“Provincializing Finance”, the American Anthropological Association session, November 20-24, 2013, Chicago. From Wall Street to the City in London, and Tokyo, recent scholarship in the anthropology of finance has provided important insight into practices among financial elites of the global North. Yet, as global finance has expanded since the 1970s, it has enfolded new markets and market participants. As rising economic powers, emerging markets such as Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (the so-called BRICS countries) have reoriented global financial markets, offering new sites of speculation and investment. Thus, global finance has increasingly come to shape the everyday lives of people across the globe, often in unexpected and understudied ways. How do we understand the ideologies and practices of contemporary capitalism when we look beyond the usual spaces and players of finance? This panel brings together scholarship on the financialized lives of people at the peripheries of finance.
By “provincializing” finance, we aim to understand finance capital not as something that simply radiates from the global North, but how it is constituted in the spaces and lives at the margins—both in mundane forms and experiences of crisis—that have become increasingly central to the growth of finance. Ethnographic investigations offer insight not only into this expansion of finance capital, but also its ironies, disjunctures, and fissures. We welcome papers that address all aspects of “provincializing finance” across regions. Topics include, but are not limited to:the production and circulation of financial discourses and practices; moral economies associated with financial activity; bottom of the pyramid finance; speculative activities and logics; financial literacy and training; engagement with new financial technologies.
Pleasw send abstracts (250 words) to Llerena Searle (llerena.searle@williams.edu) by APRIL 1. The American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting. “Provincializing Finance” session at the AAA annual meeting, organized by Llerena Searle (Williams College) & Sohini Kar (Brown University).
Estudios de la Economía 