A very nice review of Graeder's book overall and well worth a read, but I am intrigued by the question it raises about whether Graeber may have been less than diligent in some of his fact-checking.
http://codeandculture.wordpress.com/2011/12/29/how-the-poor-debtors/ ---------------------------------------------snip Other interesting points he makes on debt are various ways that it becomes a moral obligation such that debtors are seen as sinners and religious salvation is seen as a spiritual analog to redemption. This helps explain something I never completely understood when watching The Sopranos, which is why gangsters first go to the trouble of getting someone to incur an illegal debt before shaking them down? It turns out that the point of loan-sharking instead of mere naked extortion is the victim feels a certain moral obligation to repay the debt and so loan sharks exploiting gambling addicts has the same logic as how many grifts (e.g., 419 advanced-fee fraud, the fiddle game, etc.) first involve the victim as co-conspirator in a crime against a real or imagined third party. Moreover, Graeber makes the bold point towards the end of the book that debt can drive people to do things that they otherwise would be morally averse to, with his example being the conquistadores. This is all fascinating but it depends a lot on how much you trust Graeber’s empirical claims. For instance, was it really true that everyday economic life in early modern Britain was largely cashless and instead used a combination of token currencies, informal credit, and asynchronous barter? Maybe, I really don’t know. I’d like to trust Graeber on this but I don’t know if I can since he gets some things pretty wrong, or at least dubious. At Unfogged there’s a review (and a very funny comments thread) pointing out that the following sentence contains six factual claims all of which are incorrect: Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other’s garages. This is not exactly stuff written in the cuneiform of Mesopotamian diplomacy, the barbarian law codes of mediaeval Ireland, or the field notes of Victorian anthropologists, but something that occurred in suburban California around the time I was born and concerns the extremely well documented origins of one of the world’s biggest firms. If Graeber gets this wrong, how can we trust him about the stuff that’s harder to check, like all that business about barbarian law codes. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
