How do violence, credit cards, and Christianity intersect? Colombia might point to some revelations.
This talk will cover the two overarching arguments of Rebecca Bartel’s book, Card Carrying Christians: Debt and the Making of Free Market Spirituality in Colombia. The first is that there is an inextricable link between Christian morality and the morality of finance capitalism as it has developed in Colombia. The second, related to the first, is that aspiring, believing, and becoming are the organizing social forms of finance. These practices, Bartel suggests, make prosperity Christians “proper” financial subjects because faith in markets has been transferred to wondrous interior-transformation. A faith in the market has become faith in the self. But existential threats to life in Colombia, where a war has raged for decades, produce specific arrangements of subjectivity that are accompanied by the relentless possibility of violence. Everyday life in Colombia is marked by aspirational faith as much as by the necropolitics of financialization. That is, the necrofinance of late financial capitalism that oftentimes, it seems, only a miracle can resolve.
Co-sponsored by Diplomacy and World Affairs, History, Economics, Latino/a & Latin American Studies, and the Marie-Young Fund.
