Wenn Kredit zu Geld wird

Historische und moderne Kreditbeziehungen in Nepal

Abstract

Inspired by anthropological discussion of the relationship between credit and money, the cultural logic of historical and modern credit relations in Nepal will be analysed by means of Polanyi's model of the embedded economy. The starting point is that the economic basis of cooperation in a formerly highly stratified society necessitated generalised means of exchange. However, it can be shown that these means were not necessarily based on coinage, but rather on money as a unit of account. The standard of value of money was well-grounded in the logic of tenure and credit contracts, and the latter even became a means of exchange in the old system based on agriculture, state remuneration and long-term trade relations, reflected in socio-economic institutions of reciprocity and redistribution. The underlying logic for the support of credit worthiness was based on relations of patronage and crop-sharing arrangements, resulting in notions of shared risk and natural gain, as well as in complex relationships of land tenure and mutual support in trade and labor exchange. It will be argued that the discontinuity or 'great transformation' of Nepal's traditional economy was thus not due to the development of a market economy, but to the transformation of contractual arrangements in alignment with the Land Reform Act of 1964 to those of modern private landownership and simple hypothecation, resulting in land, related products and credit contracts becoming fictive commodities. However, the continuity of relations of mutual support also resulted in the efficiency, extensiveness and high number of modern cooperatives that could build on traditional attitudes towards cooperation. In recent times these new forms of cooperation are struggling for public reputation, however, as the commercial sector is extending its influence into the communal economic sphere.