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

Reminder/Rappel


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.