Traversing and Translating High Finance

Symposium/workshop held on 25 April 2015 at the Royal Anthropological Institute. This workshop, held at the Royal Anthropological Institute, went beyond charting the frontiers of corporate investments by forming bridges between disparate terrains that might otherwise seem unconnected, and proposing new methodologies for exploring and communicating such links. Anthropologists, artists, accountants, hacktivists, economists, journalists, former brokers and educators traced their ideas and methods as they imaginatively and rigorously made links geared toward making visible the frequently invisible workings of finance. Presentations informed by conceptual and performative art and exhibits focused on themes of financial secrecy and transparency that arose throughout the workshop, entreating participants to focus on current global predicaments such as the economic crisis – not solely on its effects, but also importantly, its causes

Influence of Brand Personality-Marker Attributes on Purchasing Intention: The Role of Emotionality

Marketing researchers employ the Five-Factor Model to describe branded products through attributes used for human personality. Marker attributes used to elicit brand personality dimensions can also influence consumers’ intention to purchase. Two connected studies, carried out on two samples of 91 and 557 subjects, respectively, show that brand personality-marker attributes predict intention to purchase, but only to the extent that such attributes are vivid and, in particular, when they elicit emotional responses (i.e., when they are emotionally interesting). These findings have several implications for people involved in developing strategies for persuasive communication

Starting-up during COVID-19

The global impact of COVID-19 has rippled into all areas of social, economic, political and business lives no matter what one’s line of work or livelihood. Considerable focus has been directed at understanding some of the challenges presented by the current pandemic on primary research, including the negative impacts of a technology-dependent or technology-mediated field site, the lack of material shared spaces during covid-19 times, interrupted fieldwork, transformed field sites, mental wellbeing, the weakness of online communications in comparison to face-to face contact and other concrete and adverse repercussions of the current pandemic on primary research. While the negative disruptive effects on organizations have been addressed elsewhere (Bartik et al. 2020, Meyer et al. 2020), here I wish to reflect upon my positive experiences of meeting and working with a small start-up. From my home office, I was able to meet and connect to new colleagues, build a research team, and design and conduct a research project at a new field site– all transpiring withouthaving previously worked with the team. These circumstances led me to make decisions that I would not have made sans pandemic but which contributed toward positive project decisions. Feeling encouraged about what we accomplished together without ever having met my research team colleagues in person, I focus on how covid-19 has created new possibilities for connection and for conducting research within and across borders. Rather than to focus on disruption, one might also consider the emergence of new businesses during covid and the ensuing nascent forms and conditions for conducting business at such times

Global Ayahuasca: An Entrepreneurial Ecosystem

This chapter examines issues surrounding the viability and desirability of recent entrepreneurs and entrepreneurships aiming to create effective measures of 'transparency' 'efficacy' and 'safety' with regards to the increasing participation in the ayahuasca sessions that take place in local and global settings. It raises critical questions about the methods through which such initiatives seek to identify those legitimate authorities, actors, voices and criteria or can in turn deem certain practices and actors legitimate and others not. This takes place in environments where there are marked disjunctures between what transpires in the spoken, visible and unspoken, invisible worlds particularly amidst great inequality. Whereas such enterprises may make sense from a market perspective, they make little sense within the broader social, political and cultural contexts in which ayahuasca practitioners live and operate

Steven Lee Rubinstein (1962-2012)

The sad news of Dr. Steve Lee Rubenstein’s sudden and unexpected death at the age of 49 took us all by surprise. In fact, as I write this, months after Steve’s passing, I am still grappling with the notion that he is gone from this world, as we know it. In some ways, Steve was only at the beginning of his career with many large ideas still unleashed and yet he had already achieved more than most do in one lifetime. As friends and colleagues of Steve’s we have spent the last few months exchanging stories about his extraordinary mind, wit and generosity. Students have come forth to talk about how much he changed their way of reading texts and seeing the world, identifying him as the one person from their experience in higher education who actually made a difference to them, teaching them not only about anthropology but about life. Colleagues, young and old, have benefitted from his intense and heartfelt academic exchanges, and enjoyed his constructively critical and magnanimous manner. Steve was an interlocutor par excellence. As South Americanists we experienced first-hand his commitment to community building by bringing people and ideas together, never simply promoting himself. We have all watched him hold court in the lobbies of all the various conferences we attended. Wherever Steve sat became a magnetic hub, an intellectual watering hole across and beyond our discipline

Traversing the margins of corruption amidst informal economies in Amazonia

This article focuses on local idioms of extra-legal economic activity among indigenous Amazonians in eastern Peru, and its overall argument is that these idioms are part of a broader context in which indigenous people are compelled by a variety of factors to act in a seemingly corrupt manner. I further suggest that within such a context these idioms are not confined to the informal economy but are also used to refer to activities that fall within the formal economy, supporting Hart’s (2009) claim that the informal economy is a way of imagining the orthodox economy. I argue that corruption within Amazonian economies is commonly perceived by non-indigenous people as contrasting with the workings of the orthodox economy without proper consideration of the economic conditions and bureaucratic structures that give rise to it. Lastly, I argue that, here, corruption can contravene bureaucracy by restoring the humanity that Herzfeld (1993) claims bureaucracy rejects through its acts of indifference toward individuals