What is it about?
This edited volume examines mortgaging as a social and cultural phenomenon to show its origins, variation, and effects on human lives and communities. Here anthropologists, historians, and economists explore archival, printed, and ethnographic evidence about mortgage. The book shows how mortgages affect people on the ground, where local forms of mutuality mix with larger bureaucracies. The book traces origins of land titling, pledging, and the mortgage in over millennia and incorporates findings from authors’ field research, challenging economic development orthodoxies and calling for a human-centered exploration of this age-old institution. My introductory chapter lays out the foundational concepts and discusses the history of the mortgage institution and land financialization. It shows how social and cultural concerns must be added to the legal and economic, foreshadows some recent turns to electronic finance, and explores the promises and pitfalls of lending guided by algorithms.
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Why is it important?
The mortgaging of land, a risky practice usually treated as just an economic and legal contract, has needed a broader set of perspectives for a fuller, more humanist understanding. Much of the existing scholarly literature on land and mortgages has been written by economists and legal specialists, reflecting the perspectives of their disciplinary traditions. Lacking are assessments from a wider range of disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, drawing upon historical experiences, cultural meanings, and locally informed perspectives. This edited volume is meant to fill that gap.
Perspectives
This chapter argues that the ambiguous and uneasy partnerships of the formal and informal, public and private have resided in mortgage and titling institutions throughout history. With a focus on the evolution of legal norms and institutions for mortgage credit and land titling in the non-Western and Western world, it relates these continuities to new practices and technologies in the mortgage space. In an era of intensifying population mobility, resettlement and political transitions in many parts of the world, these questions carry broader social and political import.
Daivi Rodima-Taylor
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: INTRODUCTION Land, Finance, Technology: Perspectives on Mortgage Lending, December 2022, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1515/9781800733497-004.
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