Convenor
Horacio Ortiz
East China Normal University, Shanghai
In the last decade, many countries of the “Global south” have experienced stark changes in their social and economic relations, due to an accumulation of wealth resulting from their participation in global circuits of trade and finance. This came with changes in the practices and representations of what is valued in monetary terms, of the roles of money and monetary values in everyday life. The consumption of imported goods, the participation in practices oriented towards exports, the growth of luxury and of international finance, new forms of economic exploitation and exclusion, are all part of it, implying a redefinition of social hierarchies, with new and contested imaginaries and legitimacies. These changes are fundamental not only locally, but also because they contribute to the redefinition, in multiple and often conflicting ways, of global monetary orders, something highlighted for instance by the Chiang Mai initiative in 2004 or, recently, by the creation of the Brics’ New Development Bank.
This implies at least two challenges for sociology and anthropology. First, the new representations and practices of money are not necessarily directly related to the neo-liberal imaginaries often considered the unavoidable reference when studying “North/South” relations. “South-south” relations, for instance between China and South-East Asia, Latin America and Africa, often mobilize different official imaginaries, which have to be taken into consideration without necessarily being referred to an easily reified “North”. We need to be reflexive about anthropology’s and sociology’s own mainstream imagination, and look for new concepts to problematize monetary practices, going beyond liberalism and its classic Marxian critiques, and beyond the “North/South” distinction. Second, these processes are usually part of global relations of trade and finance. They imply a redefinition of the site of observation, going beyond fieldwork-based observation, even multi-sited ethnography, and establishing a systematic dialogue with other disciplines, such as macro-economics and international political economy.
If qualitative approaches have a distinctive form of knowledge to propose, showing the multiplicity, the contradictions and the creativity of everyday practices, they cannot by themselves encompass the broader social relations of which these practices are but a small part and cannot grasp by themselves some of the main components of what they are observing. This panel aims therefore to explore reflexively the transformation of monetary practices and imaginaries in the “Global South”, linking detailed qualitative research to global processes.
IUAES2015 panel session #5 [Room 222]
16 July 2015, 11.00 – 12.30 hrs.
Programme
P9-12-A1
Profanations of Value: Luxury, Consumption and Market Expertise in Contemporary China
Maximo BADARO
P9-12-A2
The Global Imaginary of Equality: On The Reception Of Thomas Piketty’s Le Capital Au Xxie Siècle
Enrique LARRETA
P9-12-A3
Political Power, Violence and Money in Burkina Faso
Delphine MANETTA
P9-12-A4
Cross-Border Investment in China: A Reflection on Financial and Political Imaginaries of Global Finance
Horacio ORTIZ