Keeping, Giving, and Waiting in Line: Ethnographies of the Bank. Call for abstracts for AAA/CASCA 2019. Abstracts March 27.
Many of the causes and consequences of the post-2007 global financial crisis unfolded in sites of everyday banking, from homeowners’ struggles to make mortgage payments to depositors’ worries over bank liquidity. But while a great deal of the scrutiny into this crisis and its reverberations has centered on high finance and global capital, relatively less attention has been paid to retail and commercial banks—those institutions of savings and lending, or “socialized hoards” (Peebles 2008), that constitute much of everyday finance around the world and in many of our fieldsites. This panel brings together ethnographic approaches to commercial and retail banks, everyday banking practices, and the limits or other of the bank. We propose that a richer anthropological understanding of finance depends on a fuller examination of its instantiation as an everyday phenomenon—in diverse forms of saving, investing, and borrowing and in lay theories of and anxieties over these activities. Moreover, we seek to contribute to that examination by facilitating conversation around one particular site of these practices, namely, the bank. Continue reading →
Call for papers European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) 2016 conference “Anthropological legacies and human futures”, Milan 20-23 July 2016, session “Debt: a critical reflection based on people’s debts”. Convenors: Hadrien Saiag (LAIOS/CNRS) & Emilia Schijman (Lames-AMU-CNRS).
Short Abstract
This panel provides a reflection on debt, based on ethnographies of people’s debts. It focuses on the way debts concretely shape people’s lives, the challenges of dealing with debt as a generic concept, and the implications of shifting emphasis from exchange to debt. The call for papers is now open and closes at midnight GMT on February 15th, 2016. Before you propose your paper, please read the instructions and rules below, and then browse the list of panels. Continue reading →
Los amigos de Charisma avisan que ya está disponible un nuevo número especial doble de Cultural Studies dedicado a deuda y finanzas domésticas. El número fue editado por Joe Deville y Greg Seigworth y entre otros muy interesantes artículos, incluye “The Moral Performativity of Credit and Debt in the Slums of Buenos Aires” de Ariel Wilkis y “Where are the Consumers? ‘Real Households’ & the Financialization of Consumption in Chile” de Felipe González.
[Magdalena Villarreal (CIESAS) and Lya Niño (University of Baja California, México) cuentan de su investigación “‘Quoras’, [1] pesos and dollars. Juggling currencies in trans-border contexts”. La nota es en inglés pero, como siempre, comentarios en español y portugués son muy bienvenidos]
The borderline that separates the Mexican city of Mexicali from its twin in the north —Calexico, in the United States— is a scene of intense activity. A significant amount of people –the great majority of whom are Mexican— cross it systematically to get to their workplaces, for business, socialization or to reach their sleeping quarters. In this process, commuters must juggle with different currencies, wherein economies, cultures, normative and diverse practices, often conceived as different and disintegrated, intertwine. The border tends to be analytically dealt with as a dividing line. This is not surprising, considering that it separates two nations with their different economies, languages and legislations.
But our focus is different. We perceive the border as the fertile axis of transit for those who cross it every day in managing their economic and financial lives. We thus pay particular attention to the financial operations that take place in the homes of trans-border women, that is, women who commute regularly between the twin cities of Mexicali and Calexico. Some of them live in Mexico and work in the United States, others live on the American side of the border but their families are in Mexico and their economy is framed in Mexican social and cultural contexts. Some work within circuits (corridas) that operate between the two countries following a particular crop. Continue reading →
Está disponible online el último número del journal virtual de Antropología Brasilera, Vibrant. Es un número especial en inglés sobre etnografías económicas editado por Eugênia Motta, Federico Neiburg, Fernando Rabossi and Lúcia Müller y que incluye además un artículo del contribuidor de EdlE Gustavo Onto “The market as lived experience. On the knowledge of markets in antitrust analysis”. Continue reading →
[Magdalena Villarreal envía la siguiente nota contando del muy interesante número especial de la revista Desacatos que ella coordinó. El número se titula “Las deudas de los oprimidos en el imperio de la liquidez” que incluye además una reseña de Ariel Wilkis del libro de Jeanne Lazarus y otra de Fernando Rabossi contando de la muy pionera etnografía de las finanzas realizada en 1993 por Lucía Alves Müller. ]
La crisis que azota buena parte del globo es tema de constante preocupación en diversos sectores. En ésta —aunque no únicamente debido a ella— el endeudamiento y el sobreendeudamiento han mostrado sus múltiples caras. Sabemos, como se informa cotidianamente en los medios de comunicación, que afecta tanto a países primermundistas como a los considerados subdesarrollados y a todos los sectores sociales. Sin embargo, las maneras en que impacta a las poblaciones de bajos recursos tienden a estimarse con base en caracterizaciones estereotipadas de los pobres, quienes se presumen financieramente inactivos. Continue reading →
Gustavo Onto envía el siguiente llamado a contribuciones que podrá ser de interés para lectores de Estudios de la Economía:
Panel: “Forms of government and everyday economic practices: ethnography and comparison” at the 13th EASA Biennial Conference. Continue reading →
Nuevo número del casi nuevo journal of Business Anthropology incluye:
The latest opinions on the anthropology of finance by Aihwa Ong, Benjamin Lee, Daromir Rudnyckyj, Hirokazu Miyazaki, and Melissa Fisher. Organizational ethnographers in the age of financialization, by Galit Ailon. The anthropology of Chinese capitalism in Southeast Asia, by Michiel Verver and Heidi Dahles. On managing corporate values, by Emil Røyrvik. Ikea sofas are like H&M trousers, by Pauline Garvey. Towards an anthropology of worth, by Brian Moeran and Christina Garsten. Continue reading →
“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.
Continue reading →
Estudios de la Economía 