Bill Maurer

Putting Global Capitalism in Its Place: Economic Hybridity, Bataille, and Ritual Expenditure

This exceedingly interesting paper takes as its starting point J. K. Gibson-Graham’s exhortation to find new theoretical languages to explain capitalism’s supposed triumph without reproducing the self-justificatory narratives of its inevitability and global dominance. Yang crafts such a theoretical language, using tools derived from Bataille, Baudrillard, and Bakhtin and through an insightful and nuanced analysis of apparently “irrational” ritual expenditures in Wenzhou, a region often touted in the press as a success story of capitalism and free markets in the “new China.” Specifically, Yang develops two models. One is a model of ritual expenditure that attends to the sacralization of the putatively economic. It is meant to address the shortcomings of other models of peasant economies, the author arguing that peasant economies are never, strictly speaking, merely economic. The other is a model of economic hybridity that directly answers Gibson-Graham’s call for a critique of global capitalism as all-conquering and capitalist economic development as a one-way street. This model is meant to address the shortcomings of the articulation of- modes-of-production models of an earlier moment in economic anthropology.

Anthropological and accounting knowledge in Islamic banking and finance: Rethinking critical accounts

ANTHROPOLOGICAL AND ACCOUNTING KNOWLEDGE IN ISLAMIC BANKING AND FINANCE: RETHINKING CRITICAL ACCOUNTS Bill Maurer University of California at Irvine Accounting for accounting demands renewed attention to the knowledge practices of the accounting profession and anthropological analysis. Using data and theory from Islamic accountancy in Indonesia and the global network of Islamic financial engineers, this article challenges work on accounting’s rhetorical functions by attending to the inherent reflexiv- ity of accounting practice and the practice of accounting for accounting. Such a move is necessary because critical accounting scholarship mirrors, and has been taken up by, Islamic accountancy debates around the form of accounting knowledge. The article explores the work that accounting literature shoulders in carving up putatively stable domains of the technical and rhetorical, and makes a case for a reappreciation of the techniques for creat- ing anthropological knowledge in the light of new cultures of accounting. Accounting and the form of anthropological knowledge Scholars across the disciplines seem to agree that it is time for a new account- ing of accounting. For sociologists Carruthers and Espeland (1991), account- ing is more than mere technique; it has symbolic power as a form of rhetoric that legitimates some practices, hides others, creates knowledge and structures decisions. Critical accounting scholars draw attention to the ways in which accounting functions as a mode of power (Hopwood & Miller 1994). An- thropologists examining ‘audit cultures’ view accounting as a distinct kind of cultural artefact of signal importance in new regimes of management, orga- nization, and control, as well as their cultural reproduction (Shore & Wright 1999; Strathern 2000). In Carruthers’s (1995) view, accounting is not a ‘mirror’ of what goes on in an organization, as mainstream accounting scholars contend. Rather, it serves a ‘window-dressing’ function, decoupled from actual organizational practice. As such, it is much more about the ‘mythical and ceremonial’ than ‘how things actually transpire’ (Carruthers 1995: 315). This article seeks to show that the analytical distinction between technical and rhetorical, the practical and the ceremonial, cannot be sustained. It takes issue with the functionalist theory of culture at work in much critical account- ing scholarship, and the idea of ‘decoupling’ organizational form from rhetori- cal functions that goes along with it. Carruthers has argued that, rather than addressing the meaning of accounting information, scholars should focus on

Sanctioned identities: Legal constructions of modern personhood

Studies of identity politics have often overlooked the role of bourgeois law in eliciting and confirming peoples experience of themselves as persons with inherent qualities that they have a right to express. By constituting people as proprietors of their persons and capacities, bourgeois law requires those who come before it to display difference. Yet bourgeois law disclaims its role in producing difference, for by declaring all men equal before the law, in constitutes differences as developed outside its purview. Although the cultural logic of bourgeois law encourages people to imagine themselves as unique persons with rights, people achieve rights only through specific historical struggles.

Forget Locke? From Proprietor to Risk-Bearer in New Logics of Finance

Copyright

An Emerging Platform: From Money Transfer System to Mobile Money Ecosystem

While it has often been described as a money transfer product, when mobile money reaches scale it can also be seen as a network infrastructure and platform facilitating the exchange of cash and electronic value between various economic actors including clients, businesses, the government, and financial service providers. In the past, the emergence of other network infrastructures that provide new ways of moving people, goods, energy or information (canals, railroads, electricity, telecommunications, internet, etc.) has had transformative effects on the economy. In this paper, we document what may be the early stages of just such a transformation in the market for retail financial services in Kenya, where the M-PESA mobile money product has achieved the scale necessary to form an infrastructure backbone to the financial system. Our investigations uncovered significant integration of mobile money into the product and services offered by financial institutions in Kenya. We find an ecosystem of firms has sprung up to facilitate the technical integration of existing financial institutions’ back end systems with the new mobile money platform. We also find a number of innovative new businesses and “pure play” startups which operate solely over the mobile money platform. That said, significant barriers remain which block the development of a more fully developed ecosystem including the high price of money transfers and the difficulty of integrating to the mobile money interfaces (especially that of M-PESA). Firms wishing to outsource their day-to-day cash transactions with clients to the mobile money system may face a new challenge, as they must find new opportunities for interactions with their clients to reinforce rapport, build trust, educate, and cross sell new products.

From meiwaku to tokushita !: lessons for digital money design from japan

Based on ethnographically-inspired research in Japan, we report on peoples experiences using digital money payment systems that use Sonys FeliCa near-field communication smartcard technology. As an example of ubiquitous computing in the here and now, the adoption of digital money is found to be messy and contingent, shot through with cultural and social factors that do not hinder this adoption but rather constitute its specific character. Adoption is strongly tied to Japanese conceptions of the aesthetic and moral virtue of smooth flow and avoidance of commotion, as well as the excitement at winning something for nothing. Implications for design of mobile payment systems stress the need to produce open-ended platforms that can serve as the vehicle for multiple meanings and experiences without foreclosing such possibilities in the name of efficiency.

Uncanny exchanges: The possibilities and failures of 'making change' with alternative monetary forms

In most standard accounts, modern money depends on its function as the general equivalent. Equivalence, in turn, rotates around a specific numerological metaphysics, including the concept of zero and the algebraic function. Yet, rarely are the mathematics of equivalence subject to critical scrutiny. In this paper I explore contemporary alternative numerologies of money and finance. The alternatives that I consider are a US local scrip currency and transnational Islamic finance experiments. My data come from fieldwork in Ithaca, New York, and from research among Islamic finance specialists devising new financial products. I am interested in how these alternatives make explicit the moral form of the mathematics of the general equivalent.

RESOCIALIZING FINANCE? OR DRESSING IT IN MUFTI?

Critical accounts of the financialization of the world economy decry the depersonalization and abstraction effected by finance in the service of extraction, expropriation and dispossession. Analysts and activists alike seek to re-socialize finance so that those whose interests it serves can be identified and so that new, socially embedded forms of exchange can emerge. They also seek to re-ground finance in a ‘real’, presumably material and social, fabric so that its excesses can be tamed and the sources of value made apparent. My essay questions these paired critiques and their supposed aims. It will argue that the continual attempt to reassert the social in economy points to a limit to the critical imagination, and that the critique of calculative rationality misses some of the other functions and practical effects of numbers besides commensuration and abstraction.

Incalculable Payments: Money, Scale, and the South African Offshore Grey Money Amnesty

Abstract: This article seeks to refine conceptually the social study of finance and thus to extend the argument of Jane Guyers Marginal Gains (2004). Using the case of the South African “grey money” amnesty, this article argues that social studies of finance have failed to pay adequate attention to social payments, as opposed to market exchanges, in their pronouncements about the extension of the calculative rationality and universal commensuration that are supposedly intrinsic to modern money. The amnesty, which allowed forgiveness for offshore tax evasion in return for a one-time payment, reconfigured “tax minimizers” as law-abiding and rational economic actors hedging against risk. Most took the opportunity; they were granted amnesty to repatriate their funds, which generated a significant boost in revenue for the South African state, with social and symbolic implications. This article reflects on what purchase is gained on the amnesty and the social study of finance generally by considering the amnesty as a series of payments, rather than cross-boundary financial transactions between individuals, trusts, and states.

Writing Law, Making a “Nation:” History, Modernity, and Paradoxes of Self-Rule in the British Virgin Islands

Writing Law, Making a Nation : History, Modernity, and Paradoxes of Self-Rule in the British Vugin Islands Bill Maurer Law has become a key signifier in British Virgin Islander nationalist dis- course. British Virgin Islanders cast law as central to their identity as a people and celebrate the self-authoring of law. At the same time law writing has fos- tered continued colonial rule and subordination to the global market. The In- ternational Business Companies Ordinance, hailed as the BVIs first truly self- authored Jaw, produced a marketable identity for the territory in the world of international finance, yet led to increased surveillance by metropolitan powers and contributed to the deferral of political sovereignty. This article considers the role of law in modem narratives of national uniqueness. It explores the paradox that modem law, with its accompanying rhetoric of progress, its forma- tions of history, and its construction of national selves, is central to the cul- tural politics of difference, yet is also central to the processes of capitalist inte- gration that both deny and demand difference. Among natives and immigrants residing in the British Vir- gin Islands (BVI) , talk about government is commonplace. Often the talk is about corruption, favoritism, or ineptitude. But just as often it is proud, praising the legislature and its actions and ordi- nances as expressing the BVIs uniqueness as a nation with its own national traditions and cultural distinctiveness. British Vir- gin Islanders (or BVlslanders, as they call themselves) distin- guish themselves from their Caribbean neighbors as a law and order people. In this article, I explore how the legislature and the law came to be important components of a discourse of nas- cent-but never quite born-British Virgin Islands nationalism. This research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (SES-9208273) and the MacArthur Foundation through the Center for International Se- curity and Arms Control, Stanford University. I thank Ruth Buchannan, George Collier, Eve Darian.Smith, Mindie Lazarus-Black, Saba Mahmood, Diane Nelson, Joel Streicker, and Liliana Suarez-Navaz, all of whom read and commented on earlier versions. Special thanks are due to Jane Collier and David Engel, who patiently reviewed the drafts and the project it grew from and offered generous suppon and encouragement throughout. Thanks are due, too, to the Law & Society Revin»s anonymous reviewers. All errors and inconsistencies that remain are solely the authors responsibility. Address correspondence to Bill Maurer, Deparunent of Anthropology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305- Law & Society Review, Volume 29, Number 2 (1995)