Wakeful Geographies, Wakeful Bodies: Day and Nighttime Rhythms of Indebted Life and Capitalist Enclosure in Cambodia

Abstract

For a discipline so oriented around the study of wakeful geographies, the lack of direct conceptual engagement with the notion of wakefulness—a cognitive state in which the mind is conscious of, and responsive to, the external world—is all-the-more remarkable. In this article we advance geography by probing and revealing the links that exist between wakefulness and indebted life under capitalism. We show how villagers in rural Cambodia experience wakefulness in their day and nighttime lives through a punitive alertness to, and excessive rumination on, the pressures and challenges they face to repay microfinance debts on time. Capitalist debt demands a keen alertness and submission to the clock time of repayment obligations, and with this fosters a hyperalertness to debt that works to the consequential exclusion of sleep. The article evidences the enforced isorhythmic alignment between the demands of creditors and the bodies and minds of borrowers, thus demonstrating the importance of thinking about the debt relation through the heuristic tool of rhythm. This claim is evidenced further through the arrhythmic (discordant) impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and the intensifying climate crisis, which are further undermining borrowers’ hopes for debt-free lives. Ultimately, the mixed-method interview and photographic data presented in the article demonstrate the significance of the 24/7 nature of debt and broader trend toward diurnal expansionism. Both are leading to the physical, emotional, and existential enclosure of bodies and homes habituated into the rhythms and impetuses of capitalism.