Is it really different?

This week reading, chapter six of David Graeber’s Debt, was very interesting to me. As many of my classmates have said there are several notions and concepts that he introduces that are worth long and fruitful discussion. Having said that I think that is very important to focus in the general objective of the book, or at least one of it´s main objectives. That is: a history of money as we now it and especially how it relates to debt and credit in one hand and how the myths that answer these questions in modernity, deeply affect our moral and ethical constructions around debt, credit and money. 

Keeping in mind that Graeber is trying to give an innovative and not mainstream answer and not just a new description of "primitive" societies was useful for me to understand the points that he is trying to make.

That is why the most interesting notion that he brings in this chapter is the idea that all of these human economies that were structured around the venerability of human life (at least in the way that a human life is not exchangeable for anything) begin to crumble down when markets began to permeate the social structure of the societies Graeber describes. The author also says that as sacred as it human life was for these cultures, and maybe because of it, specially for the moral or ethical obligation that blood and bride debt brought to them they were perfect victims for the slave trade system that outsiders from market based economies brought.

I would like to finish with a question: Is it really different now? Is the mystification and naturalization of debt as a moral obligation the same?