Week 11- Class Discussion

This week’s readings threw up many questions on the shifts or new forms of capitalism, particularly its speculative form, and the creation of new instruments which feed into this system. The central question that structured much of the discussion was whether there has been a fundamental shift in the core concepts of capitalism.

The emergence of the specualtive market since the 80s highlights the fact that we have moved from the Marxian approach of dialectical materialism to a point where the material basis of value creation has become marginal. This of course has been greatly enabled by newer forms of technology that render materiality obsolete. At the same time, the speculative nature and ‘hype’ that enables it to persist seems to have varying effects on materiality, as evident from the DÁvella reading on Argentina and our discussion on the value of land and gold in India. Anthropological attention to these shifts and developments has thus been on account of the recognition that while speculation is premised on dematerialisation and intangibility, it still foregrounds the problem of abstraction or materiality/immateriality of value, and the social registers within which they operate.

Some of the issues raised in our discussion on speculative finance was the role of faith and belief that actors depend on to function in the system. Both Miyazaki’s arbitrageurs and Rajan’s genomic capitalists ultimately root their practices in an element of faith, even if, as in the case of the arbitrageurs, they recognise it as illusory. With Rajan’s genomic capitalists, the element of faith works with a temporal aspect because they are selling a vision, while not really making anything, of a product in the future. In fact, temporality was a crucial aspect of the speculative turn that capitalism had taken given its emphasis on linking the past, present, and future accumulation of value and resources.

The discussion on faith and temporality brought us to the question of ‘casino capitalism’ in which capitalists are no longer dealing with rational decision making but the ability to create hype, and subsequently value. This seemed similar to Marx’s concept of ‘fictitious capitalism’.

The transition from ‘commodity capitalism’ to ‘casino capitalism’ is paralleled by the transition to a 'risk society', where there is a shift from fixed structures and returns to calculated risks, not just in economic but personal life as well. In fact, risk seems to the fundamental trope of modern life.

Apart from temporality, questions over the role of knowledge as being crucial to success in the market were also raised. While most actors believe in the efficient market hypothesis and the assumption that knowledge is freely available (hence the efficiency), the fact is that knowledge too is an elusive commodity and access to it is rooted in structures of power.

An important point that Maurer’s article raised was the fact that law and regulation were constantly 'catching up' with developments of the financial market. This highlighted for the class the dynamic nature of the market which is also a product of many actors/actions, thus making it difficult to predict or explain.

In the context of law and regulation, there was also a brief discussion on the ethics of speculative finance. With examples from the recent recession, it was observed that the culture of the financial market was to push traders to take more and more risk to garner larger profits. Skirting the boundaries of legality had thus become normalised and the lines between legal- illegal and licit-illicit blurred.

We also discussed Maurer’s complex tracing of the history of property, from materiality to abstraction. In this narrative, the role of the corporation and subsequent separation of management from owners was highlighted to show the emergence of a new form of capitalism. We no longer have a clearly identifiable proprietor who is both accountable for the enterprise and the bearer of profits and loss. Instead we have a nameless- faceless corporation where there is no single individual who can be held liable. In this context, the case of Union Carbide and the inability to hold anyone person accountable was highlighted. Further, the 'owner' or risk takers incurs the loss while the manager (control) reaps the profit. In fact, the class acknowledged that we live in a time where everyone is a capitalist given that we are all invested in corporations. Even holding a bank account implies that we are part of the system thus demonstrating the extent of the hegemony of capitalism. As a result of this, the traditional Marxist distinction between owners and workers has been replaced and mobilisation/revolution seems extremely unlikely when it is counter-productive not to support the system. Another paradox of the system raised in class was the nature of credit scores in the US where scores were proportionate to level of debt incurred and not the ability to pay debt back as witnessed in the subprime fiasco.

While we are left with many unanswered questions, what we do take away from this collection of readings is the role of anthropological enquiry in the field of finance. The anthropological intent at one level is to understand how actors relate to and re-create these systems of abstraction, as shown by Miyazaki and the case of the arbitrageurs. On a much larger level, as shown by Maurer and Rajan, we must also seek to unpack the system itself; its transitions and the role of knowledge, ethics, subjectivity and dispositions that accompany it.

-Keya and Savitha

Week 11- Financial markets, speculative capital, and risk

Week 11: Financial markets, speculative capital, and risk

This week’s readings revolve around new practices in financial markets such as speculation, risk, insurance, bio-capital, and how they have redefined the core constructs of capitalism.

We start with Maurer’s article and how he traces the evolution of what property has come to mean, in the current financial market and economy. As the name of his article suggests, conceptions of property began with ideas of Locke and Hegel, which while slightly different (the role of will), define property as that which exists as ‘things in themselves’ - there was an emphasis on the tangibles that constituted property. Through the historical account since then, Maurer traces how this conception was critiqued in various ways, resulting in a complete materialisation of property. This materialisation has reached a point where the need for ‘seeability’ has been replaced by complete intangibility.

In the course of this historical account, Maurer also traces the role of the joint stock corporation and the securitisation of ‘property’. This is the juncture of separation between control and ownership, and the ironic situation where stockholders are reduced to a ‘wage earners’ although they are ‘owners’ and risk takers. Profit ultimately accrues to the corporation, which is actually the manager of the risk. It is with the nature of securitisation and financial markets that risk and insurance come to replace rights and property.

An interesting point that Maurer highlights is how both Smith and Marx recognise the fetishism that operates within capitalism; while Smith sought to free capitalism from fetishised objects, Marx sought its destruction.

DÁvella's article offers a counter-narrative to Maurer’s claims of property becoming increasingly intangible. As a result of the turbulent economic history of Argentina, DÁvella is showing us quotidian practices that are drawn upon by actors to cobble together investments that are grounded in a need for re-materialisation.  He argues for understanding an ecology of investment by which he means the emergent web of relationships between person and thing, and thing with thing. In other words, it is important to document why gold, silver, bricks and dollar were objects in which people chose to invest. Also, it is necessary to understand the relationship between dollars and pesos, dollars and bricks, and dollars (in Argentina) and dollars (in the US) too. In the process of recreating the ecology of investment, Maurer also draws our attention to the asymmetries of circulation, of money held in banks and as cash.

Like D’Avella, Miyazaki also a highlights a case of how actors or participants are making meaning of the economy and their role in it. He shows us how Japanese arbitrageurs see themselves as distinct from speculators and hedgers (which is also the textbook understanding). It appears that arbitrageurs are involved in what are basically speculative practices, and this is precisely why they require the textbook definition of their role for a sense of difference, authentication and legitimacy. These arbitrageurs claim to work towards market efficiency and weed out ‘anomalies’; and yet, it is based on these anomalies that they make their profits.  They seem to have a ‘self-closing propensity’ where they are seeking to rule out the very conditions necessary for them to survive, and make profits. Given this situation, there is need for them to believe the textbook definition of arbitrage to introduce ambivalence into their role in the market (without which they would collapse). Miyazaki makes an interesting claim when he says this is a case where actors seek to confirm to ideal types.

 Sunder Rajan offers us, through a case study of life-sciences in the United States and India, an instance of the speculative turn that capitalism has taken. Genomics works on the same premise as speculation- with the future potential for illness or risk. In trying to understand contemporary capitalism, he traces the creation of the sovereign consumer and experimental subjects in the genomic project, in USA and India respectively. This mirrors unequal global power relations and the bio-political trajectory that capitalism has enabled.

Finally, Gustav Peebles’ article addresses the question of how anthropology has dealt with credit and debt in different societies. He argues that anthropological exploration should not be limited by either moralistic or economic aspects of credit and debt. He advocates the need to examine how the credit/debt nexus produce social ties, allegiances, enmities, and hostilities, rather than making normative Maussian pronouncements concerning credit as liberating and debt as debilitating.

To this end, he reviews various anthropological texts which have engaged with credit and debt outside of its moralistic connotations, such as Strathern who shows that debtors are not necessarily needy; rather, new needs maybe created to promote the need for new debts.

Peebles’ emphasises the need to focus on social, spatial and temporal boundaries which credit and debt relations construct. He relies on Munn’s notions of time-space to demonstrate how credit and debt relations configure people’s past, present and future. He also highlights the need for examining the intertwining of credit/debt and bodies whether it is through Chu’s work on the transnational flow of Chinese migrants and the debt slavery into which they enter or Munn’s idea of bodies with credit moving through space-time and bodies in debt constricted within the same realm.

The question that these collections of readings raise for us is whether these new faces of capitalism are fundamentally different? For 

e

g. Is the creation of the experimental subject that Rajan writes about, any different from what primitive accumulation does for the supply of labour? Can we draw a parallel to Anna Tsing in terms of how capitalism is tapping into an already existing reserve (unemployed mill workers as potential experimental subjects)?

While Maurer’s emphasis on the intangible form of property is valid, it seems limited to speculative capitalism. Consideration of real-estate would perhaps indicate a clear tangibility to the  discourse on property. Even though it maybe argued that speculation often determines value of real estate, the Argentinian case demonstrates that value might actually lie in the concreteness of ‘bricks’- clearly tangible.

Finally, we were also wondering whether actors outside of the speculative markets might also function on contradictions, or recognition of contradictions, similar to the arbitrageurs in Miyazaki's article?

Keya and Savitha

Notes for Week 9: Money and Multiplicities of Values

We discussed that both Simmel and Marx write about money when it becomes a universal concept but Marx situates the question of money in the larger frame of capitalism. Simmel and Weber do a broader sociology of money, and how it stands in for industrial economy, new society and modernization. Simmel did a phenomenology of money looking at money itself, its symbolic meanings and as a category through which we make sense of world. While Simmel recognizes that there is no real objective world, he argues that categories such as money are the objectivities we impose on the world to get a grip on it. 

Maurer’s article is a review in which he is offering a broad review of the intellectual debates that have happened around the concept of money across disciplines to arrive at a critique of anthropology of money. He has tried to look at contemporary finance and critique western folk theory of money within anthropological literature. Maurer subscribes to the semiotic, symbolic and performative aspects of money. Maurer also opines that many anthropologists have missed the nuances of the way money operates and functions by subscribing to the folk theory of money.

We elaborately discussed on what gives money its value and found out from Hart that most theories and theorists either place it in market exchange or state power. This dichotomy has found its way into most anthropological debates on the value of money. Hart’s article is an attempt to escape and resolve this dichotomy looking at heads and tails as two aspects which give money its value depending on its operation. It breaks this dichotomy and questions the assumption that modern societies are fundamentally different from the primitive societies. Hart shows this by introducing another layer to the complexity of the question of money by discussing money in marginal spaces and stateless societies and how their functioning is not fundamentally different from monetary societies. Hart is also of the opinion that there is a monetarist double moment in Simmel which equates money with quantification and uniformism which effects in singularization and individualization of societies.

We further discussed the cultural biography of money and the regimes of value through which it circulates. Some points discussed include: how money gets incorporated in smaller economies in different ways and acquire different symbolic load and how we cannot have a single theory of value and money though the impulse is to achieve that which since the 90s. We also discussed the question of morality in relation to money and its multiple values. The question that we were left with was - are these articles again restaging the nostalgia for older times/days by being debating the question of value of money within an evaluative framework. A few of us felt the articles chosen for the class, especially by High and others do it do it differently as in – it does not come across as yearning for older times, but they try to show how our own worldviews frame the way in which we come to attribute symbolic value to money.

-Rashmi & Maithreyi

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Session 9: Money and multiplicities of values - Some questions

The readings for this session can be seen as lying at the intersections of the disciplines of economics and anthropology. Anthropological treatment of the questions that are usually understood through the disciplinary lens of economics encourages us to challenge some of the basic conceptual assumptions with which economics as a discipline operates. This challenge brings us back to the questions we started with, about ‘where does value lie?’, especially when we consider a symbolic object such as money (that does not seem to have any intrinsic ‘use value’ of its own). And in the set of essays for this class, we think the various authors are grappling with this question, particularly in the context of the increasingly complex, mathematically abstracted game of numbers of global finance capital and economy today, in which value seems all the more ephemeral and fleeting. Two large questions looming through the readings are: how does money come to become a general equalizer? And where does money’s power to equate widely differing objects (sometimes even morally fraught, such as children or sex) come from? (As Jane Guyer and Simmel provocatively argues, it may not just be from its ability to quantify and represent a particular quality or attribute in two widely different objects in numerical ratios, in certain cases at all. For pointing to the case of Atlantic African trade, Guyer argues, it may in fact be based on a completely different system of evaluation that can range from ordinal ranking to ‘tropic concepts’).    

But in the range of ways in which money finds its means and backing, we are left perhaps with more doubts than answers about what really provides money with this power? As Hart would have it, is it from the state backing of its authenticity, and the market which makes it a possible medium of exchange? Or as Marx and Simmel would have it, is it from its power to abstract and commensurate and order disparately different objects on a single scale? Or as Maurer (partly shows) and High points out, due to the social meanings we embed it with – the way in which these numerical calculations draw on moral significance or affective qualities that also similarly become a measure of our individual lives itself?

Whether we have a clearer answer to these questions or not, what the essays together do is destabilize the notions of uniformity and permanence associated with money, and  bring out the multiplicity of meanings and values it acquires as it circulates through different spheres of exchange, passing different hands.  This is as much true of the modern money markets and financial capitalism, as it is of primitive societies or traditional economies that are introduced into the network of modern money. As Jane Guyer tries to argue, in a complexly interconnected world, money can acquire several different meanings, and can perform several different functions, from being a reserve of wealth and value in its hard form, to playing the role of a medium of exchange in its soft form. While the former gets more and more abstracted from the real world of transactions and appears to gain its power and significance through the meanings imbued by increasingly complex mathematical calculations, and technological wizadry, she points to how soft currencies are materially constituted by real world political rankings, perceptions of stability of nations and national currencies, and the indeterminate relations between these different spheres of valuation (‘hard’, and ‘soft) along with everyday transactions of conversions and conveyances. Similarly, High tries to show us how currency or money is not a neutral exchange medium but accumulates conflicting and contestable meanings depending on the perceptions of people. Thus the article shifts the logic of money from the domain of ‘economic’ to that of ‘cultural’, and in the process also shows how even fiat money can be challenged through local meanings and interpretations. Thus, this again brings to centre the question of what power or how does money come to acquire its value?

Hart’s essay tries to also contribute to this dissolution of the certainty of the economic power of money, backed by state authority. The central preoccupation in Hart’s theoretical conceptions of value of money across disciplines and schools of thought that show it as either emanating from the fiat of state diktat or from the commodity exchange in market. Two sides of the coin – heads or tails become metaphors to capture a series of theoretical conceptions that line up with either of the one. He tries to further problematize this division by introducing an additional element of stateless societies into the question of value in money. Thus, he thinks through this question along a temporal continuum with stateless societies and their logic of money as holding the clues for a better understanding of the nature of money in the contemporary times.

As Maurer and High note, the materiality of money, and these socially embedded ways in which money comes to be understood, evaluated and used, comes to fore only during points of crisis (like the financial scandal of 2008; or the post-Suharto crisis in Indonesia when artists claimed the right, alongside the state, in symbolising money), but which otherwise finds its strength, like with Melanesian exchange, through its hidden qualities, its magical effects. These ‘magical effects’ are perhaps what Simmel refers to as the psychological experience of valuation that is completely delinked from and can exist separately from the real world.

But despite these various ways in which we can see how money is embedded socially, Maurer asks why do we still carry on with the foundational myth of anthropology and economics about the depersonalising and abstractive qualities of money? He asks why do we become enamoured by the infinite mathematical regressions effected on the way finance capital functions today, as having a power of its own? Perhaps as an antidote to such criticism, most of the essays for this class perform an interesting feat, in bringing the ground level practices to question the fundamental assumptions underlying the macro level economics. Through such attempts, they point to the importance of seeing how  we perpetuate the myth of money; but also as and push us, as Maurer  does, to question when and when is it not possible for money to achieve this abstraction?  

- Rashmi & Maithreyi

 

Summary of Week 7 discussion (Keya and Savitha)

Week 7

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Discussion on Commoditisation and Commodity Circulation

The discussion began with questioning whether a material culture approach neglects the social conditions/circumstances within which objects are produced. With regard to Appadurai’s arguments, some of us wondered whether he was making a case for agency, or privileging action over structure.

There was some disagreement over whether Appadurai was reversing or reworking Simmel’s emphasis on exchange. Is he shifting the focus to the object rather than social relations that mark moments of exchange, or is he claiming that it is the object that determines value and not exchange?

An interesting insight gained through Appadurai’s approach is the idea of commodities with meanings. The fact that certain objects lend themselves to political manipulation more than others, reflect their socially inscribed meanings. For instance, Gandhi’s use of khadi was strategic.

While discussing Kopytoff in relationship to Appadurai, the class generally agreed that Appadurai seems concerned with social life in a commodity, and Kopytoff focuses on the commodity in social life. Is Kopytoff’s approach more clearly representative of the material culture approach (in documenting the biography of objects)? One question posed at this stage of the discussion was whether the material culture approach privileges luxury goods, over regular everyday objects.

The challenge with a material culture approach seems to be how the ‘social’ is to be accounted for. In this context, some questions were raised about Appadurai’s understanding of the commodity. Is he working within a Marxist framework or adopting a different direction? He claims to be working with a criticism of the Marxist understanding of commodity but the class didn't seem entirely convinced. Further, there seemed to be some confusion over how Appadurai defined a commodity vis a vis a a 'good' or 'product' - something Callon does better in his essay.

Kopytoff, through his distinction between singularization and commoditization, tries to account for what can and cannot be commoditized. Culture seems to be presented in this analysis for what accounts for singularization or non-commoditisation. It is within this frame that the distinction between people and objects is made, with human bodies or substances resisting commoditization.

An observation made in the discussion was the importance of knowledge in consumption practices. Without understanding the ‘value’ of product A and product B, one would not be able to partake in its consumption. Does this not mean that without the social fabric, objects have no meaning?

At this point, Anna Tsing is relevant as she argues that different actors can have differing sets of knowledge about objects, such as the matsutaki mushrooms.  In processes of consumption, production and circulation, different actors attribute differing meanings to the mushrooms. At the picking stage, for instance, the refugees and veterans see mushrooms differently.

An important point of discussion that emerged from Tsing (despite two different essays having been read by some of us), was how supply chain capitalism co-opts non-capitalist transactions within its fold. There were some questions about whether this reflected the possibility of some transactions remaining outside the control of global capital, or  if all transactions have ultimately been subsumed by the capitalist system?

A point of debate was what Tsing meant by ‘overcoming theoretical orthodoxy’. Did it mean capitalism had a less violent side to its accumulation, or that different actors within the system may interpret their positions differently? In the process of attributing different meanings to their situation in the capitalist economy, are actors exercising some form of agency? Does the systematic finding of new avenues to tap into labour and natural resources, apart from primitive accumulation, mean that the system has become less violent?

At this juncture Callon's article on economy of qualities was also discussed, particularly the argument of how consumers are now part of the production process becoming 'prosumers'. Consumers are no longer passive recipients of commodities but through various forms of ICT and continuous interaction with producers are now influencing production choices and processes. Some of the questions raised during the discussion included whether there is a greater fetishisation in products as a result of the involvement of the consumer? Isn’t it making the consumer more and more disassociated from processes of production? Fair trade labels for instance seem to have created a ‘brand- value’, removed from actual production processes.

 We concluded with Miller's essay that summed up the trends and approach of material culture and the the shift of focus to consumption. Why did this shift occur? Commoditization as an idea becomes important in the 80’s when the west experienced a period of excessive consumption. Further, this was also the period where anthropologists of the west began looking at their own societies; and began to realise that consumption marks capitalism as much as production and social relations.