Credit Between Cultures
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Farmers, Financiers, and Misunderstanding in Africa
Parker Shipton
Parker Shipton brings a variety of perspectives—cultural, economic, political, and religious-philosophical—and years of field experience to this fascinating study about people who borrow and lend in the interior of Africa. His conclusions challenge the conventional wisdom of the past half century (including perennial World Bank orthodoxy) about the need for credit among African farming people.
“An eminently readable analysis of ‘trust’ in human society, this ethnographically rich study of the Luo of Kenya shows how lending, borrowing and indebtedness are moral before they are economic.”—David Parkin, University of Oxford
"This is an important book written by an impressive scholar. It tackles a complex subject with analytical subtlety, ambitious intellectual range, and a meticulous attention to empirical detail. It is written in a refreshingly engaging and lucid style that should make its many provocative and productive insights accessible to a wide audience."—Michael Dietler, University of Chicago
"Shipton takes what he finds for an African people, the Luo, as the material for a much broader and more powerful examination of the fates of the world's rural populations."—David William Cohen, University of Michigan
Publication Date: August 31, 2011
one map in text; 20 b/w in text gallery