Whether concerned with kinship or with kula, anthropology's interest in credit and debt goes back to the very beginnings of the discipline. Nevertheless, this review dedicates itself primarily to more recent research trends into credit and debt's powerful nature and effects. Following Mauss, credit and debt are treated as an indissoluble dyad that contributes to diverse regulatory mechanisms of sociality, time, space, and the body. Anthropology's overarching contribution to this field of inquiry rotates around its refusal to segregate the moral from the material, seeing the ubiquitous moral debates surrounding credit and debt in various ethnographic settings as coconstitutive of their material effects.

This article seeks to come to terms with the extraordinarily swift demise of the debtors' prison in multiple countries during the nineteenth century. While focusing primarily on the reform debate in England, I argue that the debtors' prison quickly came to be seen as a barbaric aberration within the expanding commercial life of the nineteenth century. By turning to a copious pamphletic literature from the era of its demise, I show how pamphleteers and eye-witnesses described the debtors' prison in the idiom of ritual; it was seen as a dangerous sanctuary that radically inverted all capitalistic economic practices and moral values of the world outside its walls. Reformers claimed that, inside these shrines of debt, citizens were ritually guided and transformed from active members of society into “knaves” or “idlers,” or both. As such, the debtors' prison needed to be eradicated. To do so, reformers mobilized at least three critical discourses, all of which sought to mark the debtors' prison as a zone of barbarism that threatened the civility of the state and its citizenry. By focusing on the debtors' prison as a powerful and transformative ritual zone, the article provides a counterintuitive history of this institution that was so crucial to the regulation of credit and debt relations for centuries. In so doing, the article contributes to a broader literature on the spatiality of debt.

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. Republic of debtors: bankruptcy in the age of American Independence. 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 today's leg‐bailers. Having successfully instituted national whitewashing rituals across the western world, why does the global 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?

If a thriving capitalist economy relies on the innumerable small deposits of savings that local people place in banks, then ‘unbanking’ represents a threat to just such an economy. And yet, across the globe, billions remain outside the formal banking sector, thereby reducing the ability of formal banks to set these savings in motion. This unbanking has been the subject of many reports and studies by economists, corporations and non-profit organizations, but unbanking never seems to diminish. Indeed, by all accounts, it continues to thrive. In order to offer an alternative explanation for this phenomenon, the author revives an important, age-old distinction between hoarding and saving, while also providing an anthropological survey of alternative modes of saving in Africa. In so doing, the author argues that the critics of unbanking may be ignoring the ways in which banking and unbanking are tied up with subject formation.

No abstract