Mortgage Durée: Towards a Politics 'In Construction'. Issue 3 (27th May 2017)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Corsín Jiménez, Alberto
• Is Part Of: Ethnos. Volume 82:Issue 3(2017)
• Page Start: 492
• Page End: 507
• Publication Date: 2017-05-27
• Subjects: Mortgages -- anthropology of debt -- crisis -- anthropology of time -- urban theory -- Madrid; Ethnology -- Periodicals; Archaeology -- Periodicals; 305.8
• DOI: 10.1080/00141844.2016.1220968
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0014-1844

Abstract

ABSTRACT: The article offers an ethnographic analysis of the imagination of the city as a mortgage environment: a space of sociability mediated by interest rates, legal language, square metres, actuary calculations and temporalities, real estate brokers, political and financial corruption, and so on. A central aim is to understand what it may mean for our contemporary political theory and anthropology to say that a society's democratic imagination rests on a real estate and mortgage ontology. Such an imagination renders the city as a political project 'in construction': an ongoing, 'building-in-progress' development, whose social rhythm is inflected by a permanent temporal and spatial suspension; a holding in abeyance characterised by the hopeful and yet fearful economy of credit. The mortgage durée of a city-in-construction delineates the contours of our political ruins, but in this ruinous circumstance, amidst the hubris, it offers also the resources and materials for critique and reconstruction.