Household, Future-making and Debt

How does a household come to exist? What tools do its members use to draw some together and expel others? How do households articulate with the spheres of economy and politics and their forms of power and control? Many answers rest in the nexus of mutual relations and financial debt, where social obligations and the formalized economy intersect. Although, from one perspective, lending and borrowing enable the pursuit of goods in an impersonal marketplace, anthropologists show how financial debt offers materials to extend and, even, remake relations, both among householders and with other institutions. This dynamic locates debt's power not primarily in attaining goods, but in the ties lending and borrowing establish including those among kin and the self, and the fastening of domestic worlds to projects of class and national belonging. Financial debts bind together things and people that make up households, as well as change relationships among them.