Debt and Rural Subjectivities

Description

‘Debt and Credit in Rural Communities’ Reading Group – Session Three: Debt and Rural Subjectivities

Financialisation, as a recent, but pressing topic in political economy, has been interrogated as a defining element of the current capitalist form of accumulation after the 1970s (Christopher, 2015). However, approaches to financialisation as a theoretical concept useful for the understanding of capitalist regimes of accumulation has lacked interest in incorporating the experience of peasant communities within finance and account for the process of agrarian change unleashed by it. How are processes of agrarian change affected by financialisation? What does it tell us about current value regimes and forms of accumulation? Does it help us re-examine our current understanding of the operations and histories of capitalism?

This online reading group pays attention to processes of agrarian change unleashed by debt and credit. It looks at the experiences of rural communities, peasants, and workers while also examining the structural transformations produced by finance.

This week, the group are meeting to discuss the following texts:

Aguilar, Filomeno (1998). ‘Elusive Peasant, Weak State: Sharecropping and the Changing Meaning of Debt‘. In Clash of Spirits: The History of Power and Sugar Planter Hegemony on a Visayan Island (pp. 63-94). Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

Arango, Lorenza (2020) ‘If you don’t owe, you don’t own: debt, discipline and growth in rural Colombia‘, Journal of Rural Studies, 78 (2020) 271–281.

Shah, Esha (2012) ‘A life wasted making dust’: affective histories of dearth, death, debt and farmers’ suicides in India‘, Journal of Peasant Studies, 39:5, 1159-1179.

This reading group is convened by Joseph Martínez-Salinas. If you have any queries about the events or reading, please don’t hesitate to email.

 

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gloknos is initially funded for 5 years by the European Research Council through a Consolidator Grant awarded to Dr Inanna Hamati-Ataya for her project ARTEFACT (2017-2022). ARTEFACT is funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Framework Programme for Research and Innovation (ERC grant agreement no. 724451). For information about gloknos or ARTEFACT please contact the administrator in the first instance.