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International audience; This text presents Keith Hart’s anthropology of money andits importance for a political anthropology of the financialindustry. Hart argues that money articulates social hierarchies and inequalities that connect intimate personal experience with the rest of humanity, and that the multiplicity of violence and the liberating potential of these interdependences does not correspond to a single logic, contrary to what abstract economic theories propose, criticalor otherwise. This approach makes a major contribution toa political anthropology of finance, analysing the multiplicity of practices in the financial industry from the perspective of how they participate in the constitution of globalmonetary power relations, producing and transformingsocial hierarchies through their distribution of money andtheir justification of this distribution

International audience; This article proposes an analytics to study the financial industry as a global political institution, based on its role in the production of global hierarchies, by the way it collects, produces and distributes money worldwide. I propose to do this by combining three analytic angles. First, I propose to situate the financial industry in a global space, where it contributes to produce multiple social hierarchies, which connect to the history of colonialism, the World Wars, the Cold War and its aftermath. These hierarchies cannot be subsumed under a single logic, but must be studied as intersecting and mutually constitutive. The second angle concerns the rules of monetary distribution applied by financial professionals, mobilizing, among others, the concepts of investor, market efficiency, risk and value, with their partly contradictory character and their technical, moral and political meanings. These rules are institutionalized in state regulation, labour and commercial contracts, giving the financial industry a certain institutional cohesion worldwide. The last analytic angle then concerns the way in which financial professionals make sense of their place in the global hierarchies they contribute to produce. They tend to use repertoires of meritocracy to connect their role in global monetary distribution to the social elites they tend to belong to, with conflicts that vary across the multiple forms of social identification present in the financial industry worldwide. Combining these three analytic angles allows for mobilizing fieldwork done in the offices of the financial industry to develop a critical account of its global political role.

Financial imagination plays a fundamental, yet ambivalent role in the establishment of hierarchies within and between business schools, and in business life at large. This study examines this process in the ‘middle tier’ of business education: that is, in the social space in which students and instructors understand themselves to occupy a ‘mid-range’ position within an order of excellence and success. Largely articulated through business school rankings, this order strongly relies on the centrality of the financial curriculum, proficiency in which is understood as both a proxy for smartness and a sign of moneymaking capacity. In the ‘middle tier’, this order manifests in the form of an anxiety: an order that, though legitimate, is thought not to be attained, or hardly attainable. The study draws from ethnographic investigation in a ‘middle tier’ business school with attention to how finance is made sense of in relation to an alternative curriculum, and in connection with the aim of ‘making it to the top’. A comparison with a ‘top tier’ business school allows furthering understanding of how the order of business schools relies on the anxiety of finance in order to reproduce an acquiescence to dominant financial imagination.

Based on participant observation with financial professionals working for a mergers and acquisitions consultancy company in Shanghai, this essay shows that they conduct these transactions by mobilizing imaginaries of “profits,” “states,” and “cultures.” These imaginaries concern professional and nonprofessional life and are multiple, sometimes contradictory, and mutually constitutive. This shows that the analytic claim about a “real economy,” against which financial practices would be gauged, misses the multiple meanings whereby these practices make sense for those who carry them out. The article proposes instead a pragmatist approach of money, whose political import would be to focus on how the practices and meanings of financial professionals, as they channel money to certain activities at the expense of others, contribute to produce global social hierarchies in the access to monetary resources.

Fieldwork with a team of investment managers investing in credit derivatives in Paris in 2004 shows how the concepts of “investor” and “market efficiency” are central in the technicalities of their procedures, in diverse and contradictory ways. The employees refer to their moral and political contents, as they are articulated in liberal philosophy and in financial regulation, to make sense of their careers and of the social role of finance. “Crisis” is then defined as a deviation from market efficiency, itself expected to lead to an optimal allocation of credit. These concepts thus constitute the limited repertoire of the meaning of practical rules followed by employees for a remuneration, within a bureaucratic commercial network, in a setting very different from the utopias from which the concepts stem. Therefore, anthropologists must not use them as analytic tools; rather, such concepts should be understood as part of the object of study.

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

International audience; Based on participant observation, this paper analyzes the professional everyday of employees of the financial industry. For them, giving financial value to a social activity means determining technically the monetary revenue that can be obtained from it. But it also means including it in a hierarchy of access to credit, according to liberal moral and political considerations found in financial regulation and financial theory, aiming to create efficient markets where individual investors would meet, leading to an optimal allocation of global monetary resources. Thus, this case shows that everyday practice in the financial industry challenges the opposition, found in Weber and in neo-liberalism, between an economic value (in the singular) and moral and political values (in the plural). Following Mauss and current trends in the anthropology of money, the paper concludes that the concept of value should not be an analytic tool, but is part of the object we study, as one of the ways in which the people observed make sense of their own practice.

In the last 30 years, the issuance of stocks and bonds has become the main source of financing for companies not only in the United States and Europe, but also in India and in many other countries in the developing world. In addition, the issuance of sovereign bonds has become an unavoidable element of state budgets, as we know them today. The financial industry, responsible for attracting the funds and allocating them among these different aspirants to global credit, is thus at the center of a global distribution of resources. In this chapter, I will develop a notion of elite that attempts to grasp the specific relation of power in which the financial industry operates today. In particular, I will attempt to clarify how the professionals of the financial industry, responsible for a global distribution of resources that they effect through their everyday procedures, can be thought of as central to a political process.1 To do so, I will draw on the work of Marcel Mauss, in particular the way in which he attempted to understand financial flows as constitutive of specific social hierarchies in a geographical space that went beyond that of official political groups, and with a temporal horizon that, spanning generations, superseded the limits of each individual’s life. This will help to explore the specific place of the financial industry in a global social space in which it produces hierarchies in the access of credit.