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To study risk in the financial industry, rather than using the concept as an analytic category, anthropological research should instead examine the multiple technical and political meanings it has in the highly standardized procedures used by financial professionals worldwide. One important definition of risk concerns the concept of risk-free, used to qualify the bonds of the most powerful states worldwide, which are expected not to default because of their capacity to find money to pay creditors and their willingness to prioritize them against the rest of the polity. Financial professionals use risk-free bonds as a standard to assess any other activity vying for the funds of the financial industry. If professionals consider the activities riskier according to the risk-free criteria, they will demand these activities pay higher returns, a differential designated as a risk premium. The notion of risk-free thus tends to reproduce a geopolitical order where the most powerful states set the standard of financial value for other financial assets. Another definition of risk includes the mathematical concept of standard deviation, often called volatility, established by considering that prices, returns, or other such financial information have a mathematically “normal” distribution, and hence it makes sense to use probabilistic thinking and tools, such as the calculation of averages and correlations. These methods are combined with a political imaginary of market efficiency established in neoclassical economics, according to which, in efficient markets, maximizing investors seek all available information about assets, so that prices reflect this information and thus function as signals for a socially optimal allocation of resources. In this case, investors should not try to “beat” the market, but accept its prices as signals, and the investment strategy should only seek to minimize volatility. By mathematical construction, the standard deviation of a bundle of series that is not completely correlated is lower than that of one series. According to this view, investment should diversify into as many assets as possible, buying the “whole market.” This is the conceptual foundation of indexed investment, which tends to produce investment portfolios that replicate the market, so that the proportion of each asset in the portfolio supposedly matches its proportion in the “investment universe” of all available assets that pay the risk-free rate of return or a risk premium. This leads to a reproduction of the distribution of money among existing assets and thereby to the reproduction of the social hierarchies that include and exclude social activities from financial industry funding, instituting a small group of powerful states as the global foundation of financial value. In everyday practice, financial professionals thus mobilize standardized definitions of risk, with various ontologies and political meanings, in a way that tends to reproduce current monetary distribution and the global hierarchies that result from it.

This introduction reviews the main themes addressed in the special issue Futures of Money – Monies of the Future. Recalling broader historical transformations of money, this introduction focuses on how the digitalization of money interacts with the central role of states and the financial industry in the issuance and distribution of money. This concerns how money interacts with non-monetary digital information and how digital forms of social interaction transform the rules of exchange where money is used. Exploring these issues, the articles brought together here open fruitful venues to rethink the way we theorize money.

Inévitablement, les technocraties posent aux chercheurs des difficultés pour être appréhendées à leur juste mesure. D’ailleurs, elles n’ont cessé de produire des objets démesurés. On sait que le Codex européen fait 9 000 pages et que les accords du Brexit sont loin de se résumer à quelques feuillets… Incompréhensibles ou plutôt impréhensibles par tout humain normalement constitué. Le Fonds monétaire international (FMI) constitue un cas exemplaire de cette démesure technocratique. Comment en effet le localiser, le territorialiser quand il recouvre la finance mondiale ? Où le situer et comment le qualifier ? Est-ce un modulateur, un régulateur, un opérateur dans des flux d’échanges ? Concrètement, il s’agit d’un bâtiment localisé à New York, avec des couloirs et des bureaux. En réalité, on le voit bien pour n’importe quel chercheur travaillant sur la finance mondiale, étudier le FMI signifie embrasser toutes ses activités, l’ensemble de ses productions, le spectre des affaires, des pays et des opérations dans lesquelles il est impliqué, bref essayer de percer l’opacité de son régime normal d’activité. Horacio Ortiz nous rappelle que cette institution est une technocratie qui cherche à imposer à l’échelle mondiale sa logique, logique qui est avant tout politique. Peut-être faut-il postuler que l’on a affaire à un drôle d’organisme, sublime, parce qu’il cherche à opérer une synthèse entre des mouvements contradictoires. D’où la difficulté de figuration qu’il pose à quiconque cherche à le représenter. Difficulté que Nelson Jacomin cherche à dépasser en substituant aux graphes bien ordonnés et aux courbes bien soignées, un autre agencement, un véritable chaos graphique destiné à agir de manière subliminale. Chapô : EMMANUEL GRIMAUD & ANTHON STAVRIANAKIS

This book brings together eight chapters and an afterword that study how people count with money, while questioning the distinction between quality and quantity. Some chapters are theoretical and o...

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.

El objetivo del artículo es analizar el impacto que la corrupción y la impunidad tienen sobre las violaciones a derechos humanos. Para ello, se realizaron varios modelos estadísticos. Se observó que existen ciertos tipos de violaciones a los derechos humanos que se perpetran mediante actos de corrupción. En la medida en que ni el acto de corrupción ni esa violación sean sancionados, la impunidad se convierte en un contexto que incentiva al perpetrador a seguir cometiendo los mismos actos de corrupción, lo que generará nuevas violaciones a derechos humanos. Cuando la corrupción y la impunidad se conjugan, ambas se convierten en patrones estructurales de violaciones a los derechos humanos.

Kimberly Chong’s Best Practice is based on extensive fieldwork done in the late 2000s in a site where two major contemporary historical trends come together: the expansion of financial reasoning in...

Regulation and professional norms give the financial industry a fundamental role in the allocation of resources, considering that it is the place where efficient markets are created, with prices reflecting all the information available about companies and hence their true value. The analysis of valuation methods shows that they are multiple, interdependent, and contradictory, and that they are applied by different professions and companies, within relations of hierarchy, cooperation, and competition. Yet, in all these cases, the notion of true value, defined both technically, as the result of the application of procedures, and politically, as a hierarchy of social activities, legitimizes the distributive effects of the financial industry.; La réglementation et les normes professionnelles adjugent à l’industrie financière un rôle fondamental dans la distribution de ressources, en considérant qu’elle est le lieu de réalisation de l’efficience des marchés financiers, où les prix reflèteraient toute l’information disponible sur les entreprises, et donc leur vraie valeur. L’analyse des méthodes d’évaluation montre qu’elles sont multiples, interdépendantes et contradictoires et qu’elles sont portées par différentes professions et entreprises dans des relations de hiérarchie, coopération et concurrence. Or, dans tous les cas, la notion de vraie valeur, définie à la fois de manière technique, comme résultat de l’application de procédures, et politique, comme hiérarchie des activités sociales, légitime les effets distributifs de l’industrie financière.

International audience

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.

International audience; What does it mean to turn something into capital? What does considering things as assets entail? What does the prevalence of an investor’s viewpoint require? What is this culture of valuation that asks that we capitalize on everything? How can we make sense of the traits, necessities and upshots of this pervasive cultural condition? This book takes the reader to an ethnographic stroll down the trail of capitalization. Start-up companies, research centers, consulting firms, state enterprises, investment banks, public administrations: the territory can certainly prove strange and disorienting at first sight, with its blurred boundaries between private appropriation and public interest, economic sanity and moral breakdown, the literal and the metaphorical, the practical and the ideological. The traveler certainly requires a resolutely pragmatist attitude, and a taste for the meanders of signification. But in all the sites in which we set foot in this inquiry we recognize a recurring semiotic complex: a scenario of valuation in which things signify by virtue of their capacity to become assets in the eye of an imagined investor. A ground-breaking anthropological investigation on the culture of contemporary capitalism, this work directs attention to the largely unexplored problem of capitalization and offers a critical resource for current debates on neoliberalism and financialization.

Ce texte se base sur une enquete de terrain aupres des gerants de fonds investissant l'argent de lurs clients en derives de credit. L'analyse montre que les employes se presentent comme porteurs de la decision d'investir, en appliquant des procedures qui impliquent une figure theorique, multiple et contradictoire, de l'investisseur individuel. Cependant, leur decision est en fait le resultat des interactions en partie hierarchiques au sein de leur entreprise, et suit les regles du reseau d'experts au sein duquel les derives de credit sont produits et echanges. La decision n'est pas celle d'un "investisseur" individuel mais elle est disseminee dans ces espaces sociaux.

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.

El nivel delictivo de un lugar puede afectar la calidad de vida de sus habitantes al ser considerada por los mismos como un motivo para restringir su comportamiento cotidiano. Sin embargo, esta relación no es directa, sino que está mediada por las percepciones que dichos sujetos tengan respecto de su propia situación de seguridad o inseguridad frente al delito. En la presente investigación se hace uso de la información de la Encuesta Nacional de Victimización y Percepción sobre Seguridad para analizar el caso mexicano. Se analiza específicamente la relación entre las evaluaciones ciudadanas sobre el desempeño de la policía y la realización de prácticas ciudadanas de protección personal frente al delito. De esta manera se encuentra que las evaluaciones negativas de la policía, especialmente de la policía municipal, aumentan significativamente la propensión de los sujetos a restringir sus comportamientos por temor al delito, así como la diversidad de las prácticas restrictivas que realizan. Además se encontró que este efecto está modulado por la percepción de amenazas delictivas concretas por parte de los sujetos.

Ce livre propose une histoire de la banque centrale chinoise, la Banque populaire de Chine (BPC) depuis le debut de la periode dite « de reforme et d'ouverture ». Il retrace l’importance croissante de cette institution dans la politique monetaire dans un contexte d’evolutions au sommet de l’Etat et du Parti communiste chinois (PCC). Le livre est organise en deux parties. La premiere est une presentation chronologique des evolutions de la Banque populaire de Chine distinguant deux periodes : d...

Isobutene oligomerization on W2O3/Al2O3 and NiO-W2O3/Al2O3 catalysts (20 wt.% W2O3 and 5 wt.% NiO) was studied. The catalysts were prepared by impregnating ammonium tungstanate and nickel nitrate on a γ-alumina sol-gel support. The XRD patterns of the samples calcined at 500°C show the presence of large W2O3 conglomerates on the W2O3/Al2O3 sample and smaller ones on the NiO-W2O3/Al2O3 catalyst. Pyridine-FT-IR absorption spectra study shows a higher acidity on the nickel-containing sample. The isobutene oligomerization was carried out in a gas-phase flow reactor (50°–150°C), and selectivity as high as 100% to the formation of the olefins fraction was obtained. The role of NiO coordinating the π-allyl adsorption of the olefins as well as its role to the high selectivity were discussed.

This note offers two short comments on Kai Lyu’s paper published by AEL: A Convivium in 2015. The note highlights the fact that although the historical comparative perspective is very fruitful, Kai Lyu could have gone beyond the market/state divide, and could have better integrated the roles of stock exchanges in the political economy of China and the US in order to account for their different institutional transformations.

Les vendeurs des sociétés de brokerage vendent de l’analyse financière sur des entreprises cotées en bourse de manière personnalisée aux gérants de fonds, pour que ceux-ci indiquent leurs choix d’investissement. Les modèles d’analyse financière et les règles de cet échange marchand sont fortement structurés par l’État, le monde universitaire et l’organisation des entreprises dont les acteurs sont des employés. En même temps, l’échange s’organise à travers des relations personnelles sur le long terme, dans lesquelles les acteurs développent différentes manières d’évaluer les actions des entreprises cotées qu’ils analysent. Ainsi, le marché s’organise autour d’une procédure qui permet une certaine ouverture de la qualification de ce qui est échangé : l’analyse financière. La multiplicité et la variabilité de cette qualification ne sont pas un simple élément marginal dans l’échange. Elle sont de fait des éléments organisateurs, en ce qu’elles font partie de la stratégie explicite des acteurs et des stratégies commerciales des entreprises qui les emploient. The sales people of the brokerage companies sell personalized financial analysis about listed companies to fund managers for them to inform their investment choices. The models of financial analysis and the rules of this commercial exchange are strongly structured by the state, the academic world and the companies of which the actors are employees. At the same time, the exchange is organized through personal relations that grow on the long term, in which the actors develop different ways to value the stocks of the companies they analyze. The market is thus organized by a procedure that allows for a certain openness of the qualification of that which is exchanged, i.e. the financial analysis. The multiplicity and variability of the qualification are not a mere marginal element in the exchange. They actually contribute to its organization, by being part of the explicit strategy of the actors and of the commercial strategies of the companies that employ them.

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.

L'industrie financiere a pris une place preponderante dans l'economie globale depuis une trentaine d'annees. Au nom du dogme de l'efficience des marches, elle determine la valeur des entreprises cotees en bourse a l'aide d’une methodologie standardisee d’inspiration neoliberale cautionnee par la reglementation financiere. La valeur des entreprises aurait ainsi une « verite » etablie par les experts de la finance, faisant de ces derniers les arbitres de la distribution des ressources monetaires a l’echelle mondiale et, partant, de la justice sociale. L’auteur, anthropologue, s’est immerge dans le monde de la finance pendant plusieurs annees, travaillant comme analyste au sein d’entreprises financieres a Paris et a New York. Son regard sur les pratiques et les vecus quotidiens des brokers, traders et autres gerants de fonds – qu’il restitue parfois crument – montre a quel point la « verite de la valeur » qu’ils enoncent pose en realite probleme. Loin des utopies liberales auxquelles elle se refere, elle est le produit d’injonctions et de procedures multiples et contradictoires, suivies par des personnes qui travaillent dans des relations de concurrence et de complementarite, a la fois entre elles et entre les entreprises qui les emploient. A travers l’exemple de la finance, une reflexion critique sur les processus de creation des hierarchies globales contemporaines.

This editorial considers the opportunities opened up for anthropologists by the financial crisis of 2008. The chief of these is the exposure of cracks in the intellectual hegemony of free-market economics which contributed to an unnecessarily defensive posture on the part of most anthropologists during the period of neoliberal globalization. The authors claim that anthropology can bridge the gap between everyday life and the world at large by combining the study of ideas and social actions. We draw on Ortiz's research among financial professionals to show how working practices informed by economic liberalism can have extremely unequal consequences for the global distribution of resources. The perspectives of Mauss and Polanyi on political economy can help us to make sense of the current situation and to recommend a path forward beyond market fundamentalism. Their general ideas lend power to the concrete findings of field research. The mask of neoliberal ideology has been ripped from the politics of world economy. Anthropology's highest mission is to start from where people are and go with them wherever they take you. What better time to follow this imperative than when the model the world has been compelled to live by for three decades is in such disarray?

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.

This article analyzes stock valuation practices, based on participant observation in a brokerage company in New York and in an asset management company in Paris between 2002 and 2004. Financial analysts, traders, sales people and fund managers all use the same financial theory, by following standardized procedures, according to which "value", defined differently by each profession, is always problematized in relation to its "truth". Acting in the name of real or potential clients whose interests they are supposed to represent, employees position themselves as "investors" whose interactions would ensue in the creation of "efficient markets". Employees are bound by relations of competition and complementarity, which are articulated in particular through technical debates about the different definitions of what constitutes the "truth of value". Yet, just like financial regulation does, they also mobilize arguments according to which the "truth" that would be reflected in prices, is part of a political project in which the financial industry, as the social space of "qualified investors", is expected to constitute "efficient markets" in order to obtain an "optimal" social allocation of credit. Thus, the financial industry is expected to produce a "truth" in prices, which is both technical and political.; Ce texte analyse les pratiques d'évaluation des actions cotées à partir d'une enquête par observation participante auprès de courtiers à New York et de gérants de fonds à Paris entre 2002 et 2004. Les analystes financiers, traders, vendeurs d'information et gérants de fonds, utilisent tous la même théorie financière, en suivant des procédures standardisées qui définissent la " valeur " de manières différentes selon les professions, mais en la problématisant toujours par rapport à sa " vérité ". Dans ces pratiques, agissant au nom des clients réels ou potentiels dont ils sont censés représenter les intérêts, les employés se positionnent comme " investisseurs ", dont les interactions auraient comme résultat la constitution de " marchés efficients ". Les employés sont liés par des relations de compétition et de complémentarité, qui s'articulent notamment à partir d'arguments techniques concernant les différentes définitions de ce qui fait la " vérité de la valeur ". Mais, comme le fait la régulation financière, ils mobilisent aussi des arguments sur le fait que la " vérité ", qui serait reflétée dans les prix, fait partie du projet politique qui donne à l'industrie financière, en tant qu'espace social des " investisseurs qualifiés ", le rôle de réaliser des " marchés efficients " pour atteindre une allocation sociale " optimale " du crédit. L'industrie financière est ainsi censée produire une " vérité " à travers les prix, qui est à la fois technique et politique.