ASA Globalog. Money, Anthropology, Crisis

8/6/2019 ASA Globalog. Money, Anthropology, Crisis

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ASA GlobalogA place for anthropogists to engage in discussion Current focus: Financial

crisis

Everyday life and business as usual

Everyday life and business as usual

Bob Jessop

In my first blog, I reflected on the return from panic in September-November 2008 to the appearance of

business as usual some 12 months later. Wearing my political economists hat, I suggested that this

was related in part to the role of economic crisis in facilitating the concentration of power in the hands of

a few key decision-makers, in this case, the usual suspects who knew where the bodies were buried

because they had placed them there. In terms of the classical definition, this could be seen as a

dictatorship of limited duration, focused on crisis-management, and accountable to normal politics in

due course. I might have added that such exceptional measures in response to an emergency were

possible because the financial crisis had not been accompanied by a crisis in the state and a broader

political crisis. The contrast between Weimar Germany and the United States in the Great Depression is

interesting here. On some counts the economic crisis in the USA was more sudden and severe than in

Germany but normal politics prevailed and, eventually, institutional changes introduced through the

New Deal (plus the demand generated by a war-time economy) enabled the US economy to return to

prosperity. In contrast, an interlocking and mutually reinforcing series of crises in the state, political

legitimacy, and class hegemony blocked normal politics and created the conditions for a turn to

dictatorship in the modern sense, i.e., a more durable set of political arrangements based on the

suspension of normal democratic politics and a more expansive and extensive coordination of differentinstitutional orders and social fields. I had intended to expand on these points in my second blog but

have been diverted by a news item and an academic article that I have read in the past two days.

First, the news item: reading The Wall Street Journal on a flight from Manchester to Hong Kong (and,

yes, a propos my last blog, I did manage to get past the temperature monitors in Hong Kong airport after

having signing a form about my incipient recovery from the flu), I learned that a Bank of England survey

has show that: the financial crisis and the recession that followed appear to have changed Britons

attitude to debt and spending. The BOE poll data showed that households increased their saving for

reasons largely connected to concern about the economic outlook. Reasons frequently cited were fear

of losing employment, a desire to reduce debt, additional personal commitments and extra money from

lower mortgage payments or bills, as well as a desire to save for retirement or the future, and having

extra cash from a new job or inheritance (The Wall Street Journal, 14 December 2009, p 6). Similar

reports could no doubt be found covering other advanced economies in the grip of, or newly emerging

from, recession. And, of course, anthropologists, above all, dont need to be told about the resilience of

households and social networks in relation to crisis, whether in advanced economies or, even more

importantly, in economies where informal employment and informal work more generally are significant.

Second, the journal article: in the latest issue of Review of Radical Political Economics, there is a fine

piece by three radical political economists, Dick Bryan, Randy Martin, and Mike Rafferty, on the topic:

Financialization and Marx: giving labor and capital a financial makeover. They refer to a recent IMF

paper on the crisis, which describes the household as the shock absorber of last resort in the currenteconomic situation. In one sense, of course, this has always been the case in relation to emergencies,
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crises, and other forms of turbulence. But there is also something new in the present situation, which

has been gathering speed for some time: the financialization of everyday life, reflected not only in

changes in the practices of financial institutions but also in the practices of wage earners and

households. The authors suggest that:

In the language of finance, the household is increasingly to be seen as a set of financial exposures to be

strategically self-managed. Calculations and decisions must now be made about a range of issues.

Some such issues have emerged because the management of certain exposures is no longer

undertaken by the state: there is now need for private calculation and decisions about such things as

health insurance, education investment, and investment in an asset portfolio for retirement. There are

also issues that have emerged with increasing competitiveness within the financial sector: decisions

about the proportion of (expected) income to dedicate to home loan interest payments; the time profile

of loans, fixed or floating rate loans, the management of consumer credit options; the preferred pension

scheme. Finally, there is an emerging set of choices to be made in the face of new financial products, in

particular the emergence of derivative products that permit people to hedge exposure to risks relating to

their employment and the value of their home (Shiller 2003). In each one of these calculations there are(at least retrospectively) right and wrong choices, requiring the household to be financially savvy, not

just in the sense of prudence, but in identifying the range of financial risk exposures and knowing how to

manage them. Hence the new and emphatic push by financial regulators at all levels to generate

programs for financial literacy, so that households can be assumed to have the strategic financial

capacity necessary to understand the financial pressures they now face. The corollary is that the

(assumed) financially literate worker can morally and legally take responsibility for their own financial

success and failure.

Such observations are commonplace in work on consumption and I cite them here not only because

they were the direct trigger for this blog but also because Bryan, Martin, and Rafferty relate them to a

much more complex set of innovative arguments about financialization and class formation in

contemporary capitalism. I dont want to take us down this road here, however, but to relate these

remarks to the return to business as usual.

In contrast to the 1930s, whether in Germany, the USA, or other developed metropolitan economies,

wage-earning households are far more heavily enmeshed in the circuits of finance capitalism as

consumers of and, indeed, investors in, financial products and services. This is reflected in several

aspects of the financial crisis. First, one significant line of explanation for the financial crisis has been

that it is really the fault of greedy consumers who took out mortgages that they had no realistic

prospects of repaying should the housing bubble burst, used equity in their homes to finance personal

consumption, borrowed too much on their credit cards, and generally consumed as if there would never

be a day of reckoning. Whilst blaming consumers is a useful distraction from other causes and has the

added advantage in the USA that it can be linked, however dishonestly, to claims that state intervention

forced banks to relax loan requirements in order to democratize access to the housing market, there is

also a kernel of truth in this one-sided account of the crisis. This leads to my second observation: that,

insofar as consumers were sucked into debt and now realized that they were suckers for being so

seduced, they have accepted some measure of blame for the impact of financial crisis on their present

condition. The household has then kicked in as the shock absorber of last resort, the crisis has been

normalized, accepted as a fact of life, and business as usual has been restored in everyday life.

Moreover, third, because of the opacity of many financial innovations, which exceeded the abilities (one

hesitates to say even) of financial innovators themselves to fully grasp, it is difficult for ordinary wage-earners and households to see where else the blame for the crisis might be located. This is reflected in


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populist rage against greedy bankers, mis-selling of financial products, and poor regulation but is not

translated into effective grass-roots resistance to the complex web of financialization that has emerged

in the last twenty years.

In short, if one part of the story of the apparent return of business as usual is the capacity of key

financial decision-makers to dominate decisions over the financial rescue-package, another part is the

self-responsibilization of households grounded in their integration into the circuits of financial capital,

leading them to become shock absorbers of last resort in the current crisis. If the former aspect is ripe

for further investigation as part of the political anthropology of the state and elite power, the latter is ripe

for investigation into financial practices of everyday life and new practices of economic governmentality.

None of these remarks imply, of course, that there these are the only two sets of causal factors or sites

for further research.

2009 12 18

Financial crisis

Comments (6)

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A Return to Business as Usual?

A Return to Business as Usual?

Unlike other contributors, I have no training in anthropology unless one counts a first-year course

taken 45 years ago, when I was introduced to the debate between, among others, Raymond Firth and

Karl Polanyi, on formal versus substantive economics. My background is in sociology and political

science and I am an autodidact in the critique of political economy albeit not through first hand

experience accumulated by Keith Hart in currency speculation or high tech bubbles of the kind. I will use

my blogs to supplement the interpretations already aired by cultural, economic, and social

anthropologists. In particular, I want to introduce some further dimensions and considerations that might

help us to better understand the nature and dynamics of the crisis and some of its consequences.

Before proceeding, let me apologise for the break in blogs I have been suffering in the last few days

from another aspect of globalization, a mild bout of swine flu and am now recovering.

Over the last month or so I have attended four events on the crisis at an elite German research

institute, a United Nations agency in Geneva, a global gathering of radical scholars in London, and anactivist evening workshop in Amsterdam. What has impressed me most from these events is the broad

consensus. Specifically, following the initial shock of the crisis and the fears, hopes, or blind panic that

followed the collapse of Lehman Brothers and characterized the exciting times of September-

November 2008, there has been a return to business as usual, which is a delightfully polyvalent term.

Some of those who share this reading consider it as a sign of the flexibility of capitalism, some that it is

a serious blow to the Global South, others that it is a sign of the failure of the left to prepare for crisis

and to take advantage of the crisis leaving the space open for recuperation by capital and its

representatives, and yet others that the form of the recovery reinforces the need for a Green New Deal

to be developed, ideally, from the bottom up rather than through securitized markets in carbon credits. It

is also worth noting that discussions were courteous but heated: the nature of the crisis and its solutions

were clearly politically contentious and not just matters of academic debate.
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This small personal example illustrates the complexity of crises and the problems of interpreting them. I

am sure that Gillian Tett must have experienced this many times over, even at banking conferences.

This complexity has been evident from the initial signs of crisis in the first quarter of 2007 onwards and

poses interesting questions of a more general nature about how complex events come to be interpreted.

Crises of the kind experienced in the last couple of years are hypercomplex. They are overdetermined

moments of indeterminacy, providing historically conditioned challenges and opportunities for decisive

intervention. Crises typically provoke profound theoretical, paradigmatic, policy and practical

disorientation insofar as they disrupt actors previously taken-for-granted understandings of the world

and how to go on within that world. This opens space for strategic interventions to redirect the course

of events rather than muddle through in the hope that the situation will eventually resolve itself. Crises

never produce a particular response or outcome on their own. Responses are mediated through

debates and struggles to define the nature of this crisis (and its uneven spatio-temporal incidence), to

ascribe (rightly or wrongly) material, institutional, organizational, and personal responsibilities for the

crisis, to assess whether it is a crisis in or of the relevant system(s), to chart alternative futures, and to

promote specific lines of action for particular forces over different horizons of action.

Thus the forms and purposes of responses and their relative success or failure depend not only on the

(typically contested) objective nature of the crisis but also on capacities to define its nature. Included

here is the question of whether the crisis is one in orofa given structural or strategic context. Where a

crisis is successfully defined as one within a system, it is likely to lead to a more reformist approach as

compared to when it is defined as a systemic crisis, i.e., one that affects the survival ofthe system. Yet,

if the crisis is systemic and the crisis is interpreted in reformist terms, the resulting measures will be

insufficient to deal with the full depth and breadth of the economic, political and social repercussions of

the crisis. Systemic crises of the global economy especially when coupled with failures of governanceon a global scale are particularly likely to impact developing countries and/or the weakest and most

vulnerable groups in all societies. Indeed, a useful definition of power, proposed by Karl Deutsch, is the

ability not to have to learn from ones mistakes because their costs can be displaced or deferred

elsewhere unless some form of de-coupling is possible.

Economic and political ideas, models, and paradigms play a key role in reducing complexity as actors

seek to render strategic and policy problems manageable in real time. This matters especially in crisis

periods. In the current period, the crisis has been variously defined as a crisis of global capitalism, a

crisis of globalizing neo-liberalism, a crisis of finance-led capital accumulation, a crisis in the

pathological co-dependence between China and the USA, and so forth. It also has important regionaland local dimensions. Definitions of the crisis also vary in terms of dure (e.g., short-, medium- and

long-term, tied to the temporalities of financial or industrial capital, to the dynamics of political hegemony

on a global scale or electoral cycles), in terms of geographical scope (e.g., global, triadic, city networks,

national, regional, local), and in terms of the principal site of crisis (commerce, industry, finance; politics;

hegemony; legitimacy; representation, and so on). It is particularly important to distinguish different

accounts of the crisis because its manifestations vary significantly according to the position of

particular economic and political spaces within the overall division of labour at a world scale as well as

in terms of historically specific features of each social formation that is affected by the crisis in its

various manifestations. In short, there is extensive scope for variation in narratives of crisis and, hence,

in the responses to crisis that are likely to follow.


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Viewed in these terms, the leading interpretations of the crisis have been scaled down in the past year

compared to the initial period of maximum disorientation and panic. What has emerged and been

consolidated is a reading favoured by the dominant transnational economic forces and superpowers that

this is a crisis in finance-led economic expansion and inadequate regulation. This interpretation is used

in turn to justify modest reforms within the existing neo-liberal order. One of the most surprising features

of this account is the extent to which leading economic and political forces at national, regional, and the

global scales have committed themselves to work against protectionism, to strengthen free trade, and to

scale back the public sector even as the state acquires emergency powers to deal with the financial

crisis. This has marginalized those most badly affected by the crisis, not only in the global north, but

also, more significantly, the global South. How might we understand this? I sketch one approach below

and will illustrate it in more detail in my second blog.

The first phases of a crisis trigger massive variation in interpretations, which appear in the form of

narratives, arguments, etc. The plausibility of interpretations and their associated strategies and projects

depends on their resonance with the personal (and interpersonal) narratives of significant classes,

strata, social categories, or groups affected by the crisis and hence on their capacity to mobilize these

forces. Much of this variation is arbitrary and short-lived, lacking long-term consequences for overall

social dynamics; but some accounts and their associated practices are selectedas the basis for

strategic and policy initiatives in what becomes the second phase of the crisis. Where the latter gets

defined as a crisis in the prevailing system, this sustains an impression of business as usual,

consistent with routine crisis-management measures or minor reforms responses that will last only as

long as these measures to work. Otherwise, we have a crisis in crisis- management, which adds

additional complications that need to be integrated into the analysis. If this fails or the crisis is initially

interpreted primarily as a crisis ofthat order, more radical changes may be explored. In both cases

conflicts are likely over the best policies to resolve the crisis and allocate its costs as different socialforces propose new visions, projects, programmes, and policies and a struggle for hegemony develops.

What seems to have happened and evidence will be provided in the next blog is that the extent of

the crisis, once its real magnitude became evident in September 2008, justified exceptional measures

taken in a highly condensed time frame that by-passed normal political routines (including considered

debate in legislatures) and concentrated crisis-management powers in the hands of a few key figures

within a broader context of high-powered lobbying from key financial interests. The speed with which

decisions were made effectively marginalized most social forces apart from expressions of populist

outrage against greedy bankers that were easily finessed in the short-term through rhetoric and

symbolic punitive fiscal measures. Together with the billions of dollars (or their equivalent) invested in

rescue packages and the return to profitability of major financial institutions (thanks in no small measure

to effectively free money released through quantitative easing and the opportunities created by the

crisis) has given the semblance of business as usual. Another part of the story here is the inability of

forces on the centre and the left to exploit the crisis to provide a powerful alternative account of the

crisis could challenge the progress of financialization and neo-liberalism, propose an effective set of

short-term policy alternatives and a longer-term strategy to address the deeper causes of the crisis, and,

above all, to translate these alternatives into effective policies in a period when power was being

concentrated and centralized. In this sense the crisis can be seen as a crisis of the left as much as it is

a crisis in neo-liberalism.


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The effective spectrum of debate that has immediate policy relevance in the advanced capitalist

economies is largely confined to six main approaches: (1) a return to a bastardized Keynesianism to

boost demand; (2) recapitalization and re-regulation of banks; (3) calls for a new international financial

architecture; (4) efforts to re-moralize capitalism by a stronger emphasis on responsible lending

practices; and, in the medium term, (5) efforts to roll back public spending, the public sector more

generally, and the roll-back of social rights; and (6) a Green New Deal that will help to resolve the

environmental, food, fuel, and water crises that were temporarily knocked off the global agenda by the

urgency of the financial crisis and its global repercussions. In all of these approaches, including the

Green New Deal in its neo-liberal variant (oriented to market solutions to environmental crisis), the

interests and views of the global South have been largely marginalized as have the views of social

forces around the globe that question whether further economic growth can ever be the solution to

current global challenges. Addressing such issues requires us to go beyond multi-site ethnographies of

economic and political practices to consider bigger questions of economic, political, and social

domination to understand why, in short, some are better placed than others to ignore the lessons of

their mistakes.

2009 12 14

Financial crisis

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Why dont more people make their own money?

Keith HartOpen Anthropology Cooperative

What can anthropology offer someone who wants to understand money better? Most anthropologists

dont like money and they dont have much of it. It symbolizes the world they have rejected for

something more authentic elsewhere. This lines them up with the have-nots and against the erosion of

cultural diversity by globalization. Accordingly, what they had to say about money until recently was the

same old story. Bill Maurer, in our conversation on the politics, pragmatics and promise of money, sums

up the story as follows:

Capitalism comes to town and suddenly all that is solid melts into air. Things fall apart. Its the end of

the world. And we already know what happens next: dispossession, exploitation, wealth flows up and soon. Yes, that is what happens. But if we say it is all there is to the kind of monetization or

commoditization associated with capitalism, well never see its other effects, when they are right in

front of our noses.

Modern anthropology had its origins in the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century. Even in the

nineteenth century, anthropologists sometimes studied stateless peoples in search of models for a

better society. We lost sight of that possible application of our knowledge in the last century. Economic

anthropology today should aim, in part, to help people manage their own economic affairs.

We could, for example, show that the numbers on their financial statements, bills, receipts andtransaction records constitute a way of summarizing their relations with society at a given time. (This is
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what I mean by calling money amemory bank ).The next step would be to show where these numbers

come from and how they might serve in building a viable personal economy. When individuals are able

to take responsibility for their own economic actions, they will understand better the social forces

impinging on their lives. Then it might become more obvious how and whyruling institutions need to be

reformed for all our sakes.

Immanuel Kant produced the first systematic text in our discipline,Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point

of View(1798). Both Kant and his pragmatic perspective have more or less disappeared from

anthropology. What is a pragmatic approach? The question is not so much How can our knowledge

provide an adequate representation of the world? but rather Can it help us to get something done that

we set out to do? Then it would matter less if it is true or not, just whether it works. The closest that my

public research has come to such a pragmatic approach has been through the study of community

currencies, although I have also found many applications for my knowledge in my own financial

practices.

I first heard of LETS, a system for trading with its own money circuit, and its inventor Michael Linton in

the mid-80s and later met him in Manchester. I spent two years around the millennium working with him

and his partner Ernie Yacub on theirOpen Moneyproject, sometimes physically, but mostly online.

Linton, an engineer, has brought immense creativity and dynamism to developing systems that are

suited to the digital age and are scalable; but he has been less successful in persuading people to adopt

them. I was supposed to disseminate the results as a writer and this made me focus on the

unacknowledged handicaps that people promoting LETS have to overcome. One of these is the

dominance of the nation-state as a stand-alone model for forming a community. Another is the deep

investment people have in a belief that the money they know is eternal.

I was a professional gambler for a number of years, and I sometimes made the mistake of trying to

explain to people how I lived. But all they wanted to know about gambling was that you lose. The only

winner is the bookie or the casino. And even the way they gambled was guaranteed to make sure that

they lost, so that they really had no alternative than to go back to work and accept the system.

When I wrote about moneys persuasive power (for Steve Gudemans Economic Persuasions), I was

thinking about LETS. Smith and Keynes changed how we think because they understood that theirs was

a rhetorical exercise before anything else. There was a time when I was more sanguine about the

immediate prospects of a breakthrough with these community currencies. In my lifetime, these

approaches may or may not actually change economic conditions for very many people. But whetherthey work or not, they are a terrific source of political education.

Just by entering a currency experiment, people get to argue about what form the money should take,

who should be in the circuit, what is its relationship with the national currency? Should the currency be

scrip or something else? But, because these things are usually conceived of as stand-alone and local,

the resulting form of association is some kind of micro nation-state. They end up being like every other

similar organization in which a few people put in a lot of time and argue about the minutes, so that the

whole thing becomes a kind of parish politics and most people get alienated from it. People who entered

these self-generated money circuits with real economic purposes get frustrated and move on. Michael

Linton knows this and for years now he has been developing multiple-currency systems using internet-based technology. But that is another story.
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It is a curious fact that complementary currency schemes seem to flourish more in rich countries than in

the poor countries that would appear to need them most. That may now be changing. Maurers Institute

for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion at UC Irvine has received a grant from the Gates

Foundation to explore, among other things, the impact of mobile telephony on poor peoples access to

and use of money. East Africa, and Kenya in particular, has recently emerged as the worlds leading

innovator in this area. Africans largely missed out on the infrastructure associated with the development

of electricity grids, but they have leaped to grasp the opportunities offered by mobile phones. These,

unlike the World Wide Web and other aspects of the digital revolution, have a built-in payment system

whose potential has been blocked in more advanced economies by entrenched financial interests.

At a time when the hardware manufacturers in the rich countries are wondering how to sell more and

fancier computers in a sated market, Kenyans have taken the lead in adapting cheap old machines for

use by the worlds poor masses. Nowhere else has the use of mobile phones for banking, commercial

and administrative purposes been taken further than here. M-PESA(short for mobile money in Swahili)

was first launched by the Kenyan affiliate of Vodafone in March 2007. It quickly captured a share of the

market for cash transfers and grew rapidly, with 6.5 million subscribers by May 2009 and 2 million daily

transactions in Kenya alone. In December 2008, a group of banks successfully lobbied for an audit of M-

PESA, in an attempt to slow down its growth; but the audit found that the service was robust.

There is a lot more to this revolution than just banking. Instead of walking to a distant town and queuing

to pay taxes and fees, often unsuccessfully, people can now pay them instantly with their mobile

phones. Relatives of the victims of road accidents in remote areas can buy blood to be sent from a

regional hospital in time to save lives. Farmers can check market prices around the country before

deciding when and where to send their produce for sale. Families dispersed by migration can keep in

touch by phone, using highly sophisticated methods at little or no cost. Now this is a financial revolutionthat anthropologists ought to have plenty to say about. And not just because it is in an exotic part of the

world.

Thats all folks. Its been a pleasure.

2009 11 21

Financial crisis

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Surfing the credit crunch with Abdul Aziz

Keith Hart www.thememorybank.co.uk

The fall of the Berlin Wall was famously heralded as the end of history, but in fact it restored a sense of

history for many of us by catapulting us back to before the Cold War and even to the origins of the

USSR in the Russian revolution. Questions that had been frozen for decades reappeared, such as

What will be the glue of the new Russian Federation?, Will Germany resume its dominance of Central

Europe?, What should be the boundaries of the European Union? and so on. The war in former
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Yugoslavia reopened the history of genocide in Europe and Serbian nationalism confronted the

complacent powers of Western Europe with an ugly reminder of their own history.

The failure of the New York investment bank, Lehman Brothers, in September 2008 triggered a financial

collapse whose ramifications are still with us. Predictions of the outcome of the ensuing global economic

crisis vary widely. Following a sustained equities rally in mid-2009, some commentators now argue that

the recession following Lehmans demise is already over and the free market ready to assume its

inexorable rise, while others talk of a double dip recession, persisting debt deflation and a recovery that

could take 25 years.

From the beginning this crisis has invited speculation about the closest analogy in the twentieth century

to our current experience. Most commentators were sure at first that we were entering a period

unprecedented since the Second World War. Roosevelt, Keynes and the other principals of the Great

Depression became familiar figures on the oped pages. Was 2008 like 1929? No. More likely, 1931 or

1933; some said 1938. Which was the greater threat, inflation or deflation? Cue in the history books

once more, since deflation had been unknown since the 1930s.

These comparisons lacked an overview of what led up to the Great Depression, namely three decades

of financial imperialism that ended in 1913 with what Churchill called The second thirty years war as its

aftermath. No, world war was not thought to be likely; but, after three decades of neoliberal

globalization, when the science of free markets ruled for ever, the shock of the credit crunch certainly

renewed the interest of the chattering classes in history. Then suddenly the apparent recovery of stock

prices emboldened even bailed out bankers to sing the praises of the market once more.

A break in economic history didoccur in 2008. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, it was claimed that the

world had entered a new stage of economic evolution to which all countries would eventually have to

conform, where money flowed without political restriction and the market penetrated everywhere. There

were a few doubters, of course, who identified the shaky foundations of the boom long before it crashed.

But it took courage then to go against the prevailing orthodoxy that all was best in the best of all worlds.

What happened next did change a lot, if not everything.

Economic growth can now be seen to have been sustained by a regime of cheap consumer credit,

especially in the United States; many banks and other financial houses, notably the insurance giant AIG,

exposed themselves to unacceptable levels of risk, particularly in the new market for credit derivatives;

these became toxic assets which were bought by taxpayers at huge cost in order to preserve the

banking system as a whole; access to loans dried up overnight, despite these government subsidies;

the leading exporters of manufactures, such as China, Germany and Japan, suffered massive

reductions in demand for their products; the newly liberated Eastern Europeans went into free fall, as

did countries like Ireland (hitherto a Celtic tiger) and Spain; despite governments printing money like

there was no tomorrow, the threat of deflation was real; business bankruptcies and rising unemployment

contributed to the economic malaise in rich and poor countries alike.

The economy, which had been understood as an eternally benevolent machine for growth, was

suddenly pitch-forked into the turmoil of history. The market was now seen to require massive state

intervention if it were to have any chance of surviving. The financial masters of the universe quicklybrought out the begging bowl and in some cases had to suffer nationalization. Anglophone governments


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11/19

Financial crisis

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The limits of naivety for the anthropology of money

Keith Hart The Memory Bank

What would happen if anthropologists, for some limited purposes, abolished the division between

academic writing and journalism that Mauss himself observed and that has prevented us from grasping

how they fed into each other at a key moment in his life? The dominant presence before the war of his

uncle, mile Durkheim, obviously contributed to this compartmentalization, as perhaps did Mausss

sexuality too. He was, after all, one person not several; and, in The Gift, he lays out a totalizing method

of approaching individuals, groups, institutions and events, so he was certainly aware of the problem.

For us, Mauss himself is a total social fact who lights up our own predicament.

My first attempt to approach money as an object of anthropological inquiry was a Malinowski lecture

given at LSE more than two decades ago (Heads or tails? Two sides of the coin, Man 1986).

Malinowski set a trend for anthropologists to dispute economic universals in polarized terms,

juxtaposing exotic facts and western folk theories, without acknowledging the influence of contemporary

history on their own ideas. My lecture had three parts which, taken together, constituted a method.

First, we should be more explicitly aware of the concrete conditions that stimulate our interest in some

abstract problems rather than others. This means asking what it is in the world as we experience it that

informs our researches, whether directly or indirectly. Second, it is no good taking potshots at vulgar

reductions of economic ideas, when the history of western economic thought is itself extremely plural,

even contradictory. A constructive reading of that intellectual history might have served Malinowskis

ethnographic analysis better than the straw man he chose to attack. Finally, when historical awareness

and a more sophisticated intellectual apparatus are combined with our disciplines standby of

ethnographic fieldwork, the resulting anthropological analysis offers a more secure foundation for critical

understanding of the world in which we live.

So I first located the problem of money in contemporary economic history, arguing that state control of

money was being undermined in the leading capitalist societies. Then I traced two strands of western

monetary theory explaining money as a token of authority issued by states or as a commoditymade bymarkets. These strands came together in the writings of Keynes. But, rather than acknowledge the

interdependence of top-down and bottom-up social organization (heads andtails), economic policy

has swung wildly between the two extremes (heads ortails?). Last I showed that the token/commodity

pair could inform a reanalysis of Malinowskis ethnography.

Anthropologists have to be capable of comparing their exotica with a more profound picture of ideas

and realities in the industrial world that sustains us. Conventional economic reasoning fails to enlighten

us because it is so unremittingly one-dimensional. The coin has two sides for a good reason both are

indispensable. Money is at the same time an aspect of relations between persons and a thing detached

from persons.Todays effort is an act ofbricolage rather than brokerage, formed from a vision of theanthropologist as a handyman who can help repair the damage done by professionals.
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Some anthropologists have drawn on this piece for their own ethnographic purposes, without embracing

world history or the theories of economists. In other words, the academic division of labour still reigns

supreme and most anthropologists prefer to stay on familiar ground rather than risk being exposed as

naive interlopers on territory made familiar through common journalism or already colonized by experts.

In Closed Systems and Open Minds (Max Gluckman editor, 1964), an anthropologist and an economist

explored the limits of naivety in social anthropology. They argued that anthropologists, given their

pretension to address humanity as a whole, are obliged to open themselves up to the full complexity of

social reality. At some stage they must seek analytical closure in order to draw simple patterns from

these open-ended inquiries; and these abstractions may often seem to be naive from the perspective of

other disciplines. Gluckman had in mind the rich texture of ethnographic encounters, whereas I was

suggesting that conjectural history, overthrown by fieldwork-based ethnography, should be rehabilitated,

even if specialists can easily show the naivety of anthropologists accounts. Specialization can be an

obstacle to the growth of knowledge; for specialists become prisoners of their expertise (Popper).

Anthropologists have long enjoyed a certain intellectual freedom that can be invigorating for the more

conventional sciences. We just have to be more explicit about how this comes about.

Michel Foucault ended his archaeology of the human sciences (The Order of Things, 1973, translation

ofLes mots et les choses, 1966) with some reflections on why psychoanalysis and social anthropology

(ethnologie) occupy a privileged position in our knowledge:

because, on the confines of all the branches of knowledge investigating man, they form a treasure-

hoard of experiences and concepts, and above all a perpetual principle of dissatisfaction, of calling into

questionwhat may seem, in other respects, to be established.

[They] are not so much two human sciences among others, but they span the entire domain of those

sciences, they animate its whole surface[They] are counter-sciences; which does not mean that they

are less rational or objective than the others, but that they flow in the opposite direction, that they lead

them back to their epistemological basis, and that they ceaselessly unmake that very man who is

creating and re-creating his positivity in the human sciences.

Foucault attributed anthropologys originality to its being both traditionally the knowledge we have of the

peoples without histories and situated in the dimension ofhistoricity, by which he meant within the

historical sovereignty of European thought and the relation that can bring it face to face with all other

cultures as well as with itself. He was sure the human sciences had reached their limit and this was

doubly true of a discipline whose premises were being undermined by the collapse of European empire.

Given the disappearance of the traditional object of social anthropology, primitive societies, we have to

find not only a new one, but also a theory and method appropriate to it. This means identifying the

historicity of our own moment, as well as complementing ethnographic fieldwork with world history,

critical philosophy and more besides.

2009 11 17

Financial crisis

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The great economic revolutions are monetary in nature (Mauss)


For Marcel Mauss, the years 1920-25 were packed and fruitful. His political party and the Left in general

had a real shot at winning power in France and did so in 1924. Two-thirds of his occasional political

pieces (crits politiques) were written in this period. He was able to relaunch his groups journal,Anne

sociologique, by the periods end, contributing to it his most famous essay, on The Gift. He suffered

some reverses at this time, including a serious illness, but remained optimistic for both political and

intellectual regeneration on a social scale that was increasingly international in scope.

He began serious work on a book dealing with the main political currents of the day, nationalism and

socialism. His interest in the American potlatch was expanded by the publication of Malinowskis

Argonauts of the Western Pacificin 1922, confirming his belief that competitive gift-exchange was

endemic in Melanesia and Polynesia, as well as elsewhere. And the Institut dethnologie was formed in

1925 with Rivet, Lvy-Bruhl and Mauss himself in charge.

In the late 1920s, things began to unravel on all fronts. Mausss personal standing as a savantgrew

inexorably; but his party suffered political reverses, its newspaper and journal folded, the cooperative

movement foundered and theAnne sociologique could not continue. Mussolinis version of the

nationalization of socialism must have raised doubts about Mausss own political programme. His

closest friend, Henri Hubert, died in 1927, compounding Mausss loss of family and colleagues during

the war.

The years 1920-25 stand apart for the energy and fulfillment they brought. Mauss himself kept a sort of

Chinese wall between his academic and political interests; so it is not so surprising that the two have

been kept apart, especially in the Anglophone world, where his political writings are virtually unknown.

He allowed himself one public attempt to bridge them, the concluding chapter ofThe Gift. Even so, the

essay itself does not provide an effective intellectual link between the two compartments of Mausss life.

When Malinowski produced his account of native adventurers in the Western Pacific, latter-day heirs to

the archaic tradition of noble heroes, his story found a receptive audience. The kula ring of the

Trobriand Islanders and their Melanesian neighbours provided an allegory of the world economy. Here

was a civilization spread across many small islands, each incapable of providing a decent livelihood byitself, that relied on foreign trade mediated by the exchange of precious ornaments. There were no

states, money or capitalists and, instead of buying cheap and selling dear, the trade was sustained by

an ethic of generosity. Homo economicus was not only absent, but revealed as a shabby and narrow-

minded successor to a world the West had lost.

Marcel Mauss was excited by all this, but he felt Malinowski had gone too far. One of his key

modifications to mile Durkheims legacy was to conceive of society as a historical project of humanity

whose limits were extended to become ever more inclusive. The point ofThe Giftis that society cannot

be taken for granted as a pre-existent form. It must be made and remade, sometimes from scratch. How

do we behave on a first date or on a diplomatic mission? We make gifts. Heroic gift-exchange isdesigned to push the limits of society outwards. It is liberal in a similar sense to the free market,
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except that generosity powers the exchange, self-interested for sure, but not in the way postulated by

economists.

Malinowskis account of the kula ring is the contested origin for Mausss discussion. The whole

intertribal kula is merely the extreme caseof a more general system. This takes the tribe itself, in its

entirety, out of the narrow sphere of its physical boundaries and even of its interests and rights. No

society is ever economically self-sufficient, least of all these Melanesian islands. So to the need for

establishing local limits on social action must always be added the means of extending a communitys

reach abroad. This is why markets and money in some form are universal, and why any attempt to

abolish them must end in catastrophe.

For this reason Mauss argued, against Malinowski in a long footnote, that the kula valuables were

money, if not the impersonal kind with which we are familiar. His famous essay needs to be juxtaposed

to his political journalism of the same period and in particular to a series of articles he wrote for his

partys newspaper, Populaire, on the exchange rate crisis of 1922-24. These have generally been

treated as being lightweight, even boring, unconnected to his academic work; but they do offer insight

into his economic ideas and hence into his arguments in The Gift, both analytical and programmatic.

The financial turmoil that Keynes predicted would be the consequence of the Versailles treaty was soon

realized. The stability of the franc was a matter of acute public concern, since it was taken to be a

measure of Frances international standing; and political panic when the franc dropped was

commonplace. The Left blamed it all on a few rich families. Mauss wrote about the exchange rate crisis

from December 1922 and returned to the issue a year later. Taken together, these articles constitute

150 out of the 700 pages assembled in crits politiques.

This financial journalism is notable on several counts. Mauss sets out in alarmist fashion, but soon

settles down into a voice of reason, seeking to steer a pragmatic course of stabilization in the national

interest. Being able to take a position on the economy was vital to political engagement: Every socialist

is obliged to have a few notions about political economy, or economic sociology as we now say. The

problems were both urgent and complex. More striking still is the tone Mauss adopts when discussing

what we would call the markets, as if he were himself an expert player. After studying the price curves,

exchange rates and money supply since the end of the war, he makes the bold assertion, which

militants and scientists must venture only very scrupulously that the dollar will float between 20 and 25

francs, but will not go much higher than that. The dollar exchange rate had been 11 francs in 1921.

Mauss concluded that panic in the markets, not fiduciary inflation, was the cause of exchange rate

depreciation. Storms were brewing from every direction: These are human phenomena at work:

collective psychology, imponderables, beliefs, credulity, confidence, all swirling about. Another striking

feature of these articles is personal attacks. Mauss insisted on pointing the finger at real persons,

especially right-wing political leaders such as Clemenceau, rather than indulge the convenient

abstractions beloved by left-wing conspiracy theorists.

An unpublished paper, A means of overhauling society: the manipulation of currencies, provides a link

between these reflections on national political economy and The Gift. Here Mauss claims, following his

colleague, Franois Simiand and anticipating Maynard Keynes, that the great economic revolutions aremonetary in nature and that the manipulation of currencies and credit could be a method of social


15/19

revolutionwithout pain or suffering. Mauss wished to give an economic content to juridical socialism.

It suffices to create new monetary methods within the firmest, the narrowest bounds of prudence. It will

then suffice to manage them with the most cautious rules of economics to make them bear fruit among

the new entitled beneficiaries. And that is revolution. In this way the common people of different nations

would be allowed to know how they can have control over themselveswithout the use of words,

formulas or myths.

2009 11 15

Financial crisis

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In the long run were all dead (Keynes)


Maynard Keynes stormed out of the Versailles treaty negotiations after his advice not to pulverize the

German economy was rejected by Lloyd-George and Clemenceau. He published a book about it in

1919, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, in which he predicted the depression that his own

theories later helped to correct. But he also made heavy bets against the German economy, selling the

deutschmark short in anticipation of its fall. Unfortunately for him, the German banks maintained an

irrational attachment to their currency throughout 1920 and he was almost bankrupted. His father,

professor of political economy at Cambridge, bailed him out by remortgaging the family home. In the

markets, as in life, timing is everything and that is the meaning of his remark about the long run. He

never speculated with his own money again (but he made Kings College, Cambridge rich in the bear

market of the 1930s).

I sold two houses in 2004-5, my own and my fathers. I was convinced that asset markets were over-

priced and heading for a bust, so I kept the money as cash and refused to invest in the speculative

instruments and mutual funds my bankers were peddling. I chose to rent rather than buy property.

Whenever the deflation came, my money would be worth a lot more. Then I watched the markets roar

ahead. Doubt crept in. What if the masters of the universe actually had found a way of transcending the

iron law, what goes up comes down? Didnt I owe it to my young daughter to put at least some of the

money into medium- and long-term investments? So I caved in and bought a chunk of mutual funds.The timing was brilliant, February 2007, just before the sub-prime mortgage crisis broke. I lost half of

what I invested in the next two years. Now I am a currency trader, switching cash between euros,

dollars, yen, sterling, Swiss francs, Norwegian krone and South African rands in moves that I hope take

advantage of the huge instability in foreign exchange markets. As the optimist who fell off a skyscraper

was heard saying, when he passed the 35th floor on the way down, So far so good.

I was asked at a conference not long ago why I am an economic anthropologist. I answered that, like

most people, I care passionately about my own economic circumstances and prospects. I study the

economy because I want to understand better my own situation in the world. I would like to be able to

protect my family from the disasters unfolding around us all. Maybe I will do no better than Keynes inthat early foray into the markets, but I can try. When I was 12 years old, I looked at my dad and thought
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I didnt want to be what he was when I grew up, a wage slave in a bureaucracy. I was committed to

entering the free professions through passing examinations, but what if I failed the exams? The only

alternative I could think of was betting on the horses, making money with money. So I became in time a

scientific gambler. It worked. I financed my higher education and two periods of unemployment that way.

But it is indescribably boring and, when given the chance, I always took an academic job, much more

interesting. Now I would rather learn and write about money than make it. But I havent lost the same

pragmatic impulse that prompted me once to learn statistics: there ought to be some application of my

knowledge to everyday concerns.

Rational models dont usually serve us well in the real world. It is worth recalling that, whereas classical

political economy embraced an objective theory of value driven by class struggle in the long run, the

marginalist revolution of the 1870s saw value as the outcome of subjective decisions made by many

actors in the short run, whatever the economists did with the idea next. Weber, Simmel and Mead took

their lead from this modernist move to launch 20th century sociology and social psychology as a project

that aimed to be grounded in what ordinary people think and do. Rationality is calculation framed as a

means-end relationship, a projection into the future based on knowledge of the past. I always thought

that it works best backwards, as rationalization, not forwards as prediction. In any case it is too laborious

for most practical purposes and useless for everyday decisions, where habit or magic in most cases just

have to do the job. We muddle through. So do the masters of the universe, as it turns out, except when

they fall flat on their ass and ask us to pick them up.

This series of blog posts is supposed to be about how anthropologists can throw light on what used to

be called the financial crisis. But now that Goldman Sachs is raking it in again and Lula is riding high

on Brazils booming economy, we are not sure whose crisis it is or even whether there is one. I have

been struck by how many of the really original analyses relevant to the crisis are by anthropologists:Gillian Tetts Fools Gold, Karen Hos Liquidated, Alexandra Ouroussoffs War on Wall Street(under

review by publishers), Horacio Ortizs The Political Anthropology of Contemporary Finance (a doctoral

thesis in French, but now coming out as articles in English). John Kay, reviewing ten books in the

Financial Times not long ago, wondered if we might be on the verge of a new synthesis involving

anthropology, history and economics.

Exciting times indeed. So why does this series of blog posts come across as dead as a dodo? I wont try

to answer that here (again). But I will post several items over the coming two weeks, maybe as often as

every 2-3 days. We need to be attuned to life, as most ethnographers are at least when they are in the

field, but our writing should reach out to more people than just other anthropologists. That meansengaging with 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 dont have to be reminded that Its the economy,

stupid!

2009 11 13

Financial crisis

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Capitalising on crisis
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17/19

Please see this article on the emergence of markets in new environmental products (e.g. carbon) in

relation to the financial crisis, as a route through which capitalism is capitalising on crisis:

Sullivan, Sian Green Capitalism, and the Cultural Poverty of Constructing Nature as Service Provider in

S Bohm & S.Dabhi eds. Upsetting the Offset: the political economy of carbon markets. Also online as a

PDF at pp. 18-27 here.

2009 11 12

Financial crisis

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Banking conferences

Dr Gillian Tett, Anthropologist and Assistant Editor, Financial Times

While I was recently reading Karen Hos excellent ethnography of Wall Street, Liquidated, I was struck

by a passage where she describes the difficulty that besets any anthropologist who is trying to conduct

research on bankers. In the venues where anthropologists used to work a few decades ago such as

remote, thirrd world societies a researcher could often simply pitch up, and observe the social group,

confident that those subjects of research were less powerful than the anthropologist. But in modern

finance, that power balance reversed: Wall Street or City bankers tend to be much more powerful than

anthropologists, and bankers will almost never let outsiders through their doors, to conduct research

(unless those aliens are management consultants conducting research which is paid for, and controlled,

by the bank itself.) Thus the idea of pitching your tent in the hall of JP Morgan is utterly ludicrous, as

Ho points out; an anthropologist would probably be ejected by security guards long before any research

occurred.

Some tenacious anthropologists have managed to duck around these constraints, usually by virtue of

getting a job inside the bank, through a mixture of subterfuge or happy accident. Ho did that (although

she later supplemented much of that research by conducting formal interviews along networks of Wall

Street contacts) Caitlin Zaloom, an American anthropologist, also gathered fascinating insider material

by working on a trading floor for a period. Meanwhile, Horacio Ortiz, an Argentinian post graduate

conducted some fascinating research on structured finance by working at three Paris-based financial

institutions.

However, for my own purposes working as a journalist with an anthropologist eye I have often used

another route to get access to the banking world: attending investment banking conferences. Every

year, the banking community stages a plethora of these events, which tend to be very ritualistic in

nature. To outsiders, these events can often appear deadly dull, if not almost pointless; indeed, that is

how some bankers themselves sometimes portray them. However, in practical terms, these investment

banking conferences play a role inside the banking system that partly echoes the function played by

marriage rituals in other social groups.

Most notably, banking conferences like marriages provide a chance for a social group to assembleiin one place, in a way that reaffirms their common identity and enabled them to forge new alliances,
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often in opposition to others. It also provides a forum for the group to restate their core assumptions and

ideas in a manner that allows the group to reproduce and disseminate a cognitive map, over time. Some

of this is done overtly, and self-consciously, with power-point presentations on a podium, or deliberate,

carefully chosen branding and marketing campaigns. However, the most powerful forms of intellectual

reproduction occur through more informal means: the gossip around the bar about bonuses (that

reinforces the dominant assumption that bigger pay is tantamount to success); the use of complex

mathematical language to discuss credit (which makes it acceptable to talk about money for hours on

end, without ever mentioning a human being); the sartorial conformity, as bankers all wear chinos and

expensive watches/ear-rings (which underlines the idea that wealth is unifying source of identity, but

only when it is not overtly displayed); the widespread use of speaker biographies (which also stress the

common educational, quasi-kinship bonds that link the group), or the use of on-the-record, or off-the-

record conventions for journalists, (which reinforce the assumption that bankers have a right to control

information flow to the outside world.)

However, the other feature which makes investment banking conferences oddly similar to marriage

rituals is that they are also one of the few occasions when outsiders have a chance to slip into the

banking world, and properly observe the interactions of the group, and the way that they discuss and

display themselves. This is not always possible: just as some weddings might be limited to a tiny group

of invited guests, some conferences will tightly control the members, and ban outsiders, such as the

media. Yet, the bar to entry can often be overcome, since investment banking conferences are so big,

and bankers are meeting away from their own, private space in the office or trading floor. So I, for one,

plan to keep attending as many of these events as possible only this year, in a symbolic nod too the

new mood of austerity, the conferences are no longer being staged in holiday resorts such as

Barcelona, Cannes, Boca Raton or Las Vegas (which used to be hot destinations of choice), but instead

in the more humdrum, serious locations of Washington, or Edgware Road, London.

2009 11 05

Financial crisis

Comments (2)

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Anthropology News: an article by our blogger

Dr Nayanika Mookherjee, Ethics Officer, ASA

See the October 2009 issue of Anthropology News on ECONOMIC CRISIS: ORIGINS includes an

article by Gillian Tett (Icebergs and Ideologies: How Information Flows Fuelled the Financial Crisis).

DownloadPDFhere.

2009 11 05

Financial crisis

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19/19

Documents

ASA Globalog. Money, Anthropology, Crisis