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1 On The Experience of Moral Confusion 1
2 The Myth of Barter 21
3 Primordial Debts 43
4 Cruelty and Redemption 73
5 A Brief Treatise on the Moral Grounds of Economic Relations 89
6 Games with Sex and Death 127
7 Honor and Degradation, or, On the Foundations of Contemporary Civilization 165
8 Credit Versus Bullion, And the Cycles of History 211
9 The Axial Age (800 BC-600 AD) 223
10 The Middle Ages (600 AD-1450 AD) 251
11 Age of the Great Capitalist Empires (1450-1971) 307
12 (1971-The Beginning of Something Yet to Be Determined) 361
Notes 393
Bibliography 455
Index 493
This book evokes a radical rethinking of self in relation to group. Graeber contrasts the concept of "human economy" with "debt society" to accomplish this. Graeber understands "human economy" as alternative to "debt society," which is based fundamentally on violence and power.
Graeber's ideas give new meaning not just to the nature of debt, but also to the personal, intellectual and spiritual bondage caused by the warped ideas of self that necessarily emerge from debt societies. Graeber contrasts violent, power-based debt-society with human-economy where self emerges from the shared experience of a web of family and societal relationships, which he contrasts with debt society's violent severing of personal connections.
David Graeber's integrating premise for this book is that debt reflects culture's origin in violence. Graeber shows how violence pervades even individual self-image through dualistic, cultural myths, for example we are taught to see our minds and our bodies as separate entities!
Reading the book, I recommend several readings, I am reminded of the ideas of Stanford linguist Rene Girard and theologians James Alison and Gil Bailie. All three explore human relations through the twin lenses of human desire and mimetic violence, which they find at the heart of the sacred structures of all human-created cultures.
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Posted April 14, 2012
The author confirmed all my deepest suspicions about the nature of debt and capitalism.
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Posted April 8, 2012
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Posted July 14, 2011
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Overview
Before there was money, there was debtEvery economics textbook says the same thing: Money was invented to replace onerous and complicated barter systems—to relieve ancient people from having to haul their goods to market. The problem with this version of history? There’s not a shred of evidence to support it.
Here anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom. He shows that for more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate ...