Collateralization of the Body in the Central Sahara

On Forms and Effects

Bibliographic Data

ID24233122
AuthorsMoad Musbahi (0009-0006-4546-7773, Department of Anthropology Princeton University Princeton New Jersey USA)
Year2026
Publication date2026-10-08
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEconomic Anthropology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2330-4847 • E-ISSN: 2330-4847
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1002/sea2.70052
OpenAlexW7221136381
LanguageEN
References cited34

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.

abolition of the slave trade · Body · Capitalism · Central Sahara · checkpoints · Collateral · Debt · personal security · post-2011 Libya · Security · Trust · African Studies and Geopolitics · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Law, Economics, and Judicial Systems

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