Finance and Financiers

22nd January 2019

LECTURE
● Moral outrage - start asking questions
Part 1: How finance became important
Finance:
● The management of money
● Centred around investment and speculation
● Credit, debt, interests, contracts
● Making money with money
The rise of Finance:
● Increasingly important for national economies and individual livelihoods
● Financial discipline keeps countries policies in check
● The growth of finance goes hand in hand with the globalization of production
● Growth of global competition, deindustrialization of Western economies
Part 2: how anthropology of finance has approached studied of finance and financialization
Part 2: ‘Other’ financial cultures

CLASS
Zaloom
● looks at performativity
● Social dynamics vs abstract logics
● Trading floor
● Foucault - culture of surveillance, everyone’s performance is scrutinised

Ho
● Bankers
● Actions
● Culture of Bonuses
● Habitus (Bourdieu)
● Liquidity of labour - bc bonuses are unregulated there’s gendered/racialised divisions and
employees have no loyalty to the firm, they’re ready to jump ship and go to another job.

Foucault and Bourdieu

● Poststructuralism - taking structure and looking at the way its enacted in daily life. So the
structure here is capitalism and the world of finance
● Bodily practice - formed and reformed

Bonuses + money is how Ho and Zaloom look at the ethnographic level about uncertainty and risk and
how that forms subjectivities
Difference between wall street bankers and traders:
● WSB’s are dealing with people’s money, traders are using their own money. This fact shapes
subjectivities of people working there

Dealing with subjectivities is dealing with ethics (if you’re Foucault)

Palomera - Spain
● STATE+Media+Law = more homeownership
● Access to credit - cross guarantors, superficial social ties being created, desperation
● New migrants seeing new homeownership and wanna jump on bandwagon so they have to have
strangers to be guarantor which challenges relationship of trust that a guarantor is meant to
represent. Migrants are precarious borrowers
● Asset bubble - vicious cycle
○ Fast pace
○ Short term
○ Prioritised
● Social and moral implications when financial system fails → scapegoat, xenophobia

Krige
● Men in Soheto, 7 in a group getting savings to prosper financially
● ‘Making money work for us’
● Post apartheid!! Liberal reform. Rising black elite
● Social solidarity
● Humanising finance
● Peer pressure - marriage
● Savings clubs
● Different cultural ways of approaching finance

The overarching values that people are attempting through being in capitalism is felt in different ways for
example from pre-existing kinship logics.
Draws on niche of gender and kinship relations