Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: ABSTRACT This article tracks a transporter along the route linking Tripoli to the Saharan town of Ghadames in post‐2011 Libya, asking what secures an obligation when the institutions that normally underwrite it (offices, courts, recognized names) have receded. I distinguish the debt, the sum owed, from the security pledged to answer for it: what may be taken if the owing fails. To collateralize is to fix that security beforehand, and I follow this act along a road where enforcement is personal. The security descends: from goods to names and, when these fail, to the body itself. I trace this descent through a man answered for at a checkpoint and a man who binds himself in advance against labor never demanded and follow it into the body's health and the medical implications of being held. I set this descent alongside a 19th‐century Ghadames archive, where an older grammar of the pledge did analogous work until the abolition of the slave trade stripped it of its legally sanctioned object. Collateral, I contend, generates the reliable conduct typically ascribed to trust, yet leaves trust beside the point—and when the thing pledged is a person, the holding alters who they are. In this account, the corridor is not capitalism's outside but its exposed floor, where the force sustaining every pledge becomes visible.
Source: Economic Anthropology
DOI: 10.1002/sea2.70052
Author: Moad Musbahi
Institution: Princeton University
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,400
OpenAlex ID: W7221136381