Speaking of the financial crisis and the relationship between anthropology and economics, I thought Margaret Atwood’s editorial in today’s Times did a good job of getting us to think about debt outside the confines of the banking system. Here she talks about the role of debt in Christianity:

In many religions, for instance. The version of the Lord’s Prayer I memorized as a child included the line, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” In Aramaic, the language that Jesus himself spoke, the word for “debt” and the word for “sin” are the same. And although many people assume that “debts” in these contexts refer to spiritual debts or trespasses, debts are also considered sins. If you don’t pay back what’s owed, you cause harm to others.

One anthropologist/historian who has looked at the importance of the language of debt in religion is Vicente Rafael. His excellent book Contracting Colonialism looks at how Tagalog concepts of debt altered the meaning of Catholic religious traditions as they were translated into the local context.

Among the Spaniards, the contraction of obligations between two parties was always articulated with reference to a third term that stood outside the exchange yet determined its contours. Whther figured as God, the king, the state, or the law, this third term served as the central figure in all negotiations, acting as the origin, interpreter, and enforcer of the terms governing exchange …. By contract, the tripartite structure of the contract gives way to a different configuration in utang na loob ties. The contracting of debts …. is premised not on the sanction of a transcendent third term but precisely on its elision. … The effect of this elision is to render the hierarchy found in utang na loob ties explicitly arbitrary. … Token payments of debts are made not to memorialize authority (and thereby to consolodate hierarchy) but rather, as in the case of offerings profferd to the nono, simply to loosen the pressures from above (and so to deflect the full force of hierarchy). (p. 130-131)

Note: It seems Atwood started working on her well-timed new book over three years ago.