Time Will Tell: Temporalities of Debt in an Urban Neighbourhood in Northeast Brazil. Issue 3 (27th May 2017)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Dalsgård, Anne Line
• Is Part Of: Ethnos. Volume 82:Issue 3(2017)
• Page Start: 458
• Page End: 474
• Publication Date: 2017-05-27
• Subjects: Debt trust -- disillusion -- temporality -- neighbourhood -- Brazil; Ethnology -- Periodicals; Archaeology -- Periodicals; 305.8
• DOI: 10.1080/00141844.2015.1084019
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0014-1844

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This article explores temporalities of debt in a neighbourhood on the outskirts of Recife, Northeast Brazil. It shows how the temporality of lending money is incompatible with the temporality of taking the loan. Lending relates to the present and your trust in the debtor; borrowing means borrowing resources from a speculative future. Decepção [disillusion] may be the experience of the creditor, when a loan is not returned as promised; for the debtor the envisioned future may just not have come about yet. Particularly the frequent loans of credit cards give rise to emotionally tense situations in the neighbourhood, as credit cards are locked in a punctuated time, where dates are crucial. Using an episode that I happened to be part of as a point of departure, I argue that decepção is the estrangement experienced, when a moment of trust is thrown back upon you, distorted by the process of time.