Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7fkt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T22:28:07.577Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Debts that Bind Us: A Comparison of Amazonian Debt-Peonage and U.S. Mortgage Practices

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 March 2011

Evan Killick
Evan Killick*
Affiliation:
Anthropology, University of Sussex
*
[email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Three years after the global financial crisis started academic and popular publications assessing its origins, consequences and wider implications are starting to emerge. The origins of the crisis are generally explained as stemming from the rapid increase in subprime mortgage lending in the United States and the credit default swaps banks and other financial institutions traded amongst themselves based on these loans. As homeowners found it increasingly difficult to make their repayments and housing prices in the United States started to drop, a downward spiral ensued. In this cycle ever-growing numbers of homeowners defaulted on their mortgages, unable to meet interest payments or to re-mortgage, and banks foreclosed on the houses even as their own assets and investments were exposed to the losses stemming from defaulted mortgages. With the foreclosures devaluing house prices further and the exposure of banks making them less willing and able to refinance mortgages, the situation quickly spiraled downwards. The complex global trade in credit default swaps and other derivatives meant that the problems were amplified and spread beyond the United States until ultimately many national governments decided to intervene with financial assistance mainly aimed at the financial institutions.

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 53 , Issue 2 , April 2011 , pp. 344 - 370
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Andrews, Edmund L. 2009. Busted: Life Inside the Great Mortgage Meltdown. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.Google Scholar
Atwood, Margaret. 2008. Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Barham, Bradford L. and Coomes, Oliver T.. 1994. Wild Rubber: Industrial Organization and Microeconomics of Extraction during the Amazon Rubber Boom (1860–1920). Journal of Latin American Studies 26, 1: 37–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bauer, Arnold J. 1979. Rural Workers in Spanish America: Problems of Peonage and Oppression. Hispanic American Historical Review 59, 1: 34–63.Google Scholar
Bernanke, Ben S. 2007. Speech at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago's 43rd Annual Conference on Bank Structure and Competition, Chicago, 17 May. At: http://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/bernanke20070517a.htm.Google Scholar
Biedma, Manuel. 1989 [1682]. La Conquista Franciscana del Alto Ucayali. Antonio, Tibesar, ed. Lima: Editorial Milla Batres.Google Scholar
Bitner, Richard. 2008. Confessions of a Subprime Lender: An Insider's Tale of Greed, Fraud, and Ignorance. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons.Google Scholar
Bodley, John H. 1971. Campa Socio-Economic Adaptation. PhD diss., University of Oregon. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms.Google Scholar
Chevalier, Jacques M. 1982. Civilization and the Stolen Gift: Capital, Kin, and Cult in Eastern Peru. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.Google Scholar
Dean, Bartholomew. 1994. Multiple Regimes of Value: Unequal Exchange and the Circulation of Urarina Palm-Fiber Wealth. Museum Anthropology 18, 1: 3–20.Google Scholar
De Neve, Geert. 1999. Asking for and Giving Baki: Neo-Bondage, or the Interplay of Bondage and Resistance in the Tamilnadu Power-Loom Industry. Contributions to Indian Sociology 33, 1&2: 379–406.Google Scholar
Durham, Deborah. 1995. Soliciting Gifts and Negotiating Agency: The Spirit of Asking in Botswana. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 1, 1: 111–28.Google Scholar
Ferguson, Niall. 2008. The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World. New York: Penguin Press.Google Scholar
Froerer, Peggy. 2007. Religious Division and Social Conflict: The Emergence of Hindu Nationalism in Rural India. London: Berghahn Books.Google Scholar
Giddens, Anthony. 1984. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. London: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Gray, Andrew. 1998. Demarcating Development: Titling Indigenous Territories in Peru. In Hierro, Pedro García, Hvalkof, Søren, and Gray, Andrew, eds., Liberation through Land Rights in Ucayali, Peru. Copenhagen: IWGIA, 163–14.Google Scholar
Greenspan, Alan. 2008. The Age of Turbulence. London: Penguin Books.Google Scholar
Gudeman, Stephen. 2010. Creative Destruction: Efficiency, Equity or Collapse. Anthropology Today 26, 1: 3–7.Google Scholar
Hart, Keith. 2001. Money in an Unequal World. London: Texere.Google Scholar
Hart, Keith. 2007. Money Is Always Personal and Impersonal. Anthropology Today 23, 5: 12–16.Google Scholar
Jafee, Dwight M. 2008. The U.S. Subprime Mortgage Crisis: Issues Raised and Lessons. Washington, D.C.: International Bank for Reconstruction and Development.Google Scholar
Klarén, Peter. 1970. La formación de los haciendas azucareras y los orígenes del APRA. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos.Google Scholar
Lanchester, John. 2010. Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay. London: Allen Lane.Google Scholar
Levine, Donald N. 2005. The Continuing Challenge of Weber's Theory of Rational Action. In Camic, Charles, Gorski, Philip S., and Trubek, David M., eds., Max Weber's Economy and Society: A Critical Companion. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 101–26.Google Scholar
Loveman, Brian. 1979. Critique of Arnold J. Bauer's “Rural Workers in Spanish America: Problems of Peonage and Oppression.” Hispanic American Historical Review. 59, 3: 478–85.Google Scholar
Pettifor, Ann. 2006. The Coming First-World Debt Crisis. Houndmills, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Powell, Michael. 2009. Bank Accused of Pushing Mortgage Deals on Blacks. New York Times 7 June: A-16.Google Scholar
Price, Seymour J. 1958. The Origin and History of Building Societies. London: Franey & Co.Google Scholar
Santos-Granero, Fernando and Frederica Barclay Rey de Castro, . 2000. Tamed Frontiers: Economy, Society, and Civil Rights in Upper Amazonia. Boulder: Westview Press.Google Scholar
Schrauwers, Albert. 2009. ‘Union is Strength’: W. L. Mackenzie, the Children of Peace, and the Emergence of Joint Stock Democracy in Upper Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.Google Scholar
Schrauwers, Albert. 2011. “Money bound you—money shall loose you”: Micro-Credit, Social Capital, and the Meaning of Money in Upper Canada. Comparative Studies in Society and History 53, 2: 314–343.Google Scholar
Scott, C. D. 1976. Peasants, Proletarianization and the Articulation of Modes of Production: The Case of Sugar Cane Cutters in Southern Peru, 1940–1969. Journal of Peasant Studies 3, 3: 321–42.Google Scholar
Stiglitz, Joseph. 2010. Freefall: Free Markets and the Sinking of the Global Economy. London: Allen Lane.Google Scholar
Taussig, Michael. 1986. Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing. London: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Tett, Gillian. 2009. Fool's Gold: How Unrestrained Greed Corrupted a Dream, Shattered Global Markets and Unleashed a Catastrophe. London: Little, Brown.Google Scholar
Turner, Terence. 1986. Production, Exploitation and Social Consciousness in the ‘Peripheral Situation.’ Social Analysis: Journal of Cultural and Social Practice 19: 57–63.Google Scholar
Varese, Stefano. 2002 [1968]. Salt of the Mountain. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.Google Scholar
Weiss, Gerald. 2005. Campa ribereños. In Santos-Granero, Fernando and Barclay, Frederica, eds., Guía Etnográfica de la Alta Amazonía, Vol. V. Panamá and Lima: Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos. 1–74.Google Scholar