The 2008 mortgage crash and the online publics that have emerged in its aftermath have reshaped American interpretations of indebtedness. Combining research among homeowners facing foreclosure in California's Sacramento Valley with an analysis of the national online forums they frequent, I show how participants rethink the moral scaffolding of debt relations within what I describe as online publics of indebtedness. Anonymous online publics foster experiences of disembodied autonomy that encourage debt refusal and discipline the middle‐class ethics of debt abandonment, as participants distinguish between mortgagors who deserve not to pay their debts and those they deem irresponsible for defaulting on their loans. In contrast, participation in semipublic social networks and online forms of publicity emphasizes new affective orientations toward debt obligations. My analysis contributes to an anthropological scholarship on moral economies by exploring the role of distinct forms of new media in shaping everyday experiences of indebtedness in late‐capitalist financial markets.

Following the 2007 mortgage crash, the US government established programs to assist homeowners by modifying their mortgages. But the oversight of these programs was granted to the same mortgage industry giants that provoked the crisis, and these lenders rejected over 70 percent of applicants’ requests for modifications. In the process, there emerged new mortgage‐modification bureaucracies, fusing corporate and state forms of administrative power. Yet as mortgagors demanded assistance from private lenders, they and lending company employees were drawn into reciprocal relationships that anthropologists have previously associated with “gift economies.” This convergence of government and corporate bureaucracies has inspired among homeowners and modification specialists in California's Sacramento Valley forms of reciprocity often considered antithetical to late‐capitalist finance. This surprising contemporary juxtaposition of reciprocity and indebtedness suggests a need to revise long‐standing anthropological theories about the social obligations born of debt ties within late liberal capitalist markets. [bureaucracy, corporations, debt, foreclosure, mortgaging, reciprocity, United States]

Cuban scholars and women's advocates have criticised the widespread emergence of sex tourism in post-Soviet Cuba and attributed prostitution to a crisis in socialist values. In response, feminist scholars in the United States and Europe have argued that Cuban analysts promote government agendas and demonise sex workers. Drawing on nineteen months of field research in Havana, I challenge this conclusion to demonstrate how queer Cubans condemn sex tourism while denouncing an unconditional allegiance to Cuban nationalism. By introducing gay Cuban critiques into the debate, I highlight the interventionist undertones of feminist scholarship on the Cuban sex trade.

In this article, I explore the kinship imaginaries that emerged between gay male tourists from North America and Europe and Cuban male sex workers and their families within the context of Havana’s queer-erotic economies. Whereas male sex workers throughout Latin America and the Caribbean tend to conceal their male clients from their families, Cuban sexual laborers in this study incorporated queer foreigners into kinship imaginaries. Such bonds often conferred the rights and obligations of kin, while “blood” kinship was increasingly described in and subject to financial terms. Motivated by money rather than “blood” or “choice,” kinship ties fostered between foreign gay men and younger male sex workers prompt a rethinking of non-normative kin ties as an alternative to dominant systems of kinship and suggest the political and economic roots of familial bonds more broadly.

Recent innovations in digital technologies have exponentially increased the opportunities for collaborative ethnographic filmmaking between anthropologists and our interlocutors. In this article, I focus on a relatively unexplored aspect of these emergent forms of collaboration: the unruliness of circulation in the digital age. I draw on long-standing anthropological debates about controlling the dissemination of taboo cultural motifs to consider how the rapid and promiscuous circulation of digital images and video intensifies these concerns. Reflecting on my experience of collaborative video production with Cuban sex workers and the subsequent unauthorized circulation of these politicized images outside of Cuba, I show how an inability to control distribution presents pressing concerns regarding consent for a growing cadre of anthropologists working in digital mediums.