I am just about to finish reading anthropologist Karen Ho‘s Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street. She carried out seventeen months of fieldwork on Wall Street, interviewing and observing investment bankers. Actually, she started out as a rookie analyst working in management consulting in a hybrid investment and commercial bank. She had the intention of… Read More »
In the BusinessDay of December 29, 2009 There is a thing about being so close to something that one does not see it anymore. Anthropologists normally refer to it as going native. You have gone native when you no longer see the obvious things anymore, when the things that an outsider notices stares you in… Read More »
Abstract of the paper I presented at the American Anthropology Association conference: Items of used clothing that are dropped off in a road-side used-clothing bank carry in them certain aspirations of the person who used to wear them. From the point of view of the British government, textile is one area in which waste is… Read More »
The first in a series of posts on the financial crisis by economic anthrologist Keith Hart, at the ASA Globalog. The series will engage: long-run historical questions like what this crisis is, with the news as it unfolds in real time and with issues that matter practically to people who don’t have to be reminded… Read More »
Stephen Gudeman’s post on the Association of Social Anthropologists’ Globalog series on the financial crisis: Economists may see economies as flat or smooth plains consisting of markets and market-like behavior that lead to equilibrium situations, but I think they consist of overlapping and conflicting spheres of value and practices. I label these fuzzy-edged spaces House,… Read More »
on the American Anthropological Association (AAA) website. From the AAA blog: The economic crisis issue includes: Gillian Tett: Icebergs and Ideologies: How Information Flows Fuelled the Financial Crisis Aaron Pitluck: Ethnography Meets Econometrics: Exploring Daily Work Practices that Lead to Financial Crises Tara Schwegler: The Global Crisis of Economic Meaning Edward F Fischer: Capitalism in… Read More »
From the BBC. HT AAA Blog
The rapid development of global communications today contains within its movement a far-reaching transformation of world society. ‘Anthropology’ in some form is one of the intellectual traditions best suited to make sense of it. The academic seclusion of the discipline, its passive acquiescence to bureaucracy, is the chief obstacle preventing us from grasping this historical… Read More »
Earlier today I drew attention to the announcement of the ASA Globalog series on the financial crisis. The first post in the series is already up. Alexander F. Robertson of Edinburgh University writes about Corporate Greed: The medieval burghers sought to dodge accusations of greed by political bluster or conspicuous acts of charity, but nothing… Read More »
Throughout its 5000 year history, debt has always involved institutions – whether Mesopotamian sacred kingship, Mosaic jubilees, Sharia or Canon Law – that place controls on debt’s potentially catastrophic social consequences. It is only in the current era, writes anthropologist David Graeber, that we have begun to see the creation of the first effective planetary… Read More »