Economics, economic anthropology, and debt

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Acknowledgements

I would like to extend a special thanks to Taylor Nelms for his valuable assistance in crafting this essay. Any remaining shortcomings are my own.

Notes on contributor

Drucilla K. Barker (Ph.D., University of Illinois, 1988) is Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Women’s & Gender Studies Program. She is a radical, feminist economist whose research interests are globalization, feminist political economy, and economic anthropology. Her work is interdisciplinary and from ranges from examinations of the roles of gender, race, and class in social valuations of labor, especially affective labor, to accounts of the financial crises that characterize late global capitalism. She is a founding member of the International Association for Feminist Economics.

Notes

1. Joseph’s critique of ‘community’ emerges from (and is more fleshed out in) her previous book Against the Romance of Community.

2. See Mauss ([1950] 2000) and Polyani ([1944] 2001) for foundational accounts of this reading of the economy of debt.

3. *A World Ruled by Number* is the title of Margaret Shabas’ (1990) book about William Stanley Jevons and the rise of mathematical economics.

4. There were, of course, other rationalizations used, most famously perhaps the notion that the colonists had a civilizing mission. It was their duty to lead the dark, indigenous heathens into the light of Christianity.

5. Although Joseph is careful to point out that ‘some caution is warranted before we pile on demands for accountability that ultimately affirm the juridical regime of accounting “debts to society” that has been so central the reproduction of racial hierarchy in the United States’ (xiv).

6. Men’s excess may be manifested in terms of money and finance, but also in terms of appetites for adventure and sensation.