The Anthropology of Money and Finance: Between Ethnography and World History

Abstract

Abstract:We review here recent developments in the anthropology of money and finance, listing its achievements, shortcomings and prospects, while referring back to the discipline's founders a century ago. We take our departure from the work of Marcel Mauss and Karl Polanyi, both of whom combined openness to ethnographic research with a vision of world history as a whole.Since the 1960s, anthropologists have tended to restrict themselves to niche fields and marginal debates. From the 1980s the anthropological study of money and ethnographies of finance especially have taken off. Despite taking on new objects and directions, anthropologists still find it difficult to connect their situated analyses with global processes and world history. We propose some conceptual and empirical directions for research that would seek to overcome these limitations by integrating ethnography more closely with human history, while stressing the importance of money in shaping world society and in attempts to reform it.

Scripting development through formalization: accounting for the diffusion of village savings and loans associations in Tanzania

“…Sociological theories associate ritualization with institutional isomorphism through the mimetic replication of formal organizations (DiMaggio & Powell ; Meyer & Rowan ) or as a vehicle for the creation of modern organizational forms in response to cultural globalization (Meyer ; Strang & Meyer : 503). An ethnographically situated analysis of the extension of village savings associations provides an opportunity to explore how people organize new social arrangements in emergent institutional fields created through the conjunction of development programming and financialization (Hart & Oritz : 476). Self‐organized savings associations adopt the organizational properties of ritual to generate and sustain autonomous local institutions (Handelman : 9).…”

Antropología Política De Las Finanzas Y Antropología Del Dinero

“…Muchos análisis antropológicos sobre lo que ocurre dentro de las empresas de la industria financiera se ven ante la dificultad de establecer un lazo entre lo que se observa y una circulación de dinero cuya geografía es global y por ello imposible de contrastar a través del trabajo de campo (Hart & Ortiz, 2014). Ello implica que los antropólogos que llevan a cabo estas observaciones necesitan situarlas dentro de un diálogo interdisciplinario con la economía heterodoxa en particular (Montagne & Ortiz, 2013).…”

Finance beyond function: Three causal explanations for financialization

“…In contrast to mechanical engineering, the "laws" of finance are not ahistorical and universal; how finance operates is contingent on social structures, such as the legal, regulatory, and political environments (cf. Hart and Ortiz 2014). Even on a metaphoric level, finance is dissimilar to a technology that can be optimally applied to solve similar social problems in different societies.…”