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One of the great powers of anthropology lies in its potential to denaturalise and remystify taken-for-granted elementary aspects of daily life. Debt is certainly one of these omnipresent elements, especially in times where real wages have stagnated while productivity and inflation continues soaring.

Despite this, debt, as a disputed concept, is not new; in fact, it's older than money. In the chapter I enjoyed the most titled 'the myth of barter', Graeber shows how the conventional barter-money-debt historical process actually happened in reverse. The conventional 'Economics 101' textbook example of Ragnar trading 5 kg of potatoes for a pair of shoes doesn't hold up if you think about it (what if nobody wants to trade shoes for Ragnar’s potatoes...?).

One of the greatest successes of economics as a discipline, ideology and sphere has been its imposed division between itself and the rest of society's entangled spheres and relations. Through this fractured view, the barter-money-debt story makes sense, but Graeber, much like Karl Polanyi illustrates how the exchange was mediated and embedded within social relations. If Ragnar needed shoes, he could receive a pair as a 'gift' by a neighbour to be 'repaid' at some later stage, or, better yet, he could simply be given a pair by the community.

This is the essence of what Graeber terms the 'human economy', where money is used to mediate social relations. Your chances of acquiring the goods you sought after were largely dependent on your reputation and trustworthiness (this is why money was often reserved for strangers or untrusty people). At one point during the Middle Ages, these locally embedded social credit systems were forcefully outlawed and destroyed to be subsequently replaced by coinage and later financial debts. However, the morality attached to credit and debt was seemingly transferred to these new forms of financial debt, which still haunts our language and imaginaries to this day.

Again, Karl Polanyi and his work The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time echo in the theories Graeber composes: the disembedding of social relations to impose the market through a political process (not as an organic, 'natural.' process).

Debt, as an ideological concept, is interesting since, as Graeber notes, it's based on an assumption of equality (and not intrinsic inferiority such as the caste system and some forms of slavery). But apart from local social credit systems mentioned above, it's a disembedded morality that reduces qualities to quantities. The book starts with an anecdote and assumption that 'surely one has to pay one's debts', but if there is anything the book shows is the dialectical nature of the history surrounding the concept; from popular exoduses from cities to counter-philosophical movements of the Axial Age, all eventually integrated into its development.

Alf Hornborg, another anthropologist who theorises money, treats money as an artefact that organises society and its functioning and thus dictates possibilities for action. It does, however, not have agency in itself (assuming it does is a clear case of fetishism); that power is reserved to us humans.