ABSTRACT

We introduce the concept of 'debt trails', a methodological and conceptual term to study debt relations across different sites and over time. Recent theories in the interdisciplinary Social Studies of Finance, political economy and economic and human geography have theorised debt in relational terms, although with a distinct and often disconnected theoretical and empirical focus. We propose debt trails to transcend and bridge these areas. Methodologically, debt trails trace the concrete ways in which debt relations are created. Conceptually, debt trails suggest, first, that instead of connecting existing entities, sites and actors themselves are co-constituted through debt relations. Second, debt trails reveal debt as a temporal construct, not as a Maussian obligation, but as a market and policy object designed, marketed, managed and lived with over time. Third, debt trails follow the spatial passage of debt, geographically but also across multiple analytical sites, often market interfaces, through which debt and the entities it relates become concrete. Finally, we discuss the importance of reflexivity and the power aspects of these trails. We then showcase examples where the creation and iterations of debt concretized distinct entities, which cut across conventional categories of borrowers, organizations and states.

摘要

我们介绍了“债务踪迹”的概念，这是一种方法和概念上的术语，用于研究不同地点和时间上的债务关系。金融学，政治经济学以及经济和人文地理学的跨学科社会研究中的最新理论，尽管关系到理论和经验上的关注点，而且往往是脱节的，但它们还是从关系角度对债务进行了理论化。我们建议通过债务追踪来超越和桥接这些领域。从方法上讲，债务踪迹追溯了建立债务关系的具体方式。从概念上讲，债务追踪首先表明，站点和参与者本身不是通过债务关系共同构成的，而不是连接现有实体的。其次，债务踪迹揭示了债务是一种时间结构，而不是作为马斯的义务，而是作为设计，市场化，随着时间的推移进行管理和生活。第三，债务踪迹不仅在地理上而且在跨多个分析地点（通常是市场接口）的范围内，沿着债务的空间传递，通过该途径，债务及其相关实体变得具体。最后，我们讨论了反射性的重要性以及这些线索的力量方面。然后，我们展示一些示例，在这些示例中，债务的创建和迭代使不同的实体具体化，这些实体跨越了借款人，组织和州的常规类别。