Dear all,

At the Max Planck Cambridge Centre <http://maxcam.socanth.cam.ac.uk/> we are concerned with studying the intersection of ethics, the economy and social change. 
At this year’s AAA in Vancouver (Nov 20-24) we want to focus this debate on investment and savings as different forms of economic action. Find our long abstract below. 
We are very luck to have Caitlin Zaloom <http://as.nyu.edu/content/nyu-as/as/faculty/caitlin-zaloom.html> (NYU) as our discussant for this session. 
Please be in touch with us until March 19 with an abstract (max 250 words) if you want to join our panel: [log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]> 
All are welcome.

With all best from 
Rachel Smith, Johannes Lenhard, Anna-Riikka Kauppinen

_____

With inequalities in wealth soaring as returns on investment <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_on_investment> outpace productivity <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity>-based income (Piketty 2013), it is time to turn our ethnographic attention to practices of accumulation and returns on capital. These occur beyond the sphere of production and lead us to rents and dividends. Focussing on investment and savings helps us to focus on how people plan for the future, and the climates or conditions under which they seek to mitigate uncertainty, or take calculated risks. Ethnographic insights specifically will allow us to see not only the strategies of wealthy elites using equity to grow their assets, but also new middle-class cultures and practices of saving; it will also give us insights into the struggles of the ‘unbanked’ poor and more generally into alternatives to debt-financed and indebted lives (Rudnyckyj, 2019).

Moreover, expenditure characterized as unproductive ‘consumption’ from the point of view of an economist may be seen from the standpoint of householders and community members as forms of investment in social relations (‘wealth-in-people’), or contributing to one’s social standing or moral worth. Indeed, as Guyer (2004: 99) proposed, an alternative to classifying almost everything individuals or households do as ‘consumption’ would be to see it as forms of investments in the broad sense: ‘performative conversions’ directed toward hopes for prosperous futures, and not only with the expectation of profit-margins. Indeed, from a householder’s perspective transactions such as buying a house, contributing towards a wedding, giving tithes, or meeting children’s school fees can often be deemed forms of ‘investment’.  And, as anthropologists (e.g. Bloch and Parry 1989) have long pointed out, forms of expenditure may look more ‘moral’ if not ‘rational’ when compatible with a long-term social order, or religious objectives (salvation of the soul versus storing up goods on earth), which new ethnographies of investment and saving are ideally suited to explore.  

Drawing on ethnography from different geographies, economic contexts and scales this panel explores the role of ‘investing’ and ‘saving’ at different historical, economic, political, even religious contexts and (dis)junctures. We are especially interested to tease out how   practices of investment and saving bridge ethical and economic decision-making. New ethnographies of investment and saving can illuminate debates and life projects organised not just around ‘value’ and ‘equity’ in the sense of profit and net worth, but also a diverse and plural set of values (Robbins 2013; Graeber 2018), including equality, fairness, justice, and grace. On the other hand, we also encourage attention to the kind of negative moral evaluations and sentiments that may pertain to practices of investment and saving, including greed, the occult, jealousy, complicity, and contempt.

By illuminating the plurality of values and sentiments that give shape to particular cultures and practices of investment and saving, this panel seeks to unearth alternative approaches to the study of economic action in constantly shifting political, economic, and ethical climates.  We invite ethnography across diverse sets of actors and field-sites, including economists and bankers, workplaces, associations, households, and religious communities that provide novel insights on how people qualify particular transactions and transfers as ‘consumption’, ‘saving’ and ‘investment’. 

 The papers can address the following questions, among others:

-        How do different ‘climates (economic, political, religious, ecological) influence people’s strategies and future-oriented action when facing risk, uncertainty and poverty?

-        What practices of saving and investing do people deploy when they avoid, or are excluded from, mainstream or formal financial instruments and/or state-funded forms of welfare and pensions? This could include insights on microfinance, savings and credit associations, but also informal lending, Ponzi and pyramid schemes, and even religious and ‘occult’ economies.

-        How do different kinds or degrees of investing and saving lend themselves to different forms of self-fashioning (e.g. entrepreneurial self, thrifty/responsible saver) and to moral evaluations of others (e.g. tight-fisted miser, irrational hoarder, irresponsible consumer, greedy usurer) in different contexts and climates (cf. Peebles 2015)?

-        How do materiality and liquidity matter (e.g. if investments or assets are in cash, silver, land, heirlooms)?

-        Metaphors such as growing, climbing, yields, and climates are often applied to economic phenomena, and particularly interest-bearing capital (Taussig 1980). What species of fetishism may ensue, and does it make a difference if one’s assets literally grow and reproduce (as in crops and livestock)?

-        What kinds of ethics, not just economics, inform actions of bankers, venture capitalists, traders, merchants, religious institutions and households?

-        How might practices of abstaining from consumption be motivated by other kinds of ‘saving’ or investment, such as saving the planet, or religious salvation?

-        How do practices of saving and investing pertain to different temporalities and views of time, this could relate to utopian or apocalyptic visions of the future, or understandings of time as something that can be ‘saved’ or ‘invested’ as well as ‘wasted’ and ‘spent’?

 




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