Re-reading the potlatch in a time of crisis: debt and the distinctions that matter¹

Introduction—Uncertain Visions: Crisis, Ambiguity, and Visual Culture in Greece

“…Works also link the crisis to recession and to conditions disenfranchising groups already on the margins (Alexandrakis ), changing one's attachment to history and place (Knight ; Vournelis ), engendering anxiety regarding one's position in Europe or creating bitterness about a “present becoming damaged future” (Herzfeld ; Kalantzis , ), and securitizing daily life (Dalakoglou ). These observations, in some ways, corroborate other anthropological accounts of the dominance of debt as a category in global socioeconomic affairs (e.g., High :363). Some authors, taking a more interpretative approach, see Western economic ontologies as antithetical to Greek sensibilities about the debt as ongoing negotiation where the roles of creditor and debtor constantly interchange (Herzfeld :24) or even as clashing with indigenous notions of time and personal identity (Hirschon ).…”

Market Collaboration: Finance, Culture, and Ethnography after Neoliberalism

“…As the popular success of David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years ( ) suggests, the debt paradigm is now pervasive throughout the financial world. The rethinking of economies as founded on relations of debt rather than capital (and, in some cases, also on reciprocity, altruism, affect, and the like), as well as the return to earlier generations of foundational anthropological theories of debt economies for new inspiration, is now attracting considerable attention among anthropologists and social theorists as well (Dodd ; High ; Riles ; Roitman ; Sawyer and Gomez ).…”

Exchanges Create Relations

“…When we receive something, we have to reciprocate in some way; it is how we do this that defines our standing in society. The distinction between different types of moral reasonings when you are in debt, in debt economies (High and Hall 2012), matters to many people. Being in debt makes us focus on the time aspect between what is given and received, although in Holly High's argument it becomes more: debt becomes another type of a total social phenomenon about which we can have diverse moral reasoning.…”