ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts covered in this book. The book brings out the varied and often paradoxical aspects of debt, showing that it is both shared and imposed, that it is not only political but also gendered. Debt is analyzed as a social phenomenon, a relationship that is constructed socially. It formats social, economic, and political structures. Economic and anthropological analyses are mobilised to suggest that at all times and in all places, debt functions as a matrix of human relationships and of social life. Economic debt is extinguishable, accountable. It is measured in time by means of a payment instrument that defines units of account that in principle is known to both the creditor and the debtor, although in many cases the two parties do not have equal access to information. Creditors base their legitimacy and their power on the fact that they hold capital, economic, social, political, symbolical, that they share with their debtors.
