1. The Only Compensation Paid for Slavery was to Slave Owners
: a slave revolt led to independence of Haiti from France
1825: France (on behalf of plantation owners) demanded compensation for loss of plantations and slaves and cost of military ships (150m francs, equivalent to $21b today); astronomical
1838: France agreed to reduce the debt to 60 million francs to be paid over a period of 30 years. Trade embargo of Haiti by other countries (including the US) held Haiti to repayment
1947: the final payment made
Unique in the Western Hemisphere

2. Exploring these questions through Girls of the Factory and Debt
The Big Questions: 1. How does cultural change happen? 2. What is the role of individual agency vs. social structure in explaining events and society?
Exploring these questions
through Girls of the Factory and Debt

3. Cultural Interaction and Change
Clash of civilizations
McDonaldization
Hybridization
Localization

4. How and Why do Cultures Change? Example of Girls of the Factory
Has globalization (the relocation of multinational factories to Morocco) generated cultural change?
If so, how is it happening?
If not, why not?

5. Interpretive anthropology vs. cultural materialism

6. How and Why do Cultures Change? The example of Debt
Debt as a history of ideas about money and debt? What we owe to one another?
Graeber, p : on the origins of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Greek philosophy
Both ideas and material conditions matter to him and they are not always in sync.
Violence (war, slavery) plays a major role here in transformations of ideas

7. Individual agency vs. social structure

8. Agency and Structure in Debt
What is structure in his analysis?
Our agency (our goals and desires) are structured but not fully: Why were Cortes’s soldiers so brutal to the Aztecs? Because they were in debt. Why are we so eager to work, to sell our labor power in the market?
Agency: critical to his theory of how might change might come about, p. 383
Some of you wished he made more concrete proposals: shows the limits of agency?
The human economy or capitalism

9. Agency and Structure in Girls of the Factory
What do the young women want or desire? What are their goals in life?
Can they obtain it?
What are the structures which thwart their desires? What are the structures which affect (or structure) their desires?