October 2009 • Anthropology News

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K N O W L E D G E E X C H A N G E

K N O W L E D G E E X C H A N G E

Embarking on Financial Industry ResearchA Response to Anthropologists’ Common Methodological Concerns

Horacio Ortiz LAIOS/IIAC (EHESS-CNRS)

As recent publications show, anthropologists can examine contemporary finance from a wide variety of angles. Potential topics include the practices of public and private professionals who deal with financial regulation and mone-tary policy, and the work of educators and the press to produce and reproduce legitimate financial imaginaries. Accessing relevant field sites and subjects is fairly straightforward and internships with financial profes-sionals during PhD research have produced extremely rich descrip-tions and insights into finan-cial organizations and employee practices (see Zaloom’s Out of the Pits and Godechot’s Working Rich). Another approach is to study manuals, documents of financial analysis, and regu-lation discussions published by governmental bodies (see MacKenzie’s An Engine, Not a Camera). Although conducting research only through interviews may be misleading—as financial professionals are often trained to develop mainstream explana-tory and justificatory discourses that tell little about the actual organization of work—one can combine interviews with participant-observa-tion, even within the professional associations that regulate financial practice. Despite all of these potential field sites and modes of research, however, anthropologists often find work in financial industries intimidating. Here I address common concerns noted by anthropologists interested in this area of research.

Anthropologists often seem put off by obscure and technical financial industry language and imaginaries. Further, they frequently see econ-omists as using concepts such as “maximi-zation” and “marginal utility” to constitute a homogenous field that spreads from economic knowledge to financial practice, leaving little space for the study of social relations to which anthropologists are accustomed. They wrongly assume that all financial professionals do is enact neoliberal discourse turned into coherent technical tools, and that no nuanced knowl-

edge of how these tools function is necessary. There are certainly many concepts and tech-niques that anthropologists must know in order to understand the procedures of, for example, a fund manager the way the professional under-stands them, and acquiring this knowledge is both necessary and possible. It is no different than, for instance, understanding the imagi-naries that define the specific qualities of an object that circulates in a kula ring, and the way they are related to specific religious, moral and political imaginaries.

The terms “investor” and “efficiency” are examples of key concepts that define impor-tant aspects of contemporary finance, from the justification of deontology to the concrete definition of the variables in formulae that are used in finance every day. These terms have also belonged to detailed developments in political philosophy for at least the last two centuries, and are present in many regula-tory and political discourses concerning credit relations. Anthropologists can study them as part of the imaginaries that effectively orga-nize the everyday of those credit relations. In fact, this is what Bill Maurer did when studying offshore regulatory rationales in “Cyberspatial Properties: Taxing Questions about Proprietary Regimes” (in Humphrey and Verdery’s Property in Question).

Thus, some of anthropology’s canonical concepts and questions can be a good way to start analyzing finance. At least since Mauss and Polanyi, anthropologists have analyzed the

circuits of credit relations, the concepts that organize them, and how both are strongly linked to specific social hierarchies with particular moral, political and religious discourses (see Hart and Ortiz, “Anthropologists in the Financial Crisis,” Anthropology Today, 24[6]). Foucault, for example, tried to map the political and moral philosophies that define and legitimize the orga-nization and regulatory procedures of institu-tions, described as the “art of governing.”

Additionally, when studying contemporary finance, anthropologists are also faced with new phenomena, which call for new concepts and methodological tools. For instance, finan-cial flows in any bank, pension fund, mutual fund, insurance company, or bond issuing state are concretely linked to other financial flows elsewhere. This relates to the modalities of growth of commercial relations and political developments of the last 30 years. It is also concretely observable in the procedures that financial professionals have to compare sources and objects of investment within a “universe of investment” that encompasses a very wide range of more or less tradable financial assets geographically spread throughout the whole world. This distribution is both concentrated and fragmented in specific assets and places. Thus, the political space defined by the struggles around the distribution of credit by contempo-rary finance is global, and there is no specific institution where these struggles come to be represented and representable. “Globalization” is too broad a concept to account for the speci-ficities of this development, which challenge traditional views of scope and scale, as well as uses of the term “political.”

In studying financial industries, anthropolo-gists face the challenging and fascinating task of observing and analyzing a growing field of social relations that is crucial to the everyday lives of people across the globe. Studying the practices of financial professionals demands that one clar-ifies specific ethical concerns about “studying up” and engaging critically with institutions of power that also touch the everyday lives of anthropologists themselves. Studying financial relations more generally also implies mapping and clarifying a global political realm that is in the making. In this way, anthropologists may be more than observers: defining the object of study in ways that can change the object itself, as their descriptions can be mobilized by different actors (eg, financial strategists, regulatory bodies, polit-ical activists) who are themselves struggling to map this global system. These realizations call for both a careful reflexivity and also an increase in the amount of anthropological research done, given the dramatic importance of this field in the world today.

Horacio Ortiz is an associated researcher at the LAIOS-IIAC (EHESS-CNRS). He holds an MA in philosophy from the New School for Social Research and PhD in social anthropology from the Ecole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). His research is on contempo-rary finance.

In studying financial industries,

anthropologists face the challenging

and fascinating task of observing and

analyzing a growing field of social

relations that is crucial to the everyday

lives of people across the globe.