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.
WISER Seminar Papers
- WISER's TRUST seminar is hosted on-line every Monday afternoon from 16:00 - 17:00 SA time during the teaching semester. Forthcoming seminars are available here, and past events are detailed in our archive.
- Please register on Zoom in advance of the meeting on this link.
- Participants should please read the paper (below) prior to the seminar; it will typically be available by the Friday preceding the seminar.
In this semester, the Trust seminar will explore questions of credit and debt on the African continent. In contrast with the argument that trust and confidence are synonymous (most evident in the Edelman Trust Barometer and the reporting around it), some of the most convincing scholarship argues for the direct association of trust with credit. Other researchers, studying informal African institutions, have found credit everywhere on this continent, but little that can be associated with trust. Some state institutions (like SACCOs in Kenya) and simpler penalties, like efficient bankruptcy laws, seem also to be instrumental in shaping the politics of credit. One key driver of credit systems is a secondary market, which depends in part on institutions and information that derive from (and support) fiduciaries. These are especially important in the contemporary tensions between firm-based and individualised credit systems. The seminar series this semester will explore some of these dynamics, examining how they have shaped the cultures and politics of debt and credit from the precolonial to the contemporary period.