신용과 부채의 인류학_귀스타프 피블스

 

 

 

Introduction

Mauss asserts that credit and debt greatly contribute to the building of hierarchy and dominance, but they are also the keys to building group solidarity. 

Simmel(1907) made the same point, a contrario, by speaking with such enthusiasm of a future society constituted more by a supposedly freer direct exchange, which would thereby be less colored by the inherently binding domination that he saw in credit and debt relations. 

 

In some instances, perhaps creditors are socially powerful usurers and debtors are their weak targets, but on other occasions, debtors can be enormously powerful too, as the American Insurance Group revealed to the global public in late 2008. 

Dunn(2004) have even shown us that the same economic resource can be seen as a credit by the owner, but as a debt by a new owner to whom it is transferred. 

 

 

Seen in this straightforward light, credit is a method of lending concrete resources to an institution or an individual in the present and demanding (or hoping for) a return in the future. 

In this sense, credit/debt can be seen as a method devised for a debtor to borrow speculative resources from his/her own future and transform them into the concrete resources to be used in the present (Anderlini&Sabourian 1992). 

The creditor is denying him-/herself the use of concrete resources today in exchange for speculative gains in the future. 

 

In this sense, credit/debt can be seen as a method devised for a debtor to borrow speculative resources from his/her own future and transform them into concrete resources to be used in the present. 

The creditor is denying him-/herself the use of concrete resources today in exchange for speculative gains in the future. 

 

In so doing, contracting parties conjoin their respective futures and pasts, materializing their temporal bond, as it were.

This (...) has consequences, as shown below, for the regulation and constitution of space and bodies as well. 

 

Munn clearly treats credit/debt as a Hegelian dialectical relation that creates a regulatory dynamic of "intersubjective spacetime". 

In deeply pursuing the quesiton of how debt might, on occasion, function as a form of abundance instead of lack, (...)

Roitman carefully notes the distinction between "sanctioned" and "unsanctioned" wealth and how these interrelate with one another to "legitimate a system of exclusion and inclusion" (Roitman 2005, 84). 

 

It is  vital to attend to the manner in which debts are pushed on debtors by excited creditors. Debters are not necessarily needy; rather new needs are created to promote the need for new debts(Strathern1992). 

Murphy&Steward (1956) asserted that the colonial trading post might well have a universal capacity to pull people out of traditional life by allowing "the Indian to buy beyond the means". 

 

Credit/Debt as a dyadic unit helps to determine who stands inside and outside of community borders or who stands above or below. Credit/debt's role in the actual movement of economic resources helps accomplish this, but so too do the constant negotiation and positioning over the morality/immorality/amorality of the dyad itself. 

Its immensely powerful capacity to construct and destroy community borders or build social hierarchy. 

 the "strategic stance" that we can watch unfold as people position themselves within the economic and moral specturm of credit/debt relations. 

 

 

 

Social Boundaries

 

Temporal Boundaries

 

Spacial Regulation

 

Of Bodies Individual and National

 

the correlation between debt and bodily punishment

the flow of migrants

the debt-slavery into which they enter in their continual efforts to emigrate, not altogether unlike America's old system of indentured servitude. 

credit can move through spacetime and bodies in debt

the role of visible versus invisible bodily powers and adornment

bodies become expressly labeled as either good or bad risks for the banking industry

the bodies of women were traded by men in vast systems of credit/debt that built entire societies. 

the flow of living bodies as part of a system that builds enduring relations of credit/debt remains important in the study of kinship

When body parts are given as gifts, the exchange is seen as moral, but such trades are broadly lambasted when seen as part of a direct exchange

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Greatly influenced by the pioneering efforts of Strathern, and more recently Latour, anthropologists have shown that the boundary between bodies and objects is much more fluid than the western rationalist tradition of property rights has assumed.

 

investigate the capacity of credit/debt to integrate individuals with the corporate body that is the nation-state

 

we learn not only that citizens and subjects rely on an idiom of credit/debt to become deeply attached to their nation-state, but also that states and citizens are socially constructed, in part, out of the reciprocal flow of material resources between national and individual bodies. 

 

well-being of the individual body and the national body is reified and reinforced in daily practice. 

 

 

 

 

- The Anthropology of Credit and Debt, Gustav Peebles, Annual Review of Anthropology, 2010, 39. 225-240.