It is now routine for anthropologists to study those who exercise power and control wealth and status in any number of societies. Implicit in anthropology’s long-standing commitment to apprehending societies in their totality, and explicit in the call to study up, paying attention to power is just one of the routine things that anthropologists do in the course of their fieldwork. That said, many theoretical and ethical norms in the discipline are calibrated to allow researchers to both know about and protect those with relatively little power who made up much of anthropology’s original topical area of interests. By contrast, studying people who exercise power entails special ethical and theoretical consideration. This article enumerates some of those considerations, and suggests that anthropologists need to have coherent theories of social action in addition to theories of social meaning. The article also suggests that some canonical disciplinary ethical norms are inappropriate for the study of the powerful for empirical and practical reasons.

In attempts to gain a wider understanding of the social worlds they encounter, anthropologists have exhorted their colleagues to “study up” and pay attention to wealthy and powerful people, not just those at society's margins. Anthropology has met this call. However, anthropologists could stand to be more forthcoming in explaining readily generalizable research strategies for studying people who are difficult to access. This article offers a brief methodological introduction to the literature on studying up and the anthropology of finance, and then shares a sampling of failures and successes from my own two‐year research, using private equity investors as one case of accessing an elite network. I suggest anthropologists are best served in finding multiple public sites and building informant networks with people from these sites.

This article makes use of theories of humor and play to analyze a corpus of jokes private equity investors tell about the work that they do. Private equity investors, at the time of a field project I conducted from spring 2012 through summer 2014, managed about US$3.5 trillion in mostly other people's money, to buy and sell whole companies as investments. By just about any measure, they're wealthy and powerful (they have lots of resources and can make many other people do things). I suggest that analyzing private equity investors' jokes and laughter allows us a way to understand what they think about the wealth and power they cultivate and the inequality they enable. I further suggest that private equity investors, in many ways, are ambivalent about the justification for their social status. In turn, my analysis and observations offer a critique of too rigid theories about the nature of present social inequality.

In the economists' old conception of a market, perfection would arrive when all participants had complete knowledge. However, economists and psychologists have lately realized that ignorance and bias more accurately describe the state of human knowledge even around those hallowed moments of transactional decision making. In these new academic stories, these models of irrationality and bias often take the form of basic cognitive features or evolutionary mal-adaptations. However, it's just, as is often the case, that there is also a historically specific story about local culture to be told about ignorance. This paper will report back from fieldwork conducted with contemporary, computerized stock traders, develop a typology of the things they say they don't know, and then suggest what this has to do with some of the more durable features and behaviours of contemporary financial markets.

This article suggests that it is advantageous for social scientists to deliberately depart from functionalist theories seeking to explain the expansion of financial instruments and logics across social life. Rather, we identify three causes of financialization from three extant clusters of scholastic activity: an organic political economy that sees finance expanding as a product or by‐product of larger state‐ and imperial‐level political struggles, a relational sociology that sees the ways that finance expands by becoming another medium for expressing and constraining social relationships, and a cultural analysis that observes the increasing redefinition of discursive and material practices as financial. Across this larger discussion, we introduce and situate the contributions to this journal's special issue on financialization.