Unsanctioned Wealth; or, The Productivity of Debt in Northern Cameroon
This essay is a reflection on debt. Debt seems to be the flip side of wealth; that is, not having enough. And yet I would like to consider the ways in which debt is plenitude and not simply lack. Perhaps economic debt is not just the constraint of society, the rubber stamp of a certain social status: being liable, a liability. Evidently, if debt can be described as a social relation, indebtedness involves a certain sociability: the gift is a debt ( Mauss 1950; Derrida 1991). However, the simple affirmation of the social constitution of debt relations and debt itself runs the risk of a functionalist trap. Merely pointing out the logical emergence of the social constitution of debt in a given context is tantamount to declaring its functional nature in human society. In the remarks that follow, I prefer to explore how debt can be a mode of either affirming or denying sociability. In that spirit, I ask a series of questions: What is the difference between debt that disturbs and what one might call socially sanctioned debt? How is it that some forms of wealth are socially sanctioned in spite of their origins in debt relations while others are denounced quite flatly as “debt,” portrayed as a negative economic indicator, a disruption in the order of production and exchange? And in what contexts does debt mark out not negative space in the social imaginary but rather a critical and perhaps strategic stance?
Ultimately, these questions are oriented toward the matter of the productive nature of debt and debt relations, as opposed to their significance as merely owing. They are inspired by the situation in Cameroon today, and in Africa more generally, which forces us to ask how debt and liability square with productivity.
As has been demonstrated elsewhere ( Bayart 1989; Vallée 1989,1999), debt relations are instrumental to the construction of an “extraverted” political economy. Debt is an essential mediation between the state and the global economy: an important resource for political and economic agents, debt establishes the credits that are new rents for redistribution in the national economy and for the management of internal conflict. Debt thus generates both economic and political rents, or resources and wealth that derive from commercial, political, and financial relations as opposed to agricultural or industrial production. Debt-seeking, like rentseeking, is an economic and political strategy.
And yet, beyond instrumentalist tactics, the productivity of debt can also be understood in terms of a primary relation that puts debtor-creditor relations at the very base of social relations more generally, and hence at the heart of productive associations. This means positing debt as a fundamental social fact, as already there. In the social sciences, debt is most often construed as an economic or juridical category. And when debt is apprehended as a social phenomenon— social debt—it is still most often construed as something contracted, exterior to a primary, original situation. Debt happens to someone or to some people, but it does not constitute them; it is, then, a perversion or deviation in human relations— an abnormal situation that needs to be rectified.
Since the “return” to Marcel Mauss in anthropological circles during the 1980s, the idea that debt is constituted through “the gift” (le don) has been reiterated and refined so that debt relations are now often depicted as constituting social relations through gift exchange.1 And yet, for the most part, the productive power of debt is still denied its ontological status since debt occurs through exchange and is not apprehended as an autonomous, effective power in the very constitution of human activity. In an attempt to reinstate the philosophical status of debt, Nathalie Sarthou-Lajus (1997) develops this argument, exploring the ways in which debt is the founding mark of social relations. For her, debt is inherent to the original situation of dependency in which subjectivity arises; it cannot be reduced to a problem of exchange. Following Nietzche over Mauss, (Sarthou- Lajus) asserts: “The debt regime renews our understanding of social relations insofar as it brings forth the structure of dependence that underpins such relations. Debt is in fact at the origin of a fundamentally asymmetrical social relation, which breaks with the logic of parity in exchange” (1997: 2).2 The truth of the subject’s condition is found, then, in this original state of dependence. And the ontological status of debt is recognized as the constitution of the subject in its relations with different figures of alterity ( Sarthou-Lajus 1997: 37). Sarthou-Lajus is not, however, ignoring or denying the historicity of debt in arguing for the reinstatement of its ontological status. On the contrary, she calls for an understanding of the very constitution of the “truth” of debt as a particular condition in human relations, as inherent to the constitution of certain forms of subjectivity, and hence as a historical phenomenon. Inspired by Emmanuel Lévinas, Sarthou-Lajus (1997: 72) notes that “debt forces us to apprehend the other and time together, as a fundamental relationship to alterity, which deprives the subject of its foundational pretensions.”3 The mediation between the ontological status of debt and the sociology of debt is, then, a matter of history, or the production of truths about the history of debt and indebtedness.
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Notes
This essay was originally presented as a paper at the conference Commodities and Identities: The Social Life of Things Revisited, held in Amsterdam, 11–13 June 1999. I thank Saibou Issa for conducting two of the interviews that appear in the essay. I owe thanks to Peter Geschiere, John Comaroff, Béatrice Hibou, Mamadou Diouf, and Mick Taussig. I also thank the Social Science Research Council–John T. and Catherine D. MacArthur Foundation Program on Peace and Security and the Ciriacy-Wantrup Fellowship, University of California, Berkeley.
- The return to Mauss in both Francophone and Anglophone literatures was inspired by the critique of utilitarian readings of economic life. See, most notably, the work completed by the Mouvement anti-utilitariste dans les sciences sociales (MAUSS) in La revue du MAUSS and their edited volume (1993). See also, among many others, Weiner 1976 and 1992; Appadurai 1986; Strathern 1988; and Humphrey and Hugh-Jones 1992.
- All translations from French are my own.
- The subject of time, as deferred exchange, is rarely commented upon with respect to debt. For a notable exception, see Derrida 1991.