se consideran hermosos; y el concepto de realismo grotesco, que se basa en la idea de que un cuerpo que muere nace al mismo tiempo.

The article explores the anthropology of gender and finance. Ethography is considered as the most significant contribution of anthropology to the study of gender and finance, which was able to reveal the role played by gender in finance and their relationship to the production of gendered spaces on Wall Street. The author believes anthropology is well suited to explore the gendered life of finance, including the impact of the financialization on a wide range of recipients of various genders.

In the United States foreclosure crisis since 2007, millions of homeowners have strived but failed to hold onto homeownership. This crisis threatens to unsettle the myth of the American dream and deep-seated cultural beliefs about the self as a moral, political, and financial subject. On the whole, mainstream narratives blame homeowners for their predicaments or at least hold them responsible for the consequences of the housing bust. This article examines how homeowners, housing professionals, and activists in Michigan confront narratives of blame and flawed foreclosure prevention programs. Michigan has been pivotal in the formation of beliefs about the American dream, evidenced in the blue-collar middle class, as well as being emblematic of deindustrialization and the foreclosure crisis. Confronting a multi-layered crisis, homeowners, housing professionals, and activists in Michigan produce narratives of suicide, walking away, or strategically defaulting on the mortgage. These narratives present moral critiques of lenders, enact and challenge tropes of blame, and imagine ways to recapture (albeit constrained) agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A bibliography on the subject of history is presented which includes the books "Memory, Trauma, and History: Essays on Living with the Past," by Michael S. Roth, "The Second World War," by A.W. Purdue, and "Lone Star Law: A Legal History of Texas," by Michael Ariens.

Copyright of Antípoda is the property of Universidad de los Andes 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 Through global circuits of wage labor and capital, the Murid way has become an economic force in the Senegalese postcolony amid conditions of protracted global volatility. In this article, I analyze women's actions within these global circuits. Women create value by giving gifts during the celebration of births and marriages, gifts that are the product of and the motivating force behind Murid global trade. Female ritual activities, on which male honor rests, draw women into conflict with the Murid clergy, which views women's actions as customary and not part of its modern, austere, and global vision of Islam in Senegal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The table of contents for the March 2006 issue of "Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology" is presented.

People including Madelaine Adelman, Arun Agrawal, and Sarah Barber whom the author would like to thank for their assistance in the creation of the journal "American Anthropologist" are mentioned

A response by Stephen Gudeman to a letter to the editor about his article on hoarding is presented.

Clutter fragments the temporality of the home and storage space offers a technology of containment with which to keep these portals to the past and future open, but not openly visible. Storage space is not a spatial but a temporal solution, secreting objects that do not belong to this time until such time as they might be more appropriate. Possessors of such objects speak of being transported to specific moments of their past, or in Benjaminian fashion, of historical objects that provide a sensorial window into worlds otherwise unlived. Other future-oriented things provide access to dormant or merely imagined selves projected into Borgesian forking futures, alternate paths that owners refuse to relinquish even when their possibility is lost. Clutter, by definition out of place, is thus also extra-temporal, and untold acreage is occupied in wait for a near future when 'there will be more time' to sort the debris. Storage, thus, offers a haven for 'anti-kairos'--things of an inappropriate time. Indeed, the accumulation of clutter is itself an image of time, a means of understanding Bergson's duree as an unfolding expansion of heterogenous unity that envelops us. Finally, the paper considers the relationship between these spatiotemporal trajectories of objects and the expanded spacetime of households as a kind of social value in itself, but one that must be kept balanced with the more kula-like value of circulation. [Keywords: storage, clutter, temporalities, materiality, domestic, North America, Bergson, Benjamin, spacetime], Despite clutter's in-your-face materiality, it is closer to a process than a thing, less a noun than a verb with no subject, only objects. It is not I who clutters, [...]

While much has been written in popular media about the apparent antisociality of hoarders, many people with parents who exhibit hoarding tendencies describe intense (though not always positive or desirable) forms of kin relationality that grow in and around domestic hoards. Based on fieldwork with hoarding intervention specialists, interviews with people who identify as 'Adult Children of Hoarders' (ACoHs), and a review of recent memoirs on the topic, this article examines how domestic hoards enable and restrict the interactions, habits, and movements of those who live within them, and in turn, how kin relations get made and troubled in relation to the hoard. I consider the hoard as kinship substance in its own right, and in doing so, reflect upon both the variable meanings of--and the analytic work performed by--the term 'substance' in kinship studies over the past four decades. In showing how familial relationships come to be shaped and mediated by the hoard (hoard-as-substance), and even beyond this, how the hoard may itself come to be imagined as kin (hoard-as-kin), this article offers a counterpoint to studies that overemphasize the positive aspects and affects of kinship and relatedness. [Keywords: hoarding, kinship, relations, sociality, materiality, substance, prohibition] [Palavras-chave: subterraneo, metro, vida publica, leitura, digitalizacao, novas classes medias] [phrase omitted], Levi-Strauss ends The Elementary Structures of Kinship by invoking a hoarding fantasy of epic proportions: '[M]ankind' he writes, 'has always dreamed of seizing ... that fleeting moment when it was [...]