Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Melissa S. Fisher is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Georgetown University. Greg Downey is Lecturer in Anthropology at Macquarie University.

Greg Downey is Lecturer in Anthropology at Macquarie University.

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"Capital will go anywhere if there is a profit to be turned or value to be found. That is its nature. This important collection provides a further chapter in this natural history, but one which has a much greater range, not least because it deploys a range of ethnographic techniques which allow it to cover the full spectrum of the ways and wheres in which the global economy works. An important and inspirational book which is willing to tread the delicate dividing line between within and without the system."--Nigel Thrift, author of "Knowing Capitalism"

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FRONTIERS OF CAPITAL

Duke University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments.....................................................................................................................viiIntroduction: The Anthropology of Capital and the Frontiers of Ethnography | Greg Downey and Melissa S. Fisher......................1Fast Capitalism: Para-Ethnography and the Rise of the Symbolic Analyst | Douglas R. Holmes and George E. Marcus.....................33Trading on Numbers | Caitlin Zaloom.................................................................................................58Real Time: Unwinding Technocratic and Anthropological Knowledge | Annelise Riles....................................................86The Information Economy in No-Holds-Barred Fighting | Greg Downey...................................................................108Intersecting Geographies? ICTS and Other Virtualities in Urban Africa | AbdouMaliq Simone...........................................133Corporate Players, New Cosmopolitans, and Guanxi in Shanghai | Aihwa Ong............................................................163Gentrification Generalized: From Local Anomaly to Urban "Regeneration" as Global Urban Strategy | Neil Smith........................191Navigating Wall Street Women's Gendered Networks in the New Economy | Melissa S. Fisher.............................................209Developing Community Software in a Commodity World | Siobhan O'Mahony...............................................................237Reflections on Youth, from the Past to the Postcolony | Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff.............................................267Guerrilla Capitalism and Ghettocentric Cosmopolitanism on the French Urban Periphery | Paul A. Silverstein..........................282Afterword: Knowledge Practices and Subject Making at the Edge | Saskia Sassen.......................................................305Bibliography........................................................................................................................317Contributors........................................................................................................................357Index...............................................................................................................................361

Chapter One

The social theorist's oscillation between the market as the artifact of knowledge and as evidence of its limits finds powerful expression in the events now shaping the financial world. In the aftermath of the Asian Financial Crisis and the consciousness of so-called "systemic risk" amplified, the failure of the economic models that were the source of central bankers' expertise to offer useful predictions or fine-tuned policy solutions to recent market problems, and current efforts by global banks to do away with the regulation and management of the market by state actors altogether ... the central bankers at the Bank of Japan ... were both amazed at what they imagined as their own creation-a global market of seemingly infinite scale and complexity-and fearful of their own powerlessness vis--vis their creation. In particular, these central bankers' sense of powerlessness took the form of a heightened awareness of the contradictions in their role as creators and guardians of the global market. -Riles, "Real-Time: Governing the Market after the Failure of Knowledge"

Annelise Riles's acute insight locates anxieties infiltrating the work of central bankers, but we believe these fears also imbue the outlook of actors across numerous domains of expertise. These figures share the apprehension that their distinctive analytical endeavors have been compromised, that in some deep way their knowledge is in doubt. As Riles notes, central bankers are in a particularly important position in this regard insofar as their anxiety, their sense of powerlessness, is the direct outcome of their own analytical enterprise: the institutional shaping and management of global financial markets. This predicament, faced paradigmatically by central bankers, is the starting point for what we have termed "para-ethnography," the intellectual response to a retreat of those forms of technical knowledge-whether in arts, science, business, finance, politics, government, or law-that have been underwritten and contextualized historically by the nation-state. In the shadow of this failure of technical knowledge is an alternative form of knowledge creation that has integrity in its own right, integrity with which anthropologists have a keen familiarity.

We begin with a discussion of a series of decisions made by the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), the key policymaking body of the U.S. Federal Reserve System, and how these decisions reveal distinctive intellectual practices that, we believe, have unusual methodological significance. We then turn to a historical account, informed by the work of David Westbrook, that describes the creation of a global polity-the "City of Gold," as he terms it-integrated constitutionally by supranational markets. In this brief assessment, we look at the historical circumstance that reciprocally gave birth to this global polity and brought to an end the era of the nation-state as the preeminent institutional context defining our lives together. We do this in terms of two key figures, John Maynard Keynes and Jean Monnet, who engineered this historical transformation through the Bretton Woods and European institutions, respectively, and whose analytical endeavors help us understand the role of technocratic knowledge in shaping a radical politics of our time: a politics that is not simply congruent with or reducible to the precepts of neoliberalism. This discussion also helps us assess the emergence of "symbolic analysts," a class of technocrats and political figures who, though appointed or elected in nation-states, designed supranational institutional realms in which they became key actors (Reich, 1992).

Fast capitalism thus designates the circumstances under which knowledge is created and effaced as the communicative space of the nation-state is eclipsed and our subjects and we, too, must think and act within a communicative space mediated increasingly by supranational markets. In the broadest terms, we are interested in what kind of intellectual practices are plausible, what kind of methodological innovations are necessary under the sway of contemporary political economy. For us, a reflexive ethnography is key for addressing these challenges and for investigating global assemblages constituting themselves in our midst (Agger, 1989; S. Collier and Ong, 2005; Holmes, 2000; Holmes and Marcus, 2005b; Maurer, 2005; Rabinow, 2003; Westbrook, 2003).

BETWEEN THICK AND THIN

We recapitulate in this text our discussions in which we sought to work out for the first time our conceptualization of the para-ethnographic. This initial exercise has since become the basis of a far broader reappraisal of the character of anthropological ethnography in which we are currently engaged that encompasses what we have termed a "refunctioning" of ethnography (Holmes and Marcus, 2005a, 2005b). Our discussion turns on the postulation of the para-ethnographic as an orienting object of study and a key component in the construction of multisited research designs. Such a notion derives from the long-established anthropological interest in "the native point...