Recent scholarship in economic anthropology examines how the intersection of multiple forms of temporality shapes the time of debt relations. This article builds on and refines these approaches by analysing debt as a social relation that ‘folds’ the time of other relations within itself. It does so through deploying the concept of the ‘fold’ drawn from continental philosophy and anthropological literature on personhood. This approach provides a novel way of illuminating and reflecting upon a temporal tension at the heart of debt relations, in which the timely performance of debtor-creditor relations is contingent on the harnessing of temporalities formally outside their scope. This argument is made in relation to an ethnographic study of malchny zeel (the ‘herder's loan’) issued by commercial banks in a pastoral region of Mongolia.

中文翻译：

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债务时代：蒙古农村的异时和银行贷款

最近的经济人类学研究考察了多种时间形式的交集如何塑造债务关系的时间。本文通过将债务分析为一种将其他关系的时间“折叠”在其自身内的社会关系，以此建立并完善这些方法。它通过部署从大陆哲学和人类学文献中关于人格的“折叠”概念来实现。这种方法提供了一种阐明和反思债务关系核心的时间紧张的新方法，在这种紧张关系中，债务人-债权人关系的及时表现取决于对其范围之外的时间的正式利用。这个论点与对马尔奇尼·泽尔的民族志研究有关 （“牧民贷款”）由蒙古牧区的商业银行发行。