2016 CASCA/SANA cfp: Debt and the Double Edge of Solidarity

Debt and the Double Edge of Solidarity

Anthropologists have long been interested in the paradoxical roles that
financial and other forms of debt play in social life: its potential to bind
and to divide, to intensify social inequalities and to blur them; its role in
both expressing and destabilizing care and kinship; its ability to render
people solid citizens and deadbeats. Since the global financial crisis, as
Holly High observes, debt is approaching a Maussian "total" social phenomenon,
one in which "everything intermingles." This panel explores the paradoxes of
the credit/debt dyad (Gustav Peebles's term), with particular attention to its
work at/as a "double edge" of solidarity. Possible topics include but are not
limited to: the role of various types of debt in forming and fracturing
solidarities across and within social and geopolitical boundaries; the role of
elite solidarities in establishing debt as a mechanism for governmentality and
subjectivation; and anthropology's potential to illuminate debt's part in
making and unmaking shared identities, interests and struggles within and
across political movements, groups, classes, institutions and households.

Session Organizers: Robin Whitaker & David Cooney (Department of Anthropology,
Memorial University of Newfoundland)

Please email inquiries and/or 150 word abstracts to robinw@mun.ca and
dscooney@mun.ca by January 20th.