FRONTIERS OF CAPITAL: ETHNOGRAPHIC REFLECTIONS ON THE NEW ECONOMY. Melissa Fisher and Greg Downey

Transcription

1 BOOK MANUSCRIPT FRONTIERS OF CAPITAL: ETHNOGRAPHIC REFLECTIONS ON THE NEW ECONOMY. Melissa Fisher and Greg Downey editors October 2004 (With Some Revisions: April 2005)

2 FRONTIERS OF CAPITAL ii Contents I. Introduction The Anthropology of Capital and the Frontiers of Ethnography Greg Downey and Melissa Fisher II. Frontiers of Knowledge and Information Technology Chapter One. Fast-Capitalism: Para-Ethnography and the Rise of the Symbolic Analyst Douglas Holmes, Binghamton University, and George Marcus, Rice University Chapter Two. Trading on Numbers. Caitlin Zaloom, New York University Metropolitan Studies Program Chapter Three. Real Time: Unwinding Technocratic and Anthropological Knowledge. Annelise Riles, Cornell University

3 FRONTIERS OF CAPITAL iii Chapter Four. The Information Economy in No-Holds-Barred Fighting. Greg Downey, University of Notre Dame Chapter Five. Intersecting Geographies?: ICTs and Other Virtualities in Urban Africa. AbdouMaliq Simone, New School University and University of Witwatersrand III. Frontiers of Subject Formation and Sociality Chapter Six. Re-Engineering Personalities and Guanxi in Shanghai. Aihwa Ong, University of California, Berkeley Chapter Seven. Gentrification Generalized: From Local Anomaly to Urban "Regeneration" as Global Urban Strategy. Neil Smith, City University of New York Chapter Eight. Navigating Wall Street Women s Gendered Networks in the New Economy. Melissa Fisher, Georgetown University Chapter Nine. Developing Community Software in a Commodity World. Siobhán O'Mahoney, Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration

4 FRONTIERS OF CAPITAL iv Chapter Ten. Reflections on Youth, from the Past to the Postcolony. Jean Comaroff, University of Chicago, and John Comaroff, University of Chicago Chapter Eleven. Guerrilla Capitalism and Ghettocentric Cosmopolitanism. Paul A. Silverstein, Reed College IV. Conclusion Knowledge Practices and Subject Making at the Edge: Local Moments and Electronic Domains Saskia Sassen, University of Chicago

5 FRONTIERS OF CAPITAL v Contributors Jean Comaroff is the Bernard E. & Ellen C. Sunny Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences, and in the Clinical Scholars Program at the University of Chicago. Her fieldwork in southern Africa and Great Britain has focused especially on colonialism, modernity, ritual, power, and consciousness. Among other works, she is the author of Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People (1985). John L. Comaroff is the Harold H. Swift Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences in the College of the University of Chicago. His areas of interest include modernity, neoliberalism, politics, law, and social theory, especially among the Tswana peoples of southern Africa. His many works include Rules and Processes: The Cultural Logic of Dispute in an African Context (with S.A. Roberts, 1981). Together, John and Jean Comaroff have authored or

6 FRONTIERS OF CAPITAL vi edited a number of landmark volumes, including Of Revelation and Revolution (2 volumes, 1991 and 1997), Ethnography and the Historical Imagination (1992), Modernity and Its Malcontents: Ritual and Power in Africa (1993), Civil Society and the Political Imagination in Africa: Critical Perspective, Problems, Paradoxes (1999), and Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism (2000). Greg Downey is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in He has published articles on sports and performance in a range of journals and his book on capoeira and embodiment, entitled Lessons in Cunning: Learning Capoeira, an Afro-Brazilian Art, Oxford University Press (January, 2005). He is continuing his research on the relations between gender, violence, physiological change, media, and popular culture. His nonacademic experience includes a brief stint as a design consultant for a Chicago-based design-planning firm.

7 FRONTIERS OF CAPITAL vii Melissa Fisher is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Georgetown University. She received her Ph.D. from the Columbia University Department of Anthropology in 2003 completing a dissertation on gender and class relations on Wall Street, entitled Wall Street Women: Gender, Culture, and History in Global Finance. She has published a chapter on Wall Street women in an edited volume, entitled Constructing Corporate America: History, Politics, Culture (2004). In 2001, she co-organized a workshop on the New Economy sponsored by the Program on the Corporation as a Social Institution at the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), the Business Institutions Initiative, also of the SSRC, and the Goizueta Business School at Emory University. Dr. Fisher also occasionally works as an independent anthropology consultant specializing in ethnographic consumer research. Douglas R. Holmes is a professor of anthropology at Binghamton University. During the last decade his research has focused on the social and cultural dynamics of advance European integration. His current research project

8 FRONTIERS OF CAPITAL viii examines the European Central Bank and its role in creating and managing the new European economy and currency. His published works include: Integral Europe: Fast-Capitalism, Multiculturalism, Neofascism (2000), and Cultural Disenchantment: Worker Peasantries in Northeast Italy (1989). George E. Marcus is the Joseph D. Jamial Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at Rice University. He is the founding editor of the journal Cultural Anthropology and creator of the fin-de-siecle series Late Editions at the University of Chicago Press. His many influential works include Anthropology as Cultural Critique (co-authored with Michael Fischer, 1986) and Writing Culture (co-edited with James Clifford, 1986). His recent works include Ethnography Through Thick and Thin (1998) and the edited volume Critical Anthropology Now (1999). Together, professors Douglas Holmes and George Marcus are collaborating on an on-going attempt to reinvent the norms and forms of ethnographic research to adjust to its changing circumstances of production. In particular, they

9 FRONTIERS OF CAPITAL ix are examining the theoretical and methodological challenges posed by the study of cultures of expertise. They have proposed a series of strategies by which the production of knowledge in domains of science, politics, business, and art can be investigated ethnographically. Siobhán O'Mahony is an Assistant Professor at the Harvard Business School. Her research examines technical communities and their relations with firms, the management of innovation and a technical labor force, the externalization of work, and new forms of organizing and cooperation that defy traditional definitions. A pervasive objective is to understand variance in the types of social structures that emerge when boundaries become blurred and to examine how power differentials contribute to the emergence of negotiated technical orders. She received her Ph.D. in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University and was a Social Science Research Council Fellow. Aihwa Ong is Professor of Anthropology and of Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Spirits of Resistance and

10 FRONTIERS OF CAPITAL x Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia (1987); Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (1999); and the co-editor of Bewitching Women, Pious Men: Gender and Body Politics in Southeast Asia (1992); and Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism (1995). Her forthcoming books include Buddha in Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, and the New America (University of California Press, Public Anthropology Series), and Global Assemblages: Oikos and Anthropos In-formation (co-edited with Stephen J. Collier). Ong recently received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship to study risk, sustainability, and citizenship in Asian global cities. Annelise Riles is Professor of Law and Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University. She has conducted research in China, Japan, and the Pacific. Her work focuses on the transnational dimensions of legal theories and institutions. Her first book, The Network Inside Out, won the American Society of International Law's Certificate of Merit for Her second book, Rethinking the Masters of Comparative Law, is a cultural history of

11 FRONTIERS OF CAPITAL xi Comparative Law presented through its canonical figures. A forthcoming edited collection, Documents: Artifacts of Modern Knowledge, brings together lawyers, anthropologists, sociologists and historians of science. She is currently writing a book based on anthropological fieldwork among financial regulators in Tokyo and New York about the cultural practices of lawyers, and their effect on the transnational practice of law. Saskia Sassen is the Ralph Lewis Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago, and Centennial Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics. She is currently completing her forthcoming book Denationalization: Economy and Polity in a Global Digital Age (2003) based on a five year project on governance and accountability in a global economy. Her most recent books are Guests and Aliens (1999) and an edited book, entitled Global Networks/Linked Cities (2002). Her book The Global City (1991) is out in a new fully updated edition in She is co-director of the Economy Section of the Global Chicago Project, a Member of the National Academy of Sciences Panel on Urban Data Sets, a Member of the Council

12 FRONTIERS OF CAPITAL xii of Foreign Relations, and Chair of the newly formed Information Technology, International Cooperation and Global Security Committee of the Social Science Research Council. Paul A. Silverstein is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Reed College and a member of the editorial committee of Middle East Report. His work on French and North African culture and politics has appeared in a number of disciplinary and area studies journals and edited volumes. He is currently completing a book manuscript entitled, Trans-Politics: Islam, Berberity and the French Nation-State. AbdouMaliq Simone is an urbanist presently holding joint academic appointments at the Graduate Program in International Affairs, New School University, and the Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of Witwatersrand. He has taught at five African universities and worked for a range of African NGOs and regional institutions. Key publications include In Whose Image?: Political Islam and Urban Practices in Sudan (1994),

13 FRONTIERS OF CAPITAL xiii "Urban Social Fields in Africa," Social Text, 56, 1998, "Straddling the Divides: Remaking Associational Life in the Informal African City" International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 25,1, 2001, and a forthcoming book, For the City Yet to Come: Changing Urban Life in Africa. Neil Smith is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Geography and directs the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at City University of New York. He has written extensively about the broad interaction between space, nature, social theory, and history including his books, New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City (1996) and Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space (1984), as well as volumes he has co-edited including Geography and Empire: Critical Studies in the History of Geography (1994) and Gentrification of the City (1986). His latest book, Mapping the American Century: Isaiah Bowman and the Geography of Empire, is forthcoming from the University of California. He co-edits Society and Space and sits on numerous editorial boards including Social Text and Capitalism, Nature, Socialism.

14 FRONTIERS OF CAPITAL xiv Caitlin Zaloom is an Assistant Professor in the Metropolitan Studies Program at New York University. Her research interests include globalization and cities, technology and networks, financial markets and social theory. Dr. Zaloom received a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley in 2002, and a BA in Middle Eastern Studies and Modern Culture and Media from Brown University in For her dissertation, she conducted intensive ethnographic research with traders in futures markets in Chicago and London where she examined risk-taking, rationality and technological change. An article based on this research, "Ambiguous Numbers: Trading Technologies and Interpretation in Financial Markets" appeared this past May (2003) in American Ethnologist, and her book, The Discipline of Speculators, will be published by the University of Chicago Press.