Anthropology of Finance Today

Blog readers might be interested in a recent thread on anthropology and the financial crisis published in the pages of Anthropology Today. The discussion was initiated in the November 2008 issue with this guest editorial by Keith Hart and Horacio Ortiz (see also relevant excerpts here) and this other piece by Stephen Gudeman. Comments followed by Kalman Applbaum (here) and by Julia Elyachar and Bill Maurer (here) in the February 2009 issue, and by Gustav Peebles (here) Gudeman (his reaction here) and myself (here) in the April 2009 issue — I reacted to Hart and Ortiz’s truly excellent piece with a somewhat rhetoric objection to their use of quotation marks to refer to the “force” of “objects”.