THE REAL ECONOMY THE REAL ECONOMY ESSAYS IN ETHNOGRAPHIC THEORY Edited by Federico Neiburg and Jane I. Guyer Hau Books Chicago The Real Economy by Federico Neiburg & Jane I. Guyer, with support from the Instituto de Economia Real, is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode Cover and layout design: Daniele Meucci Typesetting: Prepress Plus (www.prepressplus.in) ISBN: 9781912808267 LCCN: 2019956202 Hau Books Chicago Distribution Center 11030 S. Langley Chicago, IL 60628 www.haubooks.com Hau Books is printed, marketed, and distributed by The University of Chicago Press. www.press.uchicago.edu Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper. Table of Contents Contributors vii introduction The real in the real economy 1 Federico Neiburg and Jane Guyer chapter one The live act of business and the culture of realization 27 Fabian Muniesa chapter two Deductions and counter-deductions in South Africa 47 Deborah James chapter three Resisting numbers: The favela as an (un)quantifiable reality 77 Eugênia Motta chapter four What is a ‘real’ transaction in high-frequency trading 103 Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra vi THE REAL ECONOMY chapter five Soybean, bricks, dollars, and the reality of money in Argentina 129 Mariana Luzzi and Ariel Wilkis chapter six A political anthropology of finance in cross-border investment in Shanghai 153 Horacio Ortiz chapter seven Corporate personhood and the competitive relation in antitrust 179 Gustavo Onto chapter eight Making workers real on a South African border farm 203 Maxim Bolt chapter nine How will we pay? Projective fictions and regimes of foresight in US college finance 229 Caitlin Zaloom chapter ten Smuggling realities: On numbers, borders, and performances 253 Fernando Rabossi afterword The method of the real: What do we intend with ethnographic infrastructure? 283 Bill Maurer Contributors Maxim Bolt is a Reader in Anthropology and African Studies at the University of Birmingham, UK, and a Research Associate at the University of the Witwa- tersrand, South Africa. His first book, Zimbabwe’s migrants and South Africa’s border farms: The roots of impermanence (2015), explores wage labor in a place of transience and informal livelihoods. Jane I. Guyer is Professor Emerita at Johns Hopkins University. A graduate of the London School of Economics (1965) and the University of Rochester (1972), she undertook field research projects on economic life in Nigeria and Cameroon. She has held faculty appointments at Harvard, Boston, and North- western Universities. At Northwestern, she was Director of the Program of African Studies (1994–2001). Book publications include Family and farm in Southern Cameroon (1984), An African niche economy (1997), Marginal gains: Monetary transactions in Atlantic Africa (2004), Legacies, logics, logistics (2016), and a new translation of Marcel Mauss, The gift (Expanded Edition, 2016). Deborah James is Professor of Anthropology at London School of Economics. She is the author of Money from nothing: Indebtedness and aspiration in South Africa (2015), which documents the precarious nature of both the aspirations of upward mobility and the economic relations of debt that sustain the newly upwardly mobile in that country. Other books include Gaining ground? “Rights” viii THE REAL ECONOMY and “property” in South African land reform (2006) and Songs of the women mi- grants: Performance and identity in South Africa (1999). Mariana Luzzi is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of General Sarmiento (Argentina) and a researcher at Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Tecnológicas (CONICET). She holds a PhD in Sociology from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS-Paris). She has conducted research on Argentina’s economic crisis of 2001–2, on community currencies experiments, and on the conflicts over economic reparations to the victims of State Terrorism in Argentina. She is currently doing research on the uses and meanings of the US dollar in Argentina’s economy. Bill Maurer is Professor of Anthropology and Law and Dean of Social Sci- ences at the University of California—Irvine. He is also the Director of the In- stitute for Money, Technology, and Financial Inclusion (www.imtfi.uci.edu). He conducts research on law, property, money, and finance, focusing on the tech- nological infrastructures and social relations of exchange and payment. He has particular expertise in emerging, alternative, and experimental forms of money and finance, and their legal implications. Eugênia Motta has a Postdoctoral Fellowship (PNPD/Capes) and is Assistant Professor in the Sociology Graduate Program of the Institute of Social and Po- litical Studies (IESP) of the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ). Fabian Muniesa is a researcher at the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation, École des Mines de Paris (Mines ParisTech, PSL Research University, CNRS UMR 9217). He studies the culture of business performance and the politics of economic expertise. He is the author of The provoked economy: Economic reality and the performative turn (2014) and the coauthor of Capitalization: A cultural guide (2017). Federico Neiburg is Professor in Social Anthropology at the Museu Nacional, Universidad Federal do Rio de Janeiro. He is also lead researcher for the Brazil- ian National Research Council (CNPq) and the coordinator of the Center for Research in Culture and Economy (NuCEC, www.nucec.net). Neiburg has held many fellowships and awards for his work including the Wenner Gren Founda- tion for Anthropological Research, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Contributors ix and the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton). He has done fieldwork in México, Argentina, Brazil, and the Republic of Haiti. His most recent publi- cations are Conversas Etnográficas Haitianas (2019) and The cultural history of money in the age of Empire (edited with Nigel Dodd, 2019). Gustavo Onto is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Graduate Program in Sociol- ogy and Anthropology of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. He is also an associate researcher of the Center for Research on Culture and Economy (NuCEC), where he coordinates the Anthropology of Finance Study Group (GEAF) in partnership with the Brazilian Securities and Exchange Commis- sion (BSEC). He was a visiting researcher at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris and at Copenhagen Business School. He is also a member of the Behavioural Studies Group of the Brazilian SEC and a collaborator on the website Estudios de la Economia (http://estudiosdelaeconomia.wordpress. com). Horacio Ortiz is associate professor of the Research Institute of Anthropology, East China Normal University, and researcher at Université Paris-Dauphine, PSL Research University, CNRS, IRISSO. He graduated from Sciences Po, Paris, obtained an MA in philosophy from the New School for Social Research, New York, and a PhD in social anthropology from the Ecole de hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris. His research focuses on the global financial industry from a perspective of political anthropology. He is the author of Valeur financière et vérité: Enquête d’anthropologie politique sur l’évaluation des entreprises cotées en bourse (2014). Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra is Assistant Professor in Sociology at University of California—San Diego and Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. Trained in physics (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico) and Science and Technology Studies (University of Edinburgh), he is author of Automating finance: Infrastructures, engineers, and the making of electronic markets (2019). Fernando Rabossi is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the Federal Uni- versity of Rio de Janeiro. He coordinates the graduate program in Sociology and Anthropology (PPGSA) at the same university. He is author of En las calles de Ciudad del Este: Una etnografía del comercio de frontera (2008). His re- search is focused on the relation between rules and economic practices, dealing x THE REAL ECONOMY with informal economies, informal politics, markets, borders, mobility, and circulation. Ariel Wilkis is Researcher at Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Tecnológicas (CONICET) and Dean of the Instituto de Altos Estudios So- ciales, Universidad de San Martín (IDAES-UNSAM). His most recent books are The moral power of money: Morality and economy in the life of urban poor (2017) and Las sospechas del dinero: Moral y economía en la vida popular (2013). He has edited El poder de (e)valuar (2018) and El Laberinto de las finanzas. Nuevos es- tudios sociales de la economía (with Alexandre Roig, 2015). His book The moral power of money received “honorable mention” for the Best Book Award 2016–17 by the American Sociological Association Section on Economic Sociology (Zelizer Award). A French version will be published by École de Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in 2020. Caitlin Zaloom is a cultural anthropologist and Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU. Her book Indebted: How families make college work at any cost (2019) examines how the struggle to pay for college transforms family relationships and defines middle-class life in America today. Zaloom has held many fellowships and awards for her work, including from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the National Science Foundation. She is also the author of Out of the pits: Traders and technology from Chicago to London (2006) and is Editor in Chief of Public