Description
Book Synopsis Beginning with an original historical vision of financialization in human history, this volume then continues with a rich set of contemporary ethnographic case studies from Europe, Asia and Africa. Authors explore the ways in which finance inserts itself into relationships of class and kinship, how it adapts to non-Western religious traditions, and how it reconfigures legal and ecological dimensions of social organization, and urban social relations in general. Central themes include the indebtedness of individuals and households, the impact of digital technologies, the struggle for housing, financial education, and political contestation.
Trade Review “An excellent collection of essays overall, this edited volume demonstrates the various ways financialisation takes shape and how lives are entangled with it. I highly recommend this book as it yields new insights into processes of financialisation and advances the scholarly literature.” • Anthropological Notebooks
“In the volume’s diverse discussions of distinct yet interconnected aspects, such as state policies and debt advisors, infrastructures and familial relations, Financialization will certainly become a standard reference on the subject. It should inspire further research, not only in directions laid out by the introduction and in the afterword, such as the longue-durée and the multiscale character of the current moment, or the capture of social forms by finance capital, but also stimulate further reflections concerning how anthropologists and other social scientists… come to know what they do about cap italism.” • Anthropos
“[This volume] shows how financialization and its social consequences can take rather different forms in different places… a solid foundation for a consideration of the basic nature of financialization and its effects.” • James G. Carrier, Indiana University Bloomington
“This is a very strong collection… the attempt to provide an anthropological understanding of contemporary financialization that goes beyond merely describing how variable it is, is highly welcome.” • Keir Martin, University of Oslo
Table of Contents List of Illustrations, Figures and Tables
Preface
Chris Hann
Introduction: Transitions to What? On the Social Relations of Financialization in Anthropology and History
Don Kalb
Chapter 1. Financialization, Plutocracy and the Debtor’s Economy: Consequences and Limits
Richard H. Robbins
Chapter 2. Accumulation by Saturation: Infrastructures of Financial Inclusion, Cash Transfers, and Financial Flows in India
Sohini Kar
Chapter 3. Green Infrastructure as Financialized Utopia: Carbon Offset Forests in China
Charlotte Bruckermann
Chapter 4. Altering the Trajectory of Finance: Meaning-Making and Control in Malaysian Islamic Investment Banks
Aaron Z. Pitluck
Chapter 5. Financialization and Reproduction in Baku, Azerbaijan
Tristam Barrett
Chapter 6. Financialization and the Norwegian State: Constraints, Contestations, and Custodial Finance in the World’s Largest Sovereign Wealth Fund
Knut Christian Myhre
Chapter 7. Capital’s Fidelity: Financialization in the German Social Market Economy
Hadas Weiss
Chapter 8. Redistribution and Indebtedness: A Tale of Two Settings
Deborah James
This chapter is made available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license, thanks to the support of the Economic and Social Research Council of the UK (ESRC Grant ES/M003825/1 ‘An ethnography of advice: between market, society and the declining welfare state’), the Leverhulme Trust (ECF-2016-518), and the LSE Anthropology’s RIIF fund.
Chapter 9. Retail Finance and the Moral Dimension of Class: Debt Advice on an English Housing Estate
Ryan Davey
Chapter 10. Making Debt Work: Devising and Debating Debt Collection in Croatia
Marek Mikuš
Chapter 11. Financialized Kinship and Challenges for the Greek Oikos
Dimitra Kofti
Chapter 12. Financialized Landscapes and Transport Infrastructure: The Case of Ciudad Valdeluz
Natalia Buier
Chapter 13. Housing Financialization in Majorcan Holiday Rentals
Marc Morell
Afterword: Financialization Beyond Crisis
Gavin Smith
Index
