Abstracts of papers to be presented
For complete papers click here [restricted access]
The Underside of Formality: Navigating Documents and the Wage in a Migrant Workforce
Maxim Bolt (University of Birmingham)
Documents and wages are central to the infrastructure through which formal workforces are constituted and measured. This paper examines both in terms of their social productivity, and the everyday forms of circulation they precipitate. It develops Jane Guyer’s exploration of formality as a patchwork of plural ‘formalizations’, whose fixity and rule-boundedness are uneven. And it explores the materiality and the pragmatics of paperwork and pay in the context of this unevenness. The paper focuses on the margins of South Africa, a country usually depicted in terms of its robust formal sector. On the border with Zimbabwe, thousands of farm workers are employed on permanent and seasonal contracts. While white farmers engage regularly with state and corporate agencies, black workers’ lives are shaped by cross-border mobility, and dislocation born of the Zimbabwean crisis. Connections to officialdom are fragments of formality, and cash wages are difficult to store in this migrant-labour setting. But documentation and pay also offer possibilities for navigating a transient world of strangers. Workers learn to entrust money to more senior workers – an appeal for patronage that extends beyond safe storage. And they learn to hop between documents, mobilising hierarchical relationships as they convert gradually from less to more durable forms of official identity. In the shifting sands of crisis and insecurity, employees attempt to gain traction through circuits of money and the constellation of fixed points that official and semi-official documents appear to represent. It is this navigation through diverse social relationships that underlies the infrastructure of formality.
Economic Metaphors and the Reality of Economy
Benoit de l’Estoile (École Normale Supérieure)
It is commonplace among social scientists to use analytic terms borrowed from the economic realm to describe social phenomena:notions such as ‘monopoly of violence’, ‘linguistic market’ or ‘market of salvation goods’, ‘social capital’, moral entrepreneurs, ‘declining rate of symbolic profit’, etc. By implication, these metaphoric uses assume not only that the economic language offers more powerful tools for describing the world, but also that the economy constitutes a deeper, « more fundamental » level of reality. The very reality of «the economy » as being the « bottom line » of human life remains taken for granted. I will challenge this assumption from both an ethnographic and a theoretical prospective.Based on an ethnographic inquiry in former sugarcane plantations in the Northeastern region of Brazil, I will discuss the way various actors make use or not of an economic framework to describe their situation and actions. Theoretically, I will explore the Greek notion of oikonomia, « government of the house », as potentially offering an
alternative framework from which we can suspend our ontological belief in « the economy » and question its reality.
The popular economy and the “Real”
Verónica Gago (Universidad de Buenos Aires) and Alexandre Roig (Universidad Nacional de San Martín)
A number of words are found alongside the term economy: real, financial, social, solidarity, popular. Each one in turn sets up a category with its own actors whose use of words seeks to create a world of specific reference both scientific and political. Each of them names a categorization principle for practices, institutions and interpretations of the world which falls short of providing mutually exclusive definitions to match the strictly segmented order of the social. We know the meaning of the financial impact on industry (with every financial crisis we witness the closure of industries), and the productive dimension of the stock markets (how information about levels of employment in Wall Street impacts on the financial risk). We know that their symbolic devices articulate the moral order of the popular, the social, and the solidarity.
What is the use of these categories? We might look upon them simply as native categories, reconsider their genealogy and analyze them critically. And yet, if we only submitted them to reflective conceptual scrutiny we would lose sight of their being the expression of the economy as a phenomenon. Our discursive reflection would thus ignore the fact that those adjectives speak for those who use them as well as of their effect on the practices and institutions involved.
From a practical reflective perspective, we attempt an analysis of popular economy both as a native category and an analytical tool. We will look into its articulation with the real, financial, social and solidarity economy seeking to address its specificity. Since this category arises directly from the political sphere, we will focus on the processes of abstraction and moralization of economic relations at the very core of popular economy based on the results of ethnographic research on money and finance relations in the popular sector in Argentina. We propose to study the social categories and relations that arise in different kinds of exchange and production in those spaces.
Through our analysis of the connection with the production of the common, the forms of government, abstraction and moralization of the popular economy we will address the ontologized ways of thinking about the “real”.
The Real Economy: Past, Present and Emergent
Jane I. Guyer
The concept of the real economy is several centuries old, to indicate the correspondence between the values expressed in market demand and the money price of the goods, under national currency systems. In the 20th century, this relationship was formalized, to produce indices of national standards of living, rates of inflation, and to contribute to the calculation of GDP, for comparative international purposes monitored by the International Financial Institutions. In recent years, the concept of a class of economies defined and ranked as “emerging economies (and markets)” has been developed within the financial sector, largely as an index for private investment purposes. In this paper, I examine certain literature about “emerging markets”, particularly to assess how the old theme of inflation and the value of the currency figures in judgments about the future, and how, in particular, the “near future” (defined time horizons) is weighed and measured.
The real economy: the challenge of dialectical method
Keith Hart (LSE/University of Pretoria)
Since around 1990 my main excursions into ethnography have been online. This has led me to explore the potential of virtual reality with its inevitably dialectical construction. The idea of an objectively real economy is less plausible when relations are mediated by the internet. At the same time the movement of thought and practice is more explicitly from the actual to the possible. We are not restricted to a positivist approach to reality, but can embrace a world of change, grounded in what currently is.
Writing this paper, which was originally intended to focus on digital communications and interaction, has highlighted a persistent thread in my work over the last fifty years which I now identify as the dialectics of realism. This started out in my teenage years when I desperately needed to make a meaningful connection with impersonal society. This took shape specifically in my Accra research on what became the informal economy. Around 1970 the state was considered universally to be the main actor in development and much else. Economists were either Marxist or Keynesian, with liberals extremely rare. I knew that no idea, however big and strong, could ever capture what people really do. So I set out to document the real economy of the slum.
But the forms of state regulation shaped informal practice and the two were inseparable, certainly not distinctive sectors, as they were often depicted. I later elaborated variations on the formal/informal dialectic, conceived of as division, content, negation, and residue.
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Life and Debt: a view from the south
Deborah James (LSE)
This paper explores how, in countries in the global south where sharp rises in indebtedness have accompanied the financialization of the economy, debt factors into other relationships and meanings in the life of the family and household. Exploring local concepts of householding, obligation and saving, it asks whether relations of commodified debt nullify those of longstanding social commitment, investigates how people convert between cash-based or short term imperatives and moral or longer-term ones, and shows how barriers are sometimes erected between these separate spheres thus making them incommensurable. The lecture challenges some accounts of the ‘financialisation of daily life’ which imply a one-way, top-down intrusion by the market – with state backing – into people’s intimate relations, commitments and aspirations, and maintains that we need to explore the complicity of participants’ engagement with these processes rather than seeing them as imposed on unwilling victims.
Educating Poor People to “real economy”
Jeanne Lazarus (CSO/Sciences Po)
Since the end of the 1990’s, a new political issue arose in developed countries and spread all over the world: the improvement of citizens’ financial literacy. French government engaged cautiously in this framework only in 2014, without real national integrated policy. However, a multifaceted discourse about the "need to educate consumers of financial products" is expanding in France in recent years. From very different positions, these actors believe that financial education could be a solution to existing problems: poor relations between bank customers and advisers, sales of unnecessary products, customer budget problems, excessive debt, etc.
Based on fieldwork that goes from OECD conferences on financial literacy to local French financial education programs, this paper aims to understand what kind of economic categories are at stake when a “good money management” is taught to poor people. What is the definition of a good economic citizen and who defines it ?
I will first describe the French social space of financial education, showing that government, banks and non-profits seem to agree on the need for financial education, from very different framing. I make the point that the main capital of this field is the selflessness capital. Then I focus on the tools used by financial educators and the impact of the programs, and discuss the usefulness of the foucaldian concept of “governmentality” to describe those actions. I conclude by underlying the differences between financial education in practice and financial literacy’s global discourses.
The real price of things, the real price of money and the real money. Notes from the “real economy” during the currency exchange restrictions in Argentina (2011-2014)
Mariana Luzzi (UNGS-CONICET) and Ariel Wilkis (UNSAM-CONICET)
The currency exchange restrictions that have been in effect in Argentina for three years, between 2011 and 2014 (popularly known as the "clamp"), can be viewed as a monetary experiment. As part of this experiment, people are tested by the need to resolve the disjunctures of the transactions in which they are involved. In a monetary system where different currencies coexist, at least for some purposes, it is a time when the currency hierarchies are altered, making it necessary to figure out how to continue transactions or come up with new ones. Through a series of examples taken from ongoing fieldwork, we have recounted some of these situations. The observation of the transactions reveal how agents innovate and the need to share these innovations.Based on qualitative fieldwork conducted since mid-2014 in the cities of Buenos Aires and Santa Fe, Argentina, we will describe uses of the U.S. dollar in two markets (real state and soybean production).
Based on this analysis , this paper will argue that the context of exchange restrictions can be seen as a laboratory for understanding the place of the " real" economy. The hypothesis that we will defend here is that the definición of what is "real " is not a property of economic relations themselves, nor mononpoly held by experts. However, the definition of what "real" should be seen as part of the strategies that actors deploy in the context of specific transactions and relationships. In a context like the one discussed here , each universe of transactions becomes autonomous and seeks to to find its own formulas . The proliferation of currencies is one of these strategies designed to overcome disjunctures. In the cases we will analyze here, this creation of new currencies relies on the definition of what is are considered as "real " in each universe (for instance,, soy producers who take the soybean(or the crop) the unit of account and store of value,or real estate developers promoting the square meter as a unit of account even mong its customers ) . This currency multiplication does not result in the building of new bordes or barriers, but provides new means for transactions where profits can be generated . In this paper we will focus on these transactions to show that multiplication of prices, values and monies is then not a problem but a solution .
Resisting to numbers: the favela as an (un)quantifiable reality
Eugênia Motta (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro)
The first favelas are believed to have emerged at the end of the nineteenth century in the areas around Rio de Janeiro’s city centre. What was originally the name of a particular place – the Morro da Favela (Favela Hill) – became a general category at the start of the twentieth century, used to refer to a form of occupying the spaces of the city associated with precariously built houses, constructed in disorderly form on steep hillsides with unpaved roads and without access to electricity, sewage disposal or piped water. They were also supposed to be occupied by all kinds of dangerous people. At the same time that they were developing as new urban forms, the favelas also became construed as a government problem. The ‘favela problem’ has been part of the public debate ever since and the target of numerous public policies, the most recent of which being ‘urbanization’ and ‘security.’
In the paper I discuss how statistical categories form part of the problematization of the favelas and the ways in which these spaces resist quantification. Both these terms, problematization and resistance, will be considered in two senses.
As part of the very attempt to count, the statistics impose the need for criteria of normality – norm in the sense of a rule and a recurrence – that compel some realities to be categorized as anomalies. As I shall show through an analysis of the category ‘subnormal agglomeration’ – used to classify the favelas – they are also linked to diagnoses and associations that frame these realities within specific kinds of demands for interventions, as in the case of the ideas of ‘poverty’ and illegal land occupation, in the specific case of the favelas.
I shall also examine resistances from a double angle. First, the resistances of the very reality of these places to be quantified, especially linked to the historical and specific forms of their government. And second, the recent contestations by local residents and organizations of the official numbers referring to the favelas. Both forms of resistance to quantification are permeated by the ambiguity of public numbers, which incorporate deviations, but need to be framed as anomalies, and which are viewed with mistrust and even as spurious devices for concealing reality. At the same time, however, they comprise central elements in the disputes for recognition, resources and legitimacy.
The aim, then, is to discuss the places of reality in the production of public numbers referring to the social world of the favela. My argument is initially premised on a concrete reality apprehensible through ethnographic observation – a real reality, we could say. This basis will allow me to show how everyday economic practices, forms of regulation – especially in relation to the occupation of spaces and property – evade (or resist) being framed within stabilizing and discrete statistical categories. Subsequently I shall explore the reality of the favela as an open question, a term under dispute, in which public figures participate either as an argument or as a distortion that needs to be denounced.
Economic Emergencies and the Real Economy. Some ethnographic threads of thought.
Federico Neiburg (Museu Nacional, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro)
In December 2015 the recently elected Argentinean government decreed a ‘national statistical emergency,’ a measure that allowed intervention in the workings of the National Institute of Statistics and the suppression of the release of any data relating to national accounts, unemployment, poverty and inflation for up to 12 months. This measure was presented as one more development in a process first begun eight years earlier when the agency in question was also the subject of an intervention by decree. Issued by the previous government, its aim had been to force through a series of ‘corrections’ to the methodologies used to manufacture official economic indicators, triggering a period of intense political dispute over the numbers that allow depiction of the country’s economic ‘reality’ and guidance of the action of its ‘economic agents.’ Both interventions (in 2007 and 2015) in the most important agency producing official data on the economy were based on ‘economic emergency’ devices that allowed the governments to introduce ‘regimes of exception’ in the management of the ‘real economy.’ In fact, economic emergencies have been implemented with considerable frequency in western liberal democracies from the second decade of the twentieth century onwards, while national economies and their knowledge devices have simultaneously grown in density with the invention and widespread use of index numbers, developed in the wake of the liberal revolution in economic thought. The doctrine of the government of exception received theoretical and practical backing (linking intellectuals as diverse as Carl Schmitt, John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek) during the European hyperinflations of the 1920s (principally at the end of the Weimar Republic and during the rise of national socialism in Germany) and in the period of the Great Depression that followed the 1929 crash and the introduction of the New Deal, especially in the British and US contexts. Since then, economic emergencies have become a frequent practice, fed by the major European wars and, more recently, by the oil and dollar crises in the 1970s, monetary instabilities, public debt crises and hyperinflations (the association between economic exception and the idiom of war persists even today in the justifications made for the emergencies). In recent years, following the 2008 crash, the implementation of states of economic emergency have become commonplace, providing the basis for legal devices in the United States, Great Britain, Iceland, Portugal, Greece and other European countries. In Latin America the government of economic exception is a tradition dating back to the implementation of monetary stabilization plans in the 1960s and, with greater intensity, in the context of the hyperinflations at the end of the 1980s and the start of the 1990s. The more recent wave of economic exceptions on the continent came in the wake of the 2008 crisis and is manifest today in countries like Venezuela and Argentina. These include compulsory freezing of bank accounts, changes to currencies and exchange rates, the transfer of extraordinary funds to corporations (supposedly to lessen the risk of unemployment and bankruptcy), debt restructuring, the reinvention of indicators and knowledge/government devices (to control public deficit, as in the Greek case, or inflation, as in Argentina). The objectives of this paper are: (1) to map a genealogy of devices and justifications for economic emergencies, where we find a tense confrontation between economic and legal doctrines that aim, in accordance with liberal doxa, to momentarily suspend the rule of law to encourage the ‘independent and normal’ operation of the markets; and (2) to show how economic emergencies are a particularly fertile field for analysing the interconnections between everyday and academic categories relating to the ‘real economy’: the emergency government of the economy allows action to be taken in relation to knowledge of economic life (such as the production of indicators) in favour of the ‘common good,’ acting explicitly on the ‘real economy’ and on ‘people’s real lives’: prices, wages, contracts, employment, debts, savings and so on. Hence the regime of economic exception (acting on the production of knowledge and policies concerning the real economy) comprises a particularly rich space for understanding the academic and lay meanings of economic reality and the realization of economic life.
Legal fictions and economic realities: identifying competitors in antitrust policy
Gustavo Onto (NuCEC, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro)
Based on an ethnography conducted at the Brazilian antitrust governmental agency – the Administrative Council for Economic Defense, CADE – this article describes how regulators identify competitive economic agents in order to determine the market share held by each of them in a given market affected by corporate merger or acquisition. In order for regulators to be able to estimate the probability of future damage to competition arising out of a corporate merger, it is necessary to know how many competitors or economic agents there are in a given market and who they are. This task has become more complex for regulators in that, as a result of the increasing financialization of the economy, several companies are interconnected by means of a network of corporate ownership and/or control that is not explicit and which frequently derives from investments made by private equity firms. The difficulty that arises is how to identify the boundaries of a given economic agent in a context in which the companies are increasingly inter-connected financially, legally and administratively. By observing the procedures adopted during an investigation into a merger in the higher education sector, it is possible to show that the difficulties in identifying independent economic agents – single units that are related to other market players only in terms of competition – are the result of what the market regulators term ‘divergences’ between the legal nature and form of the corporations (i.e. their legal personality) and the economic “facts” or “reality”. According to professionals who carry out antitrust investigations, when circumstances arise in which the legal form of corporations cannot be considered a true representation of the ‘real’ economic agent, the competitors in a given market can only be identified and determined by ascertaining the specific nature of relations between relevant individuals (‘natural’ persons) and legal entities (corporations). This article aims to demonstrate the manner in which economic reality is conceived as interpersonal relationships in antitrust policy decisions, as regulators try to visualize certain corporate management practices or policies that may lie hidden behind the guise of legal personality or form.
Financial, moral and political meanings of cross-border mergers and acquisitions in China
Horacio Ortiz (Research Institute of Anthropology, East China Normal University
CNRS, IRISSO, Université Paris Dauphine)
This paper is based on research conducted through participant observation with a mergers and acquisitions (M&A) company conducting cross-border investment between China and Europe, based in Shanghai, and with interviews carried out with employees working in the financial industry in Shanghai, Beijing and Hong Kong. The paper concentrates on employees working for companies buying small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in China or in Europe, partly or wholly, in particular people working in Mergers and Acquisitions, Private Equity and Venture Capital. The analysis uses anthropological theories of money, power and globalization, in line with previous researches carried out by the author with stock brokers, hedge funds and fund managers in New York and Paris.
Based on three cases of cross-border investment, two leading to a transaction and another one in the process of finding funding for a company, the paper studies the negotiations of the meanings of the transaction for the parties, through the analysis of the negotiations of money amounts and contractual relations of power. The paper shows that the relations of power fluctuate in the negotiation, as do the identities of the parties and the financial techniques used to justify or make sense of the outcomes. It shows that the meanings of a financial transaction conducted by professionals are connected to the generation of profits, but also to moral and political imaginaries that are important in the fluid and often blurry definitions of the operation itself. Finally, it highlights the imaginaries of “China” as a source of funding and of profit for the actors observed, and shows the limited but fluctuating imaginaries of “global finance” that this implies.
Thus, the paper shows that the notions of “investor”, “market”, “state” and “identity”, whether “national”, “cultural” or “global”, are made sense of differently by each actor, in a context where they are redefined by financial practice and financial regulation. Thus, the paper contends that these categories cannot be used as analytic categories, but that we must understand them as complex, often fluid and ambiguous concepts with which financial employees make sense of their professional activity. This allows for understanding how these categories, with their multiple but limited meanings, are part of the legitimizing narratives of the particular allocation of monetary resources effected by financial professionals on a global scale.
Debts as education: the “real economy” among college students in Quebec
Jorge Pantaleón (Université de Montréal)
The beginning of the "Quiet Revolution" which occurs in Quebec in the 60’s generates the accessibility to massive postsecondary education throughout the province. In order to develop a qualified workforce, the educational reform will aim to ensure a greater access to education to various social strata through: a) the creation (and its mandatory nature, until today) of “Collège d'enseignement général et professionnel” (or better known as “Cégep”, its acronym in french), to facilitate the transition between high school and university and, b) the implementation of loans and scholarship programs for post-secondary education (in Cégep and University). Nevertheless, substantial increases in tuition fees through the last years have given rise to concerns and claims about how debt levels have become too high and make the recovery period after graduation even more difficult. The notion of "real economy" will be treated in this paper as an historical process of generational subjectivity to be learned and executed as a passage to adulthood. This process is constituted by at least three ineluctable conditions: a) Cégep education is presented as a main requirement to be admitted (in the short or medium term) in the labor market; b) access to postsecondary education involves navigating the logic of debt / investment; c) education debts forces to differentiate and assimilate other financial commitments according to the type of social relationships from which they originate (the State, banking institutions, and family). This "real economy" is internalized and enacted through personal equations of priorities (or the attribution of reality levels of such commitments with several timescale horizons). Such equations articulate moral judgments and calculating operations that unfold in everyday life and shape these young students' aspirations.
What is a ‘real’ transaction? The infrastructural moralities of spoofing in high-frequency trading
Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra (University of San Diego, California)
Spoofing is an old financial practice that entails the fraudulent creation of orders to buy and sell securities with the purpose of
manipulating the market. While an apparently rare event, spoofing has become one of the key points of discussion about the moral and
political valence of the forms of high-speed automated trading that dominate contemporary financial markets. In this paper, I look at how American and European market participants—from regulators and exchanges to investors and economists—discussed spoofing from 2005 to the present. The purpose of this exploration is to show how certain electronic orders are classified as illegitimate spoofs, revealing the contours of what constitute ‘real transactions’ within the highly uncertain, esoteric and technical circuits of automated finance. For this, examine regulatory documents, court cases against alleged spoofers, and public discussions concerning a handful of cases of suspected spoofing. Rather than thinking of spoofing as an illegitimate category or as the result of bounding an object through a process of controversy and contention, I conceptualize it as an instance of how (market) relations are created, defined and dissolved. Extending the Weberian metaphor of markets as communities, I think of automated financial markets as a set of relations mediated by the numerous infrastructures that allow transactions to take place. The question of ‘what is a real transaction’ then becomes the question of ‘how do we know when someone is a relative’. By querying the relation, then, I show how discussions of spoofing are not grounded on notions of individualistic notions of ‘intent’ or arguments of collective responsibility, but rather invoke knowledge of how infrastructures—physical, legal and moral—constitute rights and affordances in the marketplace. The claim on the reality of a transaction thus becomes a claim on its infrastructural suitability, projecting onto infrastructures a sense of the moral and the real.
Smuggling realities
Fernando Rabossi (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro)
Every March 3rd – Brazil's National Day for Combatting Smuggling – the media publishes the figure lost to the Brazilian economy due to smuggling. This year it was announced that Brazil had lost almost US$ 30 billion. This figure is the end result of a series of calculations that take into account, among other things, seizures, unpaid taxes and the jobs that would have otherwise existed to produce these goods. Based on descriptive data (seizures) – generally compiled from different agencies – the figure is composed of various projections: the projection of ‘the real number’ of merchandise from actual seizures based on the inferences of police and custom officials; an estimate of the revenue that would have been raised had the projected figure been taxed; and the projection of the number of jobs necessary for the production of that volume of production.
Having undertaken long-term ethnographic research on the dynamic border trade between Brazil and Paraguay, this calculation has always surprised me. I have researched precisely what it is not counted: the jobs and the wealth produced in these circuits. Not only are these jobs and wealth ignored, but likewise the institutions and mechanisms used to control those same circuits, including the institutes responsible for producing the figures on how much Brazil loses to smuggling.
As well as highlighting the magnitude of the problem, the figure for the losses from smuggling is associated with certain spaces, actors and dynamics that define its key circuits both territorially and socially: land borders – especially with Paraguay – traversed by circuits that feed popular markets.
This paper seeks to describe the efforts made to portray the ‘reality of smuggling’ in Brazil by analysing the instruments – the kinds of data and models employed to project the final numbers – and the actors involved in these efforts, such as the Brazilian Intellectual Property Association (ABPI), the Institute for Ethical Competition (ETCO), the National Forum Against Piracy and Illegality (FNCP), the Institute of Economic Development and Social Frontiers (IDESF), and the National Union of Tax Analysts of the Brazilian Internal Revenue Service (SINDIRECEITA). By contemplating the actors, instruments and variables chosen to compose those numbers, it is possible to understand the kind of reality surreptitiously introduced and publicly distributed through these figures and their effects on the governance and management of these circuits.
Financing Potential: The “Fictitious” Futures and “Real” Math of US Student Loans
Caitlin Zaloom (New York University)
How to account for a young adult’s potential? The cost of college forces both U.S. experts and families to confront this critical question. Economists and policy makers promote a calculus to assess the value of college education that weigh graduates’ future incomes and parents’ retirement possibilities against the cost of attending university. This cost-benefit analysis exposes, in their logic, the “real” value of college, defining potential in strict economic terms. Parents, however, maintain a much more expansive relationship to their children’s capacities and their abilities to find a place in the world that balances financial solidity with self-realization. Their visions of potential guide decisions about what college young adult children should attend and direct a willingness to take on debt to fund students' higher education. In this way, potential creates a central structuring fiction for household economies. It also catches students and their families between the “real” math of financial demands and the “fictions” of their childrens possible futures. Drawing on a corpus of 150 interviews with US families who hold student debt, I will explore the interplay between family and expert assessments of young adults' economic prospects and also propose potential as a concept that draws together the notions of the real and the fictional in finance, both in the household and outside it.
Maxim Bolt (University of Birmingham)
Documents and wages are central to the infrastructure through which formal workforces are constituted and measured. This paper examines both in terms of their social productivity, and the everyday forms of circulation they precipitate. It develops Jane Guyer’s exploration of formality as a patchwork of plural ‘formalizations’, whose fixity and rule-boundedness are uneven. And it explores the materiality and the pragmatics of paperwork and pay in the context of this unevenness. The paper focuses on the margins of South Africa, a country usually depicted in terms of its robust formal sector. On the border with Zimbabwe, thousands of farm workers are employed on permanent and seasonal contracts. While white farmers engage regularly with state and corporate agencies, black workers’ lives are shaped by cross-border mobility, and dislocation born of the Zimbabwean crisis. Connections to officialdom are fragments of formality, and cash wages are difficult to store in this migrant-labour setting. But documentation and pay also offer possibilities for navigating a transient world of strangers. Workers learn to entrust money to more senior workers – an appeal for patronage that extends beyond safe storage. And they learn to hop between documents, mobilising hierarchical relationships as they convert gradually from less to more durable forms of official identity. In the shifting sands of crisis and insecurity, employees attempt to gain traction through circuits of money and the constellation of fixed points that official and semi-official documents appear to represent. It is this navigation through diverse social relationships that underlies the infrastructure of formality.
Economic Metaphors and the Reality of Economy
Benoit de l’Estoile (École Normale Supérieure)
It is commonplace among social scientists to use analytic terms borrowed from the economic realm to describe social phenomena:notions such as ‘monopoly of violence’, ‘linguistic market’ or ‘market of salvation goods’, ‘social capital’, moral entrepreneurs, ‘declining rate of symbolic profit’, etc. By implication, these metaphoric uses assume not only that the economic language offers more powerful tools for describing the world, but also that the economy constitutes a deeper, « more fundamental » level of reality. The very reality of «the economy » as being the « bottom line » of human life remains taken for granted. I will challenge this assumption from both an ethnographic and a theoretical prospective.Based on an ethnographic inquiry in former sugarcane plantations in the Northeastern region of Brazil, I will discuss the way various actors make use or not of an economic framework to describe their situation and actions. Theoretically, I will explore the Greek notion of oikonomia, « government of the house », as potentially offering an
alternative framework from which we can suspend our ontological belief in « the economy » and question its reality.
The popular economy and the “Real”
Verónica Gago (Universidad de Buenos Aires) and Alexandre Roig (Universidad Nacional de San Martín)
A number of words are found alongside the term economy: real, financial, social, solidarity, popular. Each one in turn sets up a category with its own actors whose use of words seeks to create a world of specific reference both scientific and political. Each of them names a categorization principle for practices, institutions and interpretations of the world which falls short of providing mutually exclusive definitions to match the strictly segmented order of the social. We know the meaning of the financial impact on industry (with every financial crisis we witness the closure of industries), and the productive dimension of the stock markets (how information about levels of employment in Wall Street impacts on the financial risk). We know that their symbolic devices articulate the moral order of the popular, the social, and the solidarity.
What is the use of these categories? We might look upon them simply as native categories, reconsider their genealogy and analyze them critically. And yet, if we only submitted them to reflective conceptual scrutiny we would lose sight of their being the expression of the economy as a phenomenon. Our discursive reflection would thus ignore the fact that those adjectives speak for those who use them as well as of their effect on the practices and institutions involved.
From a practical reflective perspective, we attempt an analysis of popular economy both as a native category and an analytical tool. We will look into its articulation with the real, financial, social and solidarity economy seeking to address its specificity. Since this category arises directly from the political sphere, we will focus on the processes of abstraction and moralization of economic relations at the very core of popular economy based on the results of ethnographic research on money and finance relations in the popular sector in Argentina. We propose to study the social categories and relations that arise in different kinds of exchange and production in those spaces.
Through our analysis of the connection with the production of the common, the forms of government, abstraction and moralization of the popular economy we will address the ontologized ways of thinking about the “real”.
The Real Economy: Past, Present and Emergent
Jane I. Guyer
The concept of the real economy is several centuries old, to indicate the correspondence between the values expressed in market demand and the money price of the goods, under national currency systems. In the 20th century, this relationship was formalized, to produce indices of national standards of living, rates of inflation, and to contribute to the calculation of GDP, for comparative international purposes monitored by the International Financial Institutions. In recent years, the concept of a class of economies defined and ranked as “emerging economies (and markets)” has been developed within the financial sector, largely as an index for private investment purposes. In this paper, I examine certain literature about “emerging markets”, particularly to assess how the old theme of inflation and the value of the currency figures in judgments about the future, and how, in particular, the “near future” (defined time horizons) is weighed and measured.
The real economy: the challenge of dialectical method
Keith Hart (LSE/University of Pretoria)
Since around 1990 my main excursions into ethnography have been online. This has led me to explore the potential of virtual reality with its inevitably dialectical construction. The idea of an objectively real economy is less plausible when relations are mediated by the internet. At the same time the movement of thought and practice is more explicitly from the actual to the possible. We are not restricted to a positivist approach to reality, but can embrace a world of change, grounded in what currently is.
Writing this paper, which was originally intended to focus on digital communications and interaction, has highlighted a persistent thread in my work over the last fifty years which I now identify as the dialectics of realism. This started out in my teenage years when I desperately needed to make a meaningful connection with impersonal society. This took shape specifically in my Accra research on what became the informal economy. Around 1970 the state was considered universally to be the main actor in development and much else. Economists were either Marxist or Keynesian, with liberals extremely rare. I knew that no idea, however big and strong, could ever capture what people really do. So I set out to document the real economy of the slum.
But the forms of state regulation shaped informal practice and the two were inseparable, certainly not distinctive sectors, as they were often depicted. I later elaborated variations on the formal/informal dialectic, conceived of as division, content, negation, and residue.
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Life and Debt: a view from the south
Deborah James (LSE)
This paper explores how, in countries in the global south where sharp rises in indebtedness have accompanied the financialization of the economy, debt factors into other relationships and meanings in the life of the family and household. Exploring local concepts of householding, obligation and saving, it asks whether relations of commodified debt nullify those of longstanding social commitment, investigates how people convert between cash-based or short term imperatives and moral or longer-term ones, and shows how barriers are sometimes erected between these separate spheres thus making them incommensurable. The lecture challenges some accounts of the ‘financialisation of daily life’ which imply a one-way, top-down intrusion by the market – with state backing – into people’s intimate relations, commitments and aspirations, and maintains that we need to explore the complicity of participants’ engagement with these processes rather than seeing them as imposed on unwilling victims.
Educating Poor People to “real economy”
Jeanne Lazarus (CSO/Sciences Po)
Since the end of the 1990’s, a new political issue arose in developed countries and spread all over the world: the improvement of citizens’ financial literacy. French government engaged cautiously in this framework only in 2014, without real national integrated policy. However, a multifaceted discourse about the "need to educate consumers of financial products" is expanding in France in recent years. From very different positions, these actors believe that financial education could be a solution to existing problems: poor relations between bank customers and advisers, sales of unnecessary products, customer budget problems, excessive debt, etc.
Based on fieldwork that goes from OECD conferences on financial literacy to local French financial education programs, this paper aims to understand what kind of economic categories are at stake when a “good money management” is taught to poor people. What is the definition of a good economic citizen and who defines it ?
I will first describe the French social space of financial education, showing that government, banks and non-profits seem to agree on the need for financial education, from very different framing. I make the point that the main capital of this field is the selflessness capital. Then I focus on the tools used by financial educators and the impact of the programs, and discuss the usefulness of the foucaldian concept of “governmentality” to describe those actions. I conclude by underlying the differences between financial education in practice and financial literacy’s global discourses.
The real price of things, the real price of money and the real money. Notes from the “real economy” during the currency exchange restrictions in Argentina (2011-2014)
Mariana Luzzi (UNGS-CONICET) and Ariel Wilkis (UNSAM-CONICET)
The currency exchange restrictions that have been in effect in Argentina for three years, between 2011 and 2014 (popularly known as the "clamp"), can be viewed as a monetary experiment. As part of this experiment, people are tested by the need to resolve the disjunctures of the transactions in which they are involved. In a monetary system where different currencies coexist, at least for some purposes, it is a time when the currency hierarchies are altered, making it necessary to figure out how to continue transactions or come up with new ones. Through a series of examples taken from ongoing fieldwork, we have recounted some of these situations. The observation of the transactions reveal how agents innovate and the need to share these innovations.Based on qualitative fieldwork conducted since mid-2014 in the cities of Buenos Aires and Santa Fe, Argentina, we will describe uses of the U.S. dollar in two markets (real state and soybean production).
Based on this analysis , this paper will argue that the context of exchange restrictions can be seen as a laboratory for understanding the place of the " real" economy. The hypothesis that we will defend here is that the definición of what is "real " is not a property of economic relations themselves, nor mononpoly held by experts. However, the definition of what "real" should be seen as part of the strategies that actors deploy in the context of specific transactions and relationships. In a context like the one discussed here , each universe of transactions becomes autonomous and seeks to to find its own formulas . The proliferation of currencies is one of these strategies designed to overcome disjunctures. In the cases we will analyze here, this creation of new currencies relies on the definition of what is are considered as "real " in each universe (for instance,, soy producers who take the soybean(or the crop) the unit of account and store of value,or real estate developers promoting the square meter as a unit of account even mong its customers ) . This currency multiplication does not result in the building of new bordes or barriers, but provides new means for transactions where profits can be generated . In this paper we will focus on these transactions to show that multiplication of prices, values and monies is then not a problem but a solution .
Resisting to numbers: the favela as an (un)quantifiable reality
Eugênia Motta (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro)
The first favelas are believed to have emerged at the end of the nineteenth century in the areas around Rio de Janeiro’s city centre. What was originally the name of a particular place – the Morro da Favela (Favela Hill) – became a general category at the start of the twentieth century, used to refer to a form of occupying the spaces of the city associated with precariously built houses, constructed in disorderly form on steep hillsides with unpaved roads and without access to electricity, sewage disposal or piped water. They were also supposed to be occupied by all kinds of dangerous people. At the same time that they were developing as new urban forms, the favelas also became construed as a government problem. The ‘favela problem’ has been part of the public debate ever since and the target of numerous public policies, the most recent of which being ‘urbanization’ and ‘security.’
In the paper I discuss how statistical categories form part of the problematization of the favelas and the ways in which these spaces resist quantification. Both these terms, problematization and resistance, will be considered in two senses.
As part of the very attempt to count, the statistics impose the need for criteria of normality – norm in the sense of a rule and a recurrence – that compel some realities to be categorized as anomalies. As I shall show through an analysis of the category ‘subnormal agglomeration’ – used to classify the favelas – they are also linked to diagnoses and associations that frame these realities within specific kinds of demands for interventions, as in the case of the ideas of ‘poverty’ and illegal land occupation, in the specific case of the favelas.
I shall also examine resistances from a double angle. First, the resistances of the very reality of these places to be quantified, especially linked to the historical and specific forms of their government. And second, the recent contestations by local residents and organizations of the official numbers referring to the favelas. Both forms of resistance to quantification are permeated by the ambiguity of public numbers, which incorporate deviations, but need to be framed as anomalies, and which are viewed with mistrust and even as spurious devices for concealing reality. At the same time, however, they comprise central elements in the disputes for recognition, resources and legitimacy.
The aim, then, is to discuss the places of reality in the production of public numbers referring to the social world of the favela. My argument is initially premised on a concrete reality apprehensible through ethnographic observation – a real reality, we could say. This basis will allow me to show how everyday economic practices, forms of regulation – especially in relation to the occupation of spaces and property – evade (or resist) being framed within stabilizing and discrete statistical categories. Subsequently I shall explore the reality of the favela as an open question, a term under dispute, in which public figures participate either as an argument or as a distortion that needs to be denounced.
Economic Emergencies and the Real Economy. Some ethnographic threads of thought.
Federico Neiburg (Museu Nacional, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro)
In December 2015 the recently elected Argentinean government decreed a ‘national statistical emergency,’ a measure that allowed intervention in the workings of the National Institute of Statistics and the suppression of the release of any data relating to national accounts, unemployment, poverty and inflation for up to 12 months. This measure was presented as one more development in a process first begun eight years earlier when the agency in question was also the subject of an intervention by decree. Issued by the previous government, its aim had been to force through a series of ‘corrections’ to the methodologies used to manufacture official economic indicators, triggering a period of intense political dispute over the numbers that allow depiction of the country’s economic ‘reality’ and guidance of the action of its ‘economic agents.’ Both interventions (in 2007 and 2015) in the most important agency producing official data on the economy were based on ‘economic emergency’ devices that allowed the governments to introduce ‘regimes of exception’ in the management of the ‘real economy.’ In fact, economic emergencies have been implemented with considerable frequency in western liberal democracies from the second decade of the twentieth century onwards, while national economies and their knowledge devices have simultaneously grown in density with the invention and widespread use of index numbers, developed in the wake of the liberal revolution in economic thought. The doctrine of the government of exception received theoretical and practical backing (linking intellectuals as diverse as Carl Schmitt, John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek) during the European hyperinflations of the 1920s (principally at the end of the Weimar Republic and during the rise of national socialism in Germany) and in the period of the Great Depression that followed the 1929 crash and the introduction of the New Deal, especially in the British and US contexts. Since then, economic emergencies have become a frequent practice, fed by the major European wars and, more recently, by the oil and dollar crises in the 1970s, monetary instabilities, public debt crises and hyperinflations (the association between economic exception and the idiom of war persists even today in the justifications made for the emergencies). In recent years, following the 2008 crash, the implementation of states of economic emergency have become commonplace, providing the basis for legal devices in the United States, Great Britain, Iceland, Portugal, Greece and other European countries. In Latin America the government of economic exception is a tradition dating back to the implementation of monetary stabilization plans in the 1960s and, with greater intensity, in the context of the hyperinflations at the end of the 1980s and the start of the 1990s. The more recent wave of economic exceptions on the continent came in the wake of the 2008 crisis and is manifest today in countries like Venezuela and Argentina. These include compulsory freezing of bank accounts, changes to currencies and exchange rates, the transfer of extraordinary funds to corporations (supposedly to lessen the risk of unemployment and bankruptcy), debt restructuring, the reinvention of indicators and knowledge/government devices (to control public deficit, as in the Greek case, or inflation, as in Argentina). The objectives of this paper are: (1) to map a genealogy of devices and justifications for economic emergencies, where we find a tense confrontation between economic and legal doctrines that aim, in accordance with liberal doxa, to momentarily suspend the rule of law to encourage the ‘independent and normal’ operation of the markets; and (2) to show how economic emergencies are a particularly fertile field for analysing the interconnections between everyday and academic categories relating to the ‘real economy’: the emergency government of the economy allows action to be taken in relation to knowledge of economic life (such as the production of indicators) in favour of the ‘common good,’ acting explicitly on the ‘real economy’ and on ‘people’s real lives’: prices, wages, contracts, employment, debts, savings and so on. Hence the regime of economic exception (acting on the production of knowledge and policies concerning the real economy) comprises a particularly rich space for understanding the academic and lay meanings of economic reality and the realization of economic life.
Legal fictions and economic realities: identifying competitors in antitrust policy
Gustavo Onto (NuCEC, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro)
Based on an ethnography conducted at the Brazilian antitrust governmental agency – the Administrative Council for Economic Defense, CADE – this article describes how regulators identify competitive economic agents in order to determine the market share held by each of them in a given market affected by corporate merger or acquisition. In order for regulators to be able to estimate the probability of future damage to competition arising out of a corporate merger, it is necessary to know how many competitors or economic agents there are in a given market and who they are. This task has become more complex for regulators in that, as a result of the increasing financialization of the economy, several companies are interconnected by means of a network of corporate ownership and/or control that is not explicit and which frequently derives from investments made by private equity firms. The difficulty that arises is how to identify the boundaries of a given economic agent in a context in which the companies are increasingly inter-connected financially, legally and administratively. By observing the procedures adopted during an investigation into a merger in the higher education sector, it is possible to show that the difficulties in identifying independent economic agents – single units that are related to other market players only in terms of competition – are the result of what the market regulators term ‘divergences’ between the legal nature and form of the corporations (i.e. their legal personality) and the economic “facts” or “reality”. According to professionals who carry out antitrust investigations, when circumstances arise in which the legal form of corporations cannot be considered a true representation of the ‘real’ economic agent, the competitors in a given market can only be identified and determined by ascertaining the specific nature of relations between relevant individuals (‘natural’ persons) and legal entities (corporations). This article aims to demonstrate the manner in which economic reality is conceived as interpersonal relationships in antitrust policy decisions, as regulators try to visualize certain corporate management practices or policies that may lie hidden behind the guise of legal personality or form.
Financial, moral and political meanings of cross-border mergers and acquisitions in China
Horacio Ortiz (Research Institute of Anthropology, East China Normal University
CNRS, IRISSO, Université Paris Dauphine)
This paper is based on research conducted through participant observation with a mergers and acquisitions (M&A) company conducting cross-border investment between China and Europe, based in Shanghai, and with interviews carried out with employees working in the financial industry in Shanghai, Beijing and Hong Kong. The paper concentrates on employees working for companies buying small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in China or in Europe, partly or wholly, in particular people working in Mergers and Acquisitions, Private Equity and Venture Capital. The analysis uses anthropological theories of money, power and globalization, in line with previous researches carried out by the author with stock brokers, hedge funds and fund managers in New York and Paris.
Based on three cases of cross-border investment, two leading to a transaction and another one in the process of finding funding for a company, the paper studies the negotiations of the meanings of the transaction for the parties, through the analysis of the negotiations of money amounts and contractual relations of power. The paper shows that the relations of power fluctuate in the negotiation, as do the identities of the parties and the financial techniques used to justify or make sense of the outcomes. It shows that the meanings of a financial transaction conducted by professionals are connected to the generation of profits, but also to moral and political imaginaries that are important in the fluid and often blurry definitions of the operation itself. Finally, it highlights the imaginaries of “China” as a source of funding and of profit for the actors observed, and shows the limited but fluctuating imaginaries of “global finance” that this implies.
Thus, the paper shows that the notions of “investor”, “market”, “state” and “identity”, whether “national”, “cultural” or “global”, are made sense of differently by each actor, in a context where they are redefined by financial practice and financial regulation. Thus, the paper contends that these categories cannot be used as analytic categories, but that we must understand them as complex, often fluid and ambiguous concepts with which financial employees make sense of their professional activity. This allows for understanding how these categories, with their multiple but limited meanings, are part of the legitimizing narratives of the particular allocation of monetary resources effected by financial professionals on a global scale.
Debts as education: the “real economy” among college students in Quebec
Jorge Pantaleón (Université de Montréal)
The beginning of the "Quiet Revolution" which occurs in Quebec in the 60’s generates the accessibility to massive postsecondary education throughout the province. In order to develop a qualified workforce, the educational reform will aim to ensure a greater access to education to various social strata through: a) the creation (and its mandatory nature, until today) of “Collège d'enseignement général et professionnel” (or better known as “Cégep”, its acronym in french), to facilitate the transition between high school and university and, b) the implementation of loans and scholarship programs for post-secondary education (in Cégep and University). Nevertheless, substantial increases in tuition fees through the last years have given rise to concerns and claims about how debt levels have become too high and make the recovery period after graduation even more difficult. The notion of "real economy" will be treated in this paper as an historical process of generational subjectivity to be learned and executed as a passage to adulthood. This process is constituted by at least three ineluctable conditions: a) Cégep education is presented as a main requirement to be admitted (in the short or medium term) in the labor market; b) access to postsecondary education involves navigating the logic of debt / investment; c) education debts forces to differentiate and assimilate other financial commitments according to the type of social relationships from which they originate (the State, banking institutions, and family). This "real economy" is internalized and enacted through personal equations of priorities (or the attribution of reality levels of such commitments with several timescale horizons). Such equations articulate moral judgments and calculating operations that unfold in everyday life and shape these young students' aspirations.
What is a ‘real’ transaction? The infrastructural moralities of spoofing in high-frequency trading
Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra (University of San Diego, California)
Spoofing is an old financial practice that entails the fraudulent creation of orders to buy and sell securities with the purpose of
manipulating the market. While an apparently rare event, spoofing has become one of the key points of discussion about the moral and
political valence of the forms of high-speed automated trading that dominate contemporary financial markets. In this paper, I look at how American and European market participants—from regulators and exchanges to investors and economists—discussed spoofing from 2005 to the present. The purpose of this exploration is to show how certain electronic orders are classified as illegitimate spoofs, revealing the contours of what constitute ‘real transactions’ within the highly uncertain, esoteric and technical circuits of automated finance. For this, examine regulatory documents, court cases against alleged spoofers, and public discussions concerning a handful of cases of suspected spoofing. Rather than thinking of spoofing as an illegitimate category or as the result of bounding an object through a process of controversy and contention, I conceptualize it as an instance of how (market) relations are created, defined and dissolved. Extending the Weberian metaphor of markets as communities, I think of automated financial markets as a set of relations mediated by the numerous infrastructures that allow transactions to take place. The question of ‘what is a real transaction’ then becomes the question of ‘how do we know when someone is a relative’. By querying the relation, then, I show how discussions of spoofing are not grounded on notions of individualistic notions of ‘intent’ or arguments of collective responsibility, but rather invoke knowledge of how infrastructures—physical, legal and moral—constitute rights and affordances in the marketplace. The claim on the reality of a transaction thus becomes a claim on its infrastructural suitability, projecting onto infrastructures a sense of the moral and the real.
Smuggling realities
Fernando Rabossi (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro)
Every March 3rd – Brazil's National Day for Combatting Smuggling – the media publishes the figure lost to the Brazilian economy due to smuggling. This year it was announced that Brazil had lost almost US$ 30 billion. This figure is the end result of a series of calculations that take into account, among other things, seizures, unpaid taxes and the jobs that would have otherwise existed to produce these goods. Based on descriptive data (seizures) – generally compiled from different agencies – the figure is composed of various projections: the projection of ‘the real number’ of merchandise from actual seizures based on the inferences of police and custom officials; an estimate of the revenue that would have been raised had the projected figure been taxed; and the projection of the number of jobs necessary for the production of that volume of production.
Having undertaken long-term ethnographic research on the dynamic border trade between Brazil and Paraguay, this calculation has always surprised me. I have researched precisely what it is not counted: the jobs and the wealth produced in these circuits. Not only are these jobs and wealth ignored, but likewise the institutions and mechanisms used to control those same circuits, including the institutes responsible for producing the figures on how much Brazil loses to smuggling.
As well as highlighting the magnitude of the problem, the figure for the losses from smuggling is associated with certain spaces, actors and dynamics that define its key circuits both territorially and socially: land borders – especially with Paraguay – traversed by circuits that feed popular markets.
This paper seeks to describe the efforts made to portray the ‘reality of smuggling’ in Brazil by analysing the instruments – the kinds of data and models employed to project the final numbers – and the actors involved in these efforts, such as the Brazilian Intellectual Property Association (ABPI), the Institute for Ethical Competition (ETCO), the National Forum Against Piracy and Illegality (FNCP), the Institute of Economic Development and Social Frontiers (IDESF), and the National Union of Tax Analysts of the Brazilian Internal Revenue Service (SINDIRECEITA). By contemplating the actors, instruments and variables chosen to compose those numbers, it is possible to understand the kind of reality surreptitiously introduced and publicly distributed through these figures and their effects on the governance and management of these circuits.
Financing Potential: The “Fictitious” Futures and “Real” Math of US Student Loans
Caitlin Zaloom (New York University)
How to account for a young adult’s potential? The cost of college forces both U.S. experts and families to confront this critical question. Economists and policy makers promote a calculus to assess the value of college education that weigh graduates’ future incomes and parents’ retirement possibilities against the cost of attending university. This cost-benefit analysis exposes, in their logic, the “real” value of college, defining potential in strict economic terms. Parents, however, maintain a much more expansive relationship to their children’s capacities and their abilities to find a place in the world that balances financial solidity with self-realization. Their visions of potential guide decisions about what college young adult children should attend and direct a willingness to take on debt to fund students' higher education. In this way, potential creates a central structuring fiction for household economies. It also catches students and their families between the “real” math of financial demands and the “fictions” of their childrens possible futures. Drawing on a corpus of 150 interviews with US families who hold student debt, I will explore the interplay between family and expert assessments of young adults' economic prospects and also propose potential as a concept that draws together the notions of the real and the fictional in finance, both in the household and outside it.