FYI, they just finished a huge symposium on DG over at Crooked Timber.
On Fri, Mar 2, 2012 at 6:00 PM, raghu <[email protected]> wrote: > 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 >
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