Experimenting with Debt Forgiveness in Iceland

Rejkjavik (photo from the Guardian)

As we start to read Graeber's Debt, here's a story from NPR on an interesting proposal for debt forgiveness of mortgage debt of homebuyers - debt that increased after Iceland's own financial crisis of 2008. We will see as we get further in the semester that the notion of debt forgiveness - or the Jubilee (after the biblical notion of universal debt forgiveness) - is crucial to the arch of Graeber's history of debt. Graeber proposes a Jubilee to the current rise in debt across the board. Iceland seems to be experimenting with putting this idea into practice.

http://www.npr.org/2014/12/11/370156273/iceland-experiments-with-a-jubilee-of-debt-forgiveness

Welcome to the Economic Anthropology class blog!

Hi everyone and welcome to the Economic Anthropology class blog!

We will be using this space as a repository of thoughts, discussions, and shared resources on the general subject of economic anthropology and on specific topics such as money, value, wealth, credit, debt, markets, exchange, economic transactions.

Feel free to post questions, comments on class discussions, links to online resources relevant to our course, and, most your importantly, your blog posts on the reading material.

As this is a public common space, be sure to be respectful of one another's opinions and generous in your comments. Let's make this a constructive space for thinking anthropologically about money and economic life!