Dear All,

a friendly reminder that the registration is now open on the AAA website,
so you can now proceed and submit your abstracts for the Society of
Economic Anthropology spring conference. Because of the technical delay
with the site, we have slightly extended the deadline to Dec 15. See below
the Call for Papers.

Best

Fabio, Aaron, and Daniel.
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Financialization and Beyond: Debt, Money, Wealth, and the Capture of Value



*April 6-8, 2017, University of Iowa, Iowa City, USA.  Abstracts
due December 15, 2016.*

Finance is hard to escape. In recent years, the increasing social impact
and interconnection of financial discourses, markets, actors, and
institutions have been understood under the broad concept of
financialization. Natascha van der Zwan identifies three distinct research
streams that have approached financialization as 1) a regime of
accumulation, 2) the influence of financial markets and instruments on non-
financial corporations as well as the banking and finance industry, and 3)
a discourse of risk-taking, self-management and self-fulfillment that is
transforming people into investing subjects. Some anthropological skeptics,
however, argue that finance has a far longer genealogy than the
financializationliterature has to date recognized. For example, in the
context of a lengthy human history of creating hierarchy, financialization may
simply be a new technology serving an old purpose.

On behalf of the Society for Economic Anthropology, and in co-sponsorship
with the International Sociological Association’s Economy and Society
Research Committee, we aim to put in dialogue divergent visions of what
constitutes finance and financialization, and how finance and
financializationimpact our societies. The program committee especially
welcomes scholarship from anthropologists (in all sub-fields),
sociologists, scholars in the social studies of finance, and other social
scientists who do not necessarily self-identify as financialization scholars,
but whose work provides comparative, historical, ethnographic, or
quantitative insights into the workings of finance and financialization.

As an initial organizing tool we have divided areas of potential
contributions into three categories of inquiry. These are not exclusive
categories and we welcome contributions that don’t readily fit in what we
outline.
Debt
·        Finance predates capitalism. Therefore, what are relevant
cross-cultural, historical, and archaeological cases which help illuminate
our current moment?
·        Tracing who owes what to whom is as old as the discipline of
anthropology. Do new financialinstruments such as credit default swaps
share forms and logics with older kinds of reciprocities?
·        Are the new instruments of finance comparable to those found in
the cultural and archaeological record, and especially to other forms of
debt?
·        Numerous scholars have argued that financialization is creating
new subjects and selfhoods, accompanied by a shift of risk from states to
households. What are the material objects, spaces, and infrastructures that
translate financial abstraction into new ways of understanding personhood?
Wealth, Money, and Financial Instruments
·        Does financialization alter our comprehension of what kind of
social organization goes with what type of wealth—a leitmotif in the
comparative study of human societies, particularly since the rise of
agriculture?
·        How can we interpret potentially novel forms of financial innovation,
such as Islamic finance and banking?
·        How do ideologies such as shareholder value or social finance
transform economic practices?
·        How do non-elites use new forms of money (such as phone cards,
paypal, gift cards, local currencies) to alter hierarchies or seek
alternative forms of wealth accumulation? How and with what consequences
are elites transforming money’s materiality?
Depoliticization and the Capture of Value
·        Many have noted that financialization promotes a depoliticizing
process, in which state services, formerly held accountable to government,
are now being replaced by private markets. How do these processes compare
to other instances of political drift and shift that have come with new
modes of abstraction?
·        How is finance racializing and gendering?  Where can we observe
moments of openness, where finance can be emancipatory?
·        What kind of ethics, politics, and social goals do financial elites
envision? How do these compare to those brought into being by classes that
dominate the wealth and financial systems in different cultural or economic
contexts? What new forms of informality are promoted by financialization?
·        The supply chains of financial products connect different places
and political projects across the globe. How do such financial instruments
transform social life?



We request abstracts for both papers and posters on these topics. Please
indicate whether your abstract is for a paper, a poster or either. Proposed
papers must pertain to the meeting theme. SEA also welcomes poster
abstracts on any aspect of economic anthropology.
Publishing Opportunity

The Society for Economic Anthropology publishes *Economic Anthropology*, a
peer reviewed journal published electronically via the American
Anthropological Association (AAA). Each year *Economic Anthropology *dedicates
one of its two issues to the theme of the SEA meeting. A special issue on
financialization will be developed from select conference presentations.
Organizers

Fabio Mattioli, New York University, [log in to unmask]
Aaron Z. Pitluck, Illinois State University, [log in to unmask]
Daniel Souleles, Brandeis University, [log in to unmask]
How to submit an abstractAbstract deadline is December 15, 2016.

Abstracts of proposed papers and posters should be no more than 500 words.
Abstracts are advised to include the following information: problem
statement or theoretical frame, methodology, findings, and implications. If
you submit a paper abstract, please indicate your willingness to present a
poster if the organizers are unable to accommodate your paper in the
plenary sessions. Poster sessions at SEA are taken very seriously, and most
conference participants attend these sessions. In order to be considered
for inclusion in the journal issue tied to this theme, please plan to have
a complete, publishable-quality version of your paper ready at the time of
the conference. Additional information for potential authors will follow.
To submit an abstract, you must first register for the conference through
the AAA. At the moment, the registration site is not yet available on the
AAA web site. SEA is working with AAA to get the registration site up; this
will occur shortly.

1.  Go to americananthro.org and log in.  If you don’t have a login id and
password, create one (you do not need to join the American Anthropological
Association).

2.  Once you are logged in, look to the left hand column, click on Meeting
registration.

3.  Click on register under the SEA 2017 Annual Meeting then follow online
prompts to register for the meeting (if we do not accept your abstract and
you decide not to attend, you may request that your registration fee be
refunded and we would be happy to do so).

4.  Once you are registered, AAA will automatically send you an email
inviting you to submit an abstract.  Click the link and follow the
instructions. Check the Spam folder if you do not receive it within a few
hours.

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