Oral Presentation Session

Reviewed by: Society for Economic Anthropology

Of interest to: Practicing and Applied Anthropologists, Teachers of Anthropology in Community Colleges, Students

Primary Theme: Technology

Secondary Theme: Exchange

(3-1245) Sociotechnical Infrastructures of Value and Flow

Previous exploration in the anthropology of finance has identified a broadness inherent to financialization. Scholars have clarified diverse and unconventional means of organizing capital within dominant financial arenas such as stock and security exchanges (i.e. Ho 2009; Miyazaki 2013) and central banks (Holmes 2014). Ethnographic attention to the neoliberal expansion of markets has shed light on social relations that support, enable and are transformed in the interface with financialization (Elyachar 2005; Schuster 2015). In this panel, we aim to combine and extend these perspectives by reflecting on public and private alternate financial flows and values of credit and debt.

Drawing on scholarship which explains how contrary to its typical definitions, financial practice extends beyond large-scale financial institutions (Maurer 2005; Guyer 2004; Roitman 2005), the papers below explore independent and unconventional means of defining credit, debt, and capital. For this, we look to Pfaffenberger’s (1992) definition of the sociotechnical: a process of engineering innovation through combining new social, economic, legal, scientific, and political conditions. From this, we examine how both familiar and unfamiliar sociotechnical assemblages come together to connect, configure and constitute “buyers” and “sellers” of different forms of capital. Papers address how diverse forms of techno-sociality serve as the basis for the production, accumulation and flow of value: innovative financial technology in Kenya as means of accumulation for entrepreneurs; family business governance as a shareholder discipline strategy in Colombia; Overseas Filipino workers as sites of “flexible accumulation” of symbolic and real capital; and phatic labor as relational capital among social science publishers in Iran. All papers explain how conditions of accumulation through debt and capital do not require the sophisticated infrastructures of modern finance, while considering what alternative forms of value transfer serve analogous functions to financial transactions.
Therefore, through our particular examples, we aim to answer the following two questions:
What forms of financial techniques do people deploy to create other forms of capital?
How do people create and manage a debt of social and cultural capital?

Elyachar, Julia. 2005. Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development, and the State in Cairo. Durham: Duke University Press,.
Guyer, Jane. 2004. Marginal Gains: Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Ho, Karen. 2009. Liquidated : An Ethnography of Wall Street. Durham: Duke University Press.
Holmes, Douglas. 2014. Economy of Words: Communicative Imperatives in Central Banks. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Maurer, Bill. 2005. Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Miyazaki, Hirokazu. 2013. Arbitraging Japan : Dreams of Capitalism at the End of Finance. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Pfaffenberger, Bryan. 1992. “Social Anthropology of Technology.” Annual Review of Anthropology 21: 491–516.
Roitman, Janet. 2005. Fiscal Disobedience: An Anthropology of Economic Regulation in Central Africa. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Schuster, Caroline. 2015. Social Collateral : Women and Microfinance in Paraguay’s Smuggling Economy. Oakland, California: University of California Press.

Organizer(s)

• Farah Qureshi

  University of California, Irvine

Presenter(s)

• Farah Qureshi

  University of California, Irvine

Organizer(s)

• Mariana Saavedra Espinosa

  Assistant Professor of Global Commerce
  Denison University

Presenter(s)

• Mariana Saavedra Espinosa

  Assistant Professor of Global Commerce
  Denison University

Chair(s)

• Taylor Nelms

  Managing Director of Research
  Filene Research Institute

Discussant(s)

• Mrinalini Tankha

  Assistant Professor
  Portland State University

Chair(s)

• Ivan Small

  Assistant Professor
  Central Connecticut State University

Presenter(s)

• Hosna Sheikholeslami

  Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Sociology
  Denison University

• Alden Marte-Wood

  University of California, Irvine

Presentations:

• 4:15 PM - 4:30 PM

  Plural Forms of ‘Fintech’ in Kenya
  Farah Qureshi – University of California, Irvine
• 4:30 PM - 4:45 PM

  The Social Unit of Capital: Governance and Discipline in the Reproduction of Colombian Family Capitalism
  Mariana Saavedra Espinosa – Denison University
• 4:45 PM - 5:00 PM

  Gifts, Gossip, and Gossamer: Phatic Labor as Relational Capital between Publishers and Translators in Iran
  Hosna Sheikholeslami – Denison University
• 5:00 PM - 5:15 PM

  “Financing the Philippines: Economic Remittances and Debt Service Payments in the Postcolonial Era of Flexible Accumulation”
  Alden Sajor Marte-Wood – University of California, Irvine
• 5:15 PM - 5:30 PM

  Discussion
  Mrinalini Tankha – Portland State University