Pub Date : 2021-09-01DOI: 10.1177/0308275X211038606
Michael M. Prentice
This article discusses the experiences of high-level managers at a South Korean conglomerate named ‘Sangdo’ who worked within the corporate group’s head office under the owner-executive family. These highly credentialled professionals were attracted to the idea of working directly under or alongside an elite, wealthy corporate dynasty who both owned the conglomerate and were its top executives. Rather than seeing this as a site of inherent conflict between the familial and the professional, I describe how the idea of working alongside and for such elites was enhanced by a ‘dynastic aura’. Through the concept of dynastic aura, I highlight how, in South Korea, families that own business groups are objects of public fascination, particularly as indicators of the future of the economy. In the context of Sangdo, I describe how managers were drawn to the potential of working with a new generation of Sangdo ownership, who sought to centralize and systematize expertise within a holding company. I show how this aura figuratively wore off for managers as they came to understand that ownership was just as entangled in the corporate form – not necessarily above or outside of it – as they were. The article highlights how certain aspects of kinship (such as dynasties and generational succession) still animate capitalist labour, even for non-family members. Additionally, the article calls attention to the way that actors engage with and understand powerful actors in their own right, going beyond accounts of anthropologists’ own direct encounters with the powerful.
{"title":"Dynastic aura: Proximity to the powerful and its promise in corporate South Korea","authors":"Michael M. Prentice","doi":"10.1177/0308275X211038606","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X211038606","url":null,"abstract":"This article discusses the experiences of high-level managers at a South Korean conglomerate named ‘Sangdo’ who worked within the corporate group’s head office under the owner-executive family. These highly credentialled professionals were attracted to the idea of working directly under or alongside an elite, wealthy corporate dynasty who both owned the conglomerate and were its top executives. Rather than seeing this as a site of inherent conflict between the familial and the professional, I describe how the idea of working alongside and for such elites was enhanced by a ‘dynastic aura’. Through the concept of dynastic aura, I highlight how, in South Korea, families that own business groups are objects of public fascination, particularly as indicators of the future of the economy. In the context of Sangdo, I describe how managers were drawn to the potential of working with a new generation of Sangdo ownership, who sought to centralize and systematize expertise within a holding company. I show how this aura figuratively wore off for managers as they came to understand that ownership was just as entangled in the corporate form – not necessarily above or outside of it – as they were. The article highlights how certain aspects of kinship (such as dynasties and generational succession) still animate capitalist labour, even for non-family members. Additionally, the article calls attention to the way that actors engage with and understand powerful actors in their own right, going beyond accounts of anthropologists’ own direct encounters with the powerful.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":"41 1","pages":"247 - 266"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49401464","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-09-01DOI: 10.1177/0308275X211040154
E. Hertz
The author reviews the fine ethnographic analyses in this special issue and argues that they become more coherent if power is understood as a sociotechnological network. This further implies that anthropologists' conclusions about how power is exercised must be modest, both historically situated and politically targeted, if the discipline wishes to contribute meaningfully to holding the powerful to account.
{"title":"Rich man, poor man, middleman, thing: Distributing power","authors":"E. Hertz","doi":"10.1177/0308275X211040154","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X211040154","url":null,"abstract":"The author reviews the fine ethnographic analyses in this special issue and argues that they become more coherent if power is understood as a sociotechnological network. This further implies that anthropologists' conclusions about how power is exercised must be modest, both historically situated and politically targeted, if the discipline wishes to contribute meaningfully to holding the powerful to account.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":"41 1","pages":"320 - 327"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45875254","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-09-01DOI: 10.1177/0308275X211038608
S. Field
Drawing on ethnographic research in Houston, Texas, I explore how oil and gas experts negotiate social power and precariousness within the US hydrocarbon sector. In an industry long associated with corporate power, the careers of experts are precariously balanced on rising and falling hydrocarbon prices. This makes the social power these experts wield as fluid as the commodities they are premised on. I show that informal social networks solidified by industry associations can buffer this precariousness by opening new employment opportunities and allowing them to maintain their connection to elite industry circles through periods of unemployment and uncertainty. For many working in the industry, precariousness defines the US hydrocarbon sector as much as the wealth that it is known to generate. Precariousness, I argue, is not just experienced by specific groups of people but rather is a general characteristic of capitalism that touches all but a select few.
{"title":"Power and precariousness in the expert hierarchies of the US hydrocarbon industry","authors":"S. Field","doi":"10.1177/0308275X211038608","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X211038608","url":null,"abstract":"Drawing on ethnographic research in Houston, Texas, I explore how oil and gas experts negotiate social power and precariousness within the US hydrocarbon sector. In an industry long associated with corporate power, the careers of experts are precariously balanced on rising and falling hydrocarbon prices. This makes the social power these experts wield as fluid as the commodities they are premised on. I show that informal social networks solidified by industry associations can buffer this precariousness by opening new employment opportunities and allowing them to maintain their connection to elite industry circles through periods of unemployment and uncertainty. For many working in the industry, precariousness defines the US hydrocarbon sector as much as the wealth that it is known to generate. Precariousness, I argue, is not just experienced by specific groups of people but rather is a general characteristic of capitalism that touches all but a select few.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":"41 1","pages":"303 - 319"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44400886","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-06-16DOI: 10.1177/0308275X211021658
James Wintrup
This article offers a critique of Christian humanitarianism in Zambia. But it does so by engaging with the arguments of anthropologists who have begun to question the status of political critique within the discipline. These anthropologists argue that critique often undermines ethnographic understanding because it problematically positions the anthropologist as an actor who is able to ‘uncover’ political realities that remain invisible to others. In this article, I take these concerns seriously and attempt to reconsider the practice of critique by drawing on an ethnographic description of the work of Christian medical missionaries in Zambia. Focusing on how these missionaries encouraged one another to ‘see’ their Zambian patients as ‘Christ-like’ and ‘faithful’ in moments of suffering, I argue that these practices of ‘seeing’ and ‘showing’ resemble certain forms of political critique. Rather than an exercise in ‘uncovering’ hidden realities, critique can also be understood as an act of ‘aspect-showing’ – the aim of which is to encourage others to ‘see’ the same things in a different light. The critique of Christian humanitarianism I offer here is therefore itself an act of aspect-showing that partially resembles that which missionaries themselves engaged in.
{"title":"Who alone can ‘see’? Christian humanitarianism, aspect-perception and political critique","authors":"James Wintrup","doi":"10.1177/0308275X211021658","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X211021658","url":null,"abstract":"This article offers a critique of Christian humanitarianism in Zambia. But it does so by engaging with the arguments of anthropologists who have begun to question the status of political critique within the discipline. These anthropologists argue that critique often undermines ethnographic understanding because it problematically positions the anthropologist as an actor who is able to ‘uncover’ political realities that remain invisible to others. In this article, I take these concerns seriously and attempt to reconsider the practice of critique by drawing on an ethnographic description of the work of Christian medical missionaries in Zambia. Focusing on how these missionaries encouraged one another to ‘see’ their Zambian patients as ‘Christ-like’ and ‘faithful’ in moments of suffering, I argue that these practices of ‘seeing’ and ‘showing’ resemble certain forms of political critique. Rather than an exercise in ‘uncovering’ hidden realities, critique can also be understood as an act of ‘aspect-showing’ – the aim of which is to encourage others to ‘see’ the same things in a different light. The critique of Christian humanitarianism I offer here is therefore itself an act of aspect-showing that partially resembles that which missionaries themselves engaged in.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":"42 1","pages":"78 - 100"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2021-06-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0308275X211021658","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48547857","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-04-08DOI: 10.1177/0308275X211004713
Angela Torresan
By the late 1990s, when I was conducting ethnographic fieldwork research in Lisbon, the ‘dentists’ case’ had become a familiar trope for the presence of Brazilian immigrants in Portugal. Although it involved a small group of Brazilian and Portuguese professionals, it gained visibility in the media of both countries, escalating into a political and diplomatic quarrel, and culminating in the amendment of the 1966 Cultural Accord. I use Victor Turner’s concept of social drama to address the case as a chapter in the cyclical pattern of connection and disconnection of postcolonial Luso-Brazilian relationships. Drawing from a recent discussion on the concept of cosmopolitanism in migration studies, I employ the idea of postcolonial sociabilities to help explore the seemingly inherent ambiguities in the relationship between Brazilians and Portuguese.
{"title":"Postcolonial social drama: The case of Brazilian dentists in Portugal","authors":"Angela Torresan","doi":"10.1177/0308275X211004713","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X211004713","url":null,"abstract":"By the late 1990s, when I was conducting ethnographic fieldwork research in Lisbon, the ‘dentists’ case’ had become a familiar trope for the presence of Brazilian immigrants in Portugal. Although it involved a small group of Brazilian and Portuguese professionals, it gained visibility in the media of both countries, escalating into a political and diplomatic quarrel, and culminating in the amendment of the 1966 Cultural Accord. I use Victor Turner’s concept of social drama to address the case as a chapter in the cyclical pattern of connection and disconnection of postcolonial Luso-Brazilian relationships. Drawing from a recent discussion on the concept of cosmopolitanism in migration studies, I employ the idea of postcolonial sociabilities to help explore the seemingly inherent ambiguities in the relationship between Brazilians and Portuguese.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":"41 1","pages":"165 - 186"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2021-04-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0308275X211004713","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47852732","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-03-20DOI: 10.1177/0308275X211004719
Jaesok Kim
This article analyzes evolving urban governance in contemporary China, highlighting contradictory outcomes originating from the coexistence of the technologies of pervasive control, socialist legacies of urban entitlements, and neoliberal strategies of self-government. Based on fieldwork among low-income migrant workers in a village located on Beijing's outskirts, I investigate how the grassroots administrative practices justified the continuing privileges of local residents and discrimination against newcomers, while the evolving governance projects a better future for every individual who is willing to exert themselves. The 2014 implementation of a Social Credit System was critical for this political agenda. It offered rewards and imposed punishments corresponding to the level of reliability indicated by credit scores, thereby urging migrants to “responsibly” manage their lives. The combination of high-tech surveillance and social credit demonstrates that the notion of “market socialism”, combined with neoliberal practices, has created a new system of social control in 21st-century China.
{"title":"From coercion to cooperation: Urban governance and evolving modes of control in a Beijing village","authors":"Jaesok Kim","doi":"10.1177/0308275X211004719","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X211004719","url":null,"abstract":"This article analyzes evolving urban governance in contemporary China, highlighting contradictory outcomes originating from the coexistence of the technologies of pervasive control, socialist legacies of urban entitlements, and neoliberal strategies of self-government. Based on fieldwork among low-income migrant workers in a village located on Beijing's outskirts, I investigate how the grassroots administrative practices justified the continuing privileges of local residents and discrimination against newcomers, while the evolving governance projects a better future for every individual who is willing to exert themselves. The 2014 implementation of a Social Credit System was critical for this political agenda. It offered rewards and imposed punishments corresponding to the level of reliability indicated by credit scores, thereby urging migrants to “responsibly” manage their lives. The combination of high-tech surveillance and social credit demonstrates that the notion of “market socialism”, combined with neoliberal practices, has created a new system of social control in 21st-century China.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":"41 1","pages":"128 - 148"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2021-03-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0308275X211004719","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43057625","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-03-20DOI: 10.1177/0308275X211004717
Hadas Weiss
Drawing on fieldwork in Madrid, I argue that the growing redundancy of living labour power in the capitalist production process has translated, since the last decades of the 20th century, into surplus portions of the individual life-cycle. Capitalism’s promise of productivity, associated with adulthood, has shrunk to become a window of opportunity. Besides sheer luck, it takes protracted preparation to seize this opportunity and inordinate effort to retain it. Adulthood is the mystified representation of structural pressures on productive activity, as an elusive personal accomplishment whose curtailment is one’s own fault. Failure to realize it is further depoliticized as either a rejection of adulthood, or acceptance of besieged adulthood as a sign of maturity.
{"title":"Elusive adulthood and surplus life-time in Spain","authors":"Hadas Weiss","doi":"10.1177/0308275X211004717","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X211004717","url":null,"abstract":"Drawing on fieldwork in Madrid, I argue that the growing redundancy of living labour power in the capitalist production process has translated, since the last decades of the 20th century, into surplus portions of the individual life-cycle. Capitalism’s promise of productivity, associated with adulthood, has shrunk to become a window of opportunity. Besides sheer luck, it takes protracted preparation to seize this opportunity and inordinate effort to retain it. Adulthood is the mystified representation of structural pressures on productive activity, as an elusive personal accomplishment whose curtailment is one’s own fault. Failure to realize it is further depoliticized as either a rejection of adulthood, or acceptance of besieged adulthood as a sign of maturity.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":"41 1","pages":"149 - 164"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2021-03-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0308275X211004717","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47907981","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-03-20DOI: 10.1177/0308275X211004723
Annie McCarthy
The child has long been a powerfully affective figure in development work – whether as an abject victim or a joyful symbol of brighter futures. While the power of children to produce emotions in donors has been well studied, far less attention has been given to children’s own affective relationships with development organisations. This article explores the role of affect in children’s participation in non-governmental organisation (NGO) programmes in Delhi, India. In particular, by focusing on spectacles of performance, this article highlights the importance of positive affects: happiness, fun, and joy in child-focused NGO programmes. Yet, rather than a cynical critique of the way children’s joy is captured (typically in images) and translated into narratives of successful development, this article seeks to explore the possibilities for sincere ethnographic engagement with happiness itself. Drawing on the work of Sara Ahmed, and exploring the temporal dimensions of positive affects, I seek to engage seriously with children’s joyful experiences in development programmes, while simultaneously questioning any simplistic equation of child happiness with developmental success.
{"title":"Staging joyful spectacles: Exploring the temporalities of positive affect in child-focused NGO programmes","authors":"Annie McCarthy","doi":"10.1177/0308275X211004723","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X211004723","url":null,"abstract":"The child has long been a powerfully affective figure in development work – whether as an abject victim or a joyful symbol of brighter futures. While the power of children to produce emotions in donors has been well studied, far less attention has been given to children’s own affective relationships with development organisations. This article explores the role of affect in children’s participation in non-governmental organisation (NGO) programmes in Delhi, India. In particular, by focusing on spectacles of performance, this article highlights the importance of positive affects: happiness, fun, and joy in child-focused NGO programmes. Yet, rather than a cynical critique of the way children’s joy is captured (typically in images) and translated into narratives of successful development, this article seeks to explore the possibilities for sincere ethnographic engagement with happiness itself. Drawing on the work of Sara Ahmed, and exploring the temporal dimensions of positive affects, I seek to engage seriously with children’s joyful experiences in development programmes, while simultaneously questioning any simplistic equation of child happiness with developmental success.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":"41 1","pages":"111 - 127"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2021-03-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0308275X211004723","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43551473","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-03-01DOI: 10.1177/0308275X20974093
M. Marchesi
This article argues for gendering affective citizenship and humanitarianism. Both of these ‘regimes of care’ are understood to work through benevolent affect, to mobilize citizens in the wake of the retrenchment of the welfare state. Ethnography with Italian-origin women volunteers at a Milanese association shows that the affect and motivations of affective citizens can starkly deviate from benevolence and ‘do-gooderism’. Analyses of post-Fordist affective citizenship focus on the shift from waged labour and state-mediated forms of social security to precarious labour and privatized responsibilities for welfare, implicitly centring the (male) breadwinner as the subject of these transformations. By contrast, this article seeks to call attention to the continuities in unwaged care. In so doing, it shows how the Fordist legacy of gendered citizenship ‘haunts’ its post-Fordist affective and humanitarian reconfigurations and highlights the contradictions and contestations that mark ongoing transformations of social citizenship in Europe.
{"title":"‘I volunteer at home too!’ Gendering affective citizenship","authors":"M. Marchesi","doi":"10.1177/0308275X20974093","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X20974093","url":null,"abstract":"This article argues for gendering affective citizenship and humanitarianism. Both of these ‘regimes of care’ are understood to work through benevolent affect, to mobilize citizens in the wake of the retrenchment of the welfare state. Ethnography with Italian-origin women volunteers at a Milanese association shows that the affect and motivations of affective citizens can starkly deviate from benevolence and ‘do-gooderism’. Analyses of post-Fordist affective citizenship focus on the shift from waged labour and state-mediated forms of social security to precarious labour and privatized responsibilities for welfare, implicitly centring the (male) breadwinner as the subject of these transformations. By contrast, this article seeks to call attention to the continuities in unwaged care. In so doing, it shows how the Fordist legacy of gendered citizenship ‘haunts’ its post-Fordist affective and humanitarian reconfigurations and highlights the contradictions and contestations that mark ongoing transformations of social citizenship in Europe.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":"41 1","pages":"21 - 42"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0308275X20974093","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46990934","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-12-01DOI: 10.1177/0308275X20959421
Daniela Peluso
This article examines the ways in which ‘Chinese walls’ – that is, information barriers within financial institutions – are constituted and subverted by acts of trespass within large investment banking firms in New York. While Chinese walls positively serve to prevent corruption and fraud, they simultaneously attract legal, semi-legal and illegal forms of trespassing. My analysis shows that some trespassing is based on non-verbalized and embodied exchanges of information that are not in and of themselves illegal. Referred to as playing ‘the game’, the result of these forms of trespass is that the Chinese wall becomes an ‘effect’ or fiction. At other times, trespassing can cause inconvenient suspicion, encouraging those who operate amid these walls to participate strategically in various aspects of wilful blindness. Together, these examples reveal the conceptual and material relationships between ‘seeing’ and ‘knowing’, thereby highlighting the complexity of information flows in financial institutions and demonstrating how the critical regulation of financial capitalism is sometimes weakened.
{"title":"Turning a blind eye: The complicit trespassing of ‘Chinese walls’ in financial institutions in New York","authors":"Daniela Peluso","doi":"10.1177/0308275X20959421","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X20959421","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the ways in which ‘Chinese walls’ – that is, information barriers within financial institutions – are constituted and subverted by acts of trespass within large investment banking firms in New York. While Chinese walls positively serve to prevent corruption and fraud, they simultaneously attract legal, semi-legal and illegal forms of trespassing. My analysis shows that some trespassing is based on non-verbalized and embodied exchanges of information that are not in and of themselves illegal. Referred to as playing ‘the game’, the result of these forms of trespass is that the Chinese wall becomes an ‘effect’ or fiction. At other times, trespassing can cause inconvenient suspicion, encouraging those who operate amid these walls to participate strategically in various aspects of wilful blindness. Together, these examples reveal the conceptual and material relationships between ‘seeing’ and ‘knowing’, thereby highlighting the complexity of information flows in financial institutions and demonstrating how the critical regulation of financial capitalism is sometimes weakened.","PeriodicalId":46784,"journal":{"name":"Critique of Anthropology","volume":"40 1","pages":"438 - 454"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0308275X20959421","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47719611","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：