Debt as an Urban Chronotrope in Mongolia
Publikation: Bidrag til tidsskrift › Tidsskriftartikel › Forskning › fagfællebedømt
Standard
Debt as an Urban Chronotrope in Mongolia. / Pedersen, Morten Axel.
I: Ethnos. Journal of Anthropology, Bind 82, Nr. 3, Special Issue: Urban TimesIMES , 2017, s. 475-491.Publikation: Bidrag til tidsskrift › Tidsskriftartikel › Forskning › fagfællebedømt
Harvard
APA
Vancouver
Author
Bibtex
}
RIS
TY - JOUR
T1 - Debt as an Urban Chronotrope in Mongolia
AU - Pedersen, Morten Axel
PY - 2017
Y1 - 2017
N2 - Based on fieldwork in Ulaanbaatar, this article explores the spatio-temporal properties of debt relations in urban Mongolia. During socialism, relations of debt were mostly restricted to closed circuits of friends, whose exchange of objects and favours often stretched over a long time. With the transition to capitalism in the 1990s, both the number of debt obligations and the size of loans expanded dramatically, without being subject to similar curtailment or other formalization. The result is that ‘no one pays back what they owe’, as people complain. Departing from the seemingly peculiar fact that people nonetheless keep on lending others money – including debtors they hardly know or with a bad reputation – I argue that debt has acquired a gift-like nature in Ulaanbaatar, and show how the temporality of such ‘generalized debt’ is inseparable from the neo-liberal deregulation of residential spaces in this and other postsocialist cities.
AB - Based on fieldwork in Ulaanbaatar, this article explores the spatio-temporal properties of debt relations in urban Mongolia. During socialism, relations of debt were mostly restricted to closed circuits of friends, whose exchange of objects and favours often stretched over a long time. With the transition to capitalism in the 1990s, both the number of debt obligations and the size of loans expanded dramatically, without being subject to similar curtailment or other formalization. The result is that ‘no one pays back what they owe’, as people complain. Departing from the seemingly peculiar fact that people nonetheless keep on lending others money – including debtors they hardly know or with a bad reputation – I argue that debt has acquired a gift-like nature in Ulaanbaatar, and show how the temporality of such ‘generalized debt’ is inseparable from the neo-liberal deregulation of residential spaces in this and other postsocialist cities.
U2 - 10.1080/00141844.2016.1192213
DO - 10.1080/00141844.2016.1192213
M3 - Journal article
VL - 82
SP - 475
EP - 491
JO - Ethnos
JF - Ethnos
SN - 0014-1844
IS - 3
M1 - Special Issue: Urban TimesIMES
Y2 - 25 February 2010
ER -
ID: 135147862