Rank: Veteran Joined: 9/4/2009 Posts: 700 Location: Nairobi
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The history of Debt by David Graeber. The situation the French anthropologist Jean-Claude Galey encountered in a region of the Eastern Himalayas, where as recently as the 1970s, the low-ranking castes-they were referred to as “the vanquished ones,” since they were thought to be descended from a population once conquered by the current landlord caste, many centuries before-lived in a situation of permanent debt dependency. Landless and penniless, they were obliged to solicit loans from the landlords simply to find a way to eat-not for the money, since the sums were paltry, but because poor debtors were expected to pay back the interest in the form of work, which meant they were creditors’ outhouses and reroofed their sheds. For the “vanquished”-expenses were weddings and funerals.
These required a good deal of money, which always had to be borrowed. In such cases it was common practice, Galey explains, for high-caste moneylenders to demand one of the borrower’s daughters as security. Often, when a poor man had to borrow money for his daughter’s marriage, the security would be the bride herself. She would be expected to report to the lender’s household after her wedding night, spend a few months there as his concubine, and then, once he grew bored, be sent off to some nearby timber camp, where she would have to spend the next year or two as a prostitute working off her father’s debt. Once it was paid off, she’d return to her husband and begin her married life.Read below from page 7 onwards: http://himalaya.socanth....als/ebhr/pdf/EBHR_08.pdf“We are the middle children of history man, no purpose or place. We have no great war, no great depression. Our great war is a spiritual war, our great depression is our lives!" – Tyler Durden
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