Social Anthropology

Re‐reading the potlatch in a time of crisis

Debt and the distinctions that matter1

This article contends that the anthropological analysis of ritual can shed light on our understanding of insolvency and bankruptcy practices. Societies without such legal rituals see a far higher incidence of what was known as ‘leg‐bail’ in 19th‐century Britain – that is, people disappear, becoming effectively dead to society. As Mann crisply puts it in his magisterial study of colonial American debt system, without a bankruptcy law in place, people ‘substituted distance for discharge’ by fleeing to the unknown territory of ‘Kentucke’ to start life afresh (Mann, B. 2002. . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 128–9). Alternatively, prior to their eradication, debtors who had no bankruptcy rituals (known popularly as 'whitewashing') to turn to could also opt for another form of social death in one of the western world's many debtors’ prisons. Thus, by contrasting not only the 19th century to the 21st, but also leg‐bailing to whitewashing, this article will ponder what has happened to leg‐bailers. Having successfully instituted national whitewashing rituals across the western world, why does the legal system still retain hidden and far‐removed spaces that mimic old Kentucke? Who is still permitted, and indeed, encouraged, to disappear into social death, while others are ritually cleansed and returned to the social?

by Chu, Julie

How might one consider debt in a highly emotional situation where its discharge is not possible? In the UK arena of bodily material procured for research or medicine, donations cannot be reciprocated. What are called ‘gifts’ are not only made to diffuse entities such as society or science, the procurement and treatment process often creates specific, if anonymous, recipients who are burdened with/grateful for a gift they cannot repay. Indeed to pay – and thus pay‐off – the perceived debt is usually against the law. The gift entails, and hence summons, the absence of money. This article offers a comment on gifts in a context where money forever hovers on the margins of the imagination, and where the more it is banned from sight, the more it creeps back in. In endless discussions about remuneration or compensation payments that are meant to fall short of outright purchase, people tend to focus on the characteristics of diverse organs and tissue, including gametes, and assume they know both what money is and what the gift is. The anthropologist is less certain. Totemic debates in anthropology come to the rescue in a rather odd fashion.

Peebles, in a recent review of the anthropology of debt and credit, found an ‘astonishing consistency’ in the moral valuation of credit which is everywhere given a positive evaluation relative to debt. But why is this? Does it apply to creditors as well? What are the theoretical implications of these questions for economic anthropology?

Big men and business

Morality, debt and the corporation A perspective by Keir Martin