IUAES2015 panel session #5 [Room 222]
16 July 2015, 11.00 – 12.30 hrs.
Horacio ORTIZ
Research Institute of Anthropology, East China Normal University
contact: horacio.ortiz@free.fr
Abstract
This presentation is based on interviews and observations made with financial professionals working for companies in charge of cross-border investment in small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Shanghai, Beijing and Hong Kong. This is the main channel of foreign financial investment in mainland China, given current regulations. It is therefore the place of encounter of different financial regulations, financial techniques and financial interests. The research shows that in the conflicts and negotiations that take place during transactions, employees make sense of these differences by taking different positions around fragmented and multiple imaginaries. They mobilize imaginations about cultural and generational identities, and views concerning the place of Chinese regulation and financial institutions in global finance. This can be done by integrating a particular definition of “China” within global finance, either in a teleology of neo-liberal homogenization, or in different views about conflicts of norms and geo-political relations. This research shows that, in order to account for this site of financial globalization, we cannot use the expressions “culture”, “investor”, “market”, “state”, “value” and the “global” as straightforward analytic concepts. On the contrary, these are often ambivalent categories with multiple possible meanings, that the people we observe use to make sense of their own practices. This paper seeks to elaborate an analysis of the power relations that are established through these financial relations without falling in the ready-made analytic categories of neo-liberal discourse and its classic oppositions. Following authors such as Keith Hart, Jane Guyer and Viviana Zelizer, the paper attempts to understand the production of financial flows and cultural and political identities as part of the everyday practice of financial professionals, in order to propose a reflexivity about the capacity of anthropology to produce alternative imaginaries.