Times of debt: heterochrony and bank loans in rural Mongolia

Abstract

Recent scholarship in economic anthropology examines how the intersection of multiple forms of temporality shapes the time of debt relations. This article builds on and refines these approaches by analysing debt as a social relation that ‘folds’ the time of other relations within itself. It does so through deploying the concept of the ‘fold’ drawn from continental philosophy and anthropological literature on personhood. This approach provides a novel way of illuminating and reflecting upon a temporal tension at the heart of debt relations, in which the timely performance of debtor-creditor relations is contingent on the harnessing of temporalities formally outside their scope. This argument is made in relation to an ethnographic study of malchny zeel (the ‘herder's loan’) issued by commercial banks in a pastoral region of Mongolia.