ISSN:
0014-1844
Language:
English
Titel der Quelle:
Ethnos : journal of anthropology
Publ. der Quelle:
London : Routledge
Angaben zur Quelle:
Vol. 82, No. 3 (2017), p. 492
DDC:
390
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.
Note:
Copyright: © 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group 2016
DOI:
10.1080/00141844.2016.1220968
URL:
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00141844.2016.1220968
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