Money and Its Effects

I recently finished reading a new book by American studies scholar and historian Peter Hudson on the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century internationalization of finance capital. The book, Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean (2017), tackles the expansion of the United States, via Wall Street, to its new sphere of influence: the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Haiti, and elsewhere throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. Across the text, certain individuals appear and reappear as merchant and then commercial banks boom and bust in one location, then another, all the while followed by military intervention, attempts at financial regulation, agricultural collapse, and (ultimately) economic disaster. Throughout, these same individuals both espouse and solidify the scientific racism of the day that positioned “natives” of these territories as incapable of governing their own economic and political affairs, either due to their climactically inspired torpor or to their natural inferiority. Hudson's is thus a story of the fraught relations between empire and sovereignty through the lens of racial capital, one that instantiates what George Marcus long ago identified as one strategy through which anthropologists might conduct multisited research: “follow the money” (1995). The book made me think about capital's contemporary circulations, and how these circulations also inform our epistemological practices. If speculation, volatility, instability, and conspiracy characterized late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century imperial capitalist expansions, generating new and exacerbating old dimensions of global inequality, these are the same processes that exemplify the newest form of capital circulation: Bitcoin. Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency and payment system, is the first decentralized digital currency, an open-protocol cash-transfer system that doesn't require authorization from a trusted banking or credit institution (Maurer, Nelms, and Swartz 2013). Since its introduction in 2009, Bitcoin has increased its value by over 100,000 percent. Millionaires have been made overnight, as early adopters have traded what is essentially a trust commodity, the most quintessential instantiation of Marx's dematerialized and disembodied commodity form, money. Holders of Bitcoin exchange value with anyone with an internet connection, and the magic of this instant wealth generation makes the Comaroffs’ “millennial capitalism” (2001) seem ponderous (just Google “Bitcoin millionaires” to see what I mean). Proponents of Bitcoin and other block-chain systems, like Ethereum, believe that these platforms represent the complete democratization of markets. With no need to prove value, identity, or worth, and with no middlemen or governmental regulatory body, individuals freely trade with others they cannot see and do not know. For many, according to Steven Johnson in his January 21 cover article for the New York Times Magazine, the “real promise of these new technologies … lies not in displacing our currencies but in replacing much of what we now think of as the internet, while at the same time returning the online world to a more decentralized and egalitarian system,” one that isn't reined in by the monopoly-like status of social media platforms like Facebook, and search and retailing engines like Google and Amazon.1 While potentially liberatory, Bitcoin also offers us a cautionary tale. It is the currency of choice on the “dark web.” It has been used to finance online terror attacks; it has attracted scammers, hackers, mercenaries, and anarcho-libertarians; and it has been used by countries and corporations to avoid international sanctions. It is also the preferred exchange medium of white supremacist organizations that, having been banned from soliciting donations through online platforms like Paypal or GoFundMe, have sought out cryptocurrencies as their primary alternative. “White supremacists like Bitcoin,” Michael Harriot writes, “because it can fund the movement without the people who contribute being labeled white supremacists. The average, run-of-the-mill racists like it because they can donate without anyone knowing. Bitcoin is essentially a digital Ku Klux Klan hood.”2 Bitcoin thus equally attracts fortune-hunting opportunists and present-day Nazis. What, we should ask, will be the long-term effects of this emergent shift toward cryptocurrencies? I am using the word “effects” here to signal the phenomena that result from shifts in value and the representations thereof as well as to mean the “stuff” of money itself—not its material representation but those things that it wears or carries (like “personal effects”).3 One effect of late nineteenth-century speculation and the economic contractions it spawned was an intensified pattern of regulation and institutional consolidation. This effect might squarely be placed in the column of economy, though the forms of legibility it encouraged also redounded to other spheres. We might argue, for example, that financial imperialism went hand in hand with the political and sociocultural elaborations of scientific racism that constituted the dominant foundational common sense of anthropological research at the time. We might also see it as having produced the kinds of salvage ethnography and antiracist research that would come to characterize Boas's project for the discipline in its American incarnation. The effects of racial capitalism—what it carried—were new ideas about personhood, sovereignty, and human value, ideas with which we are still struggling. What are the currencies through which anthropological knowledge travels today? What insights do bones, films, karsts, middens, drawings, injuries, and other forms of historical and contemporary archives give us? And in what ways might these insights be legitimately mediated by practices of refusal (Simpson 2007) or opacity (Glissant 1997)? Daryl Pullman's “Bioarchaeology, Bioethics, and the Beothuk” explores the issues surrounding the skeletal remains of twelve Beothuk individuals, currently in museum storage. He focuses on the skulls of Nonosabasut and his wife Demasduit, who died at the hands of European colonizers, and the attempts to repatriate these skulls from Edinburgh to Newfoundland and Labrador. By investigating the ethical and legal challenges surrounding the repatriation of these skulls, Pullman asks questions not only about who speaks for Indigenous communities—there are no known descendants of the Beothuk among present-day Indigenous populations, and there is no established repatriation legislation in Canada—but also about the tensions between research- and justice-oriented goals. He concludes by suggesting a middle ground between the poles of science and reparative justice, one that is rooted in narrative ethics, raising new questions about historicity and continuity. Pullman's exploration of the ethical dimensions of repatriation is followed by Crystal M. Riley Koenig, Bryan L. Koenig, and Crickette M. Sanz's discussion of the use of primate documentaries in anthropology classrooms. So many of us use film and other multimodal materials in the classroom in order to create affective connections with students related to anthropological questions about cultural practices, history, and human evolution. For biological anthropologists, documentary films are particularly helpful in teaching about primate behavior and environmental issues. The authors thus wanted to evaluate the effectiveness of specifically biological anthropology films and to create an openly available resource that would present these findings. Based on an online survey that asked 219 college-level anthropology instructors about their use and perceptions of primate documentary films, they created the Primate Films Database,4 which features reviews, ratings, and other useful tools. The results of their survey tell us as much about the ways teaching strategies have changed over time as they do about the films themselves. In “The Sterkfontein Caves after Eighty Years of Paleoanthropological Research,” Dominic Justin Stratford asks us to think anew about the three generations of paleoanthropological research at this site. Stratford provides a history of the research conducted at Sterkfontein and its interventions into our understanding of the human evolutionary past, and in doing so elaborates an archive of excavation-diary entries since 1967 and an extensive research bibliography (available on our website and as supplementary information on the Wiley website). Sterkfontein, he argues, provides important insights into the consolidation of Johannesburg and its development as an industrial center, and therefore about the simultaneous strengthening of the social, cultural, and political practices of segregation and apartheid with the establishment of the University of the Witwatersrand. At Sterkfontein, therefore, we are not only given Australopithecus africanus and “Little Foot” but also karst caves, which produce knowledge of the environmental past linking us both to contemporary socio-racial phenomena and to the epistemological infrastructures that both reproduce and challenge those phenomena. In the end, Stratford argues that Sterkfontein remains a valuable resource for the study of evolution and hominid variation. Yitzchak Jaffe, Qiaowei Wei, and Yichao Zhao's “Foodways and the Archaeology of Colonial Contact” attempts to read the relationships between community foodways and colonial contact through archaeological assemblages of ceramics. They argue that cooking and serving vessels should be seen as gleaning information not only about group identity and membership but also about food preferences and habitus and the ways these change as the result of colonial expansion. Their case study is Bronze Age China and Western Zhou imperialism. Contributing to the archaeological investigation of human-object entanglements, the authors investigate the complexities and emergent hybridities produced by colonial contact, drawing from both anthropological and cultural studies theory. By focusing on practice, they seek to avoid simplistic analyses of imperialism and cultural change, promoting instead a materially based approach that can tell us something about the relations among incorporation, domination, and innovation. Aaron Glass turns our attention to an early (and largely overlooked) practice of what we might now call multimodality by exploring Franz Boas's research drawings from the first decade of his Northwest Coast fieldwork. In “Drawing on Museums: Early Visual Fieldnotes by Franz Boas and the Indigenous Recuperation of the Archive,” Glass gives us the early Boas as art (object) aficionado, practitioner, and phenomenologist. Boas's use of drawings as ethnographic practice and in ethnographic practice has not, Glass notes, typically been archived in conjunction with his more conventional ethnographic materials. However, contemporary Kwakwaka'wakw communities are using these drawings in their efforts to support their current cultural production and to revitalize ceremonial practices, despite their reservations about the initial monograph for which the drawings were created, The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians. Glass is interested, therefore, in the ways these drawings live and circulate beyond the conditions of their original production, and in how materials such as these can allow anthropologists and the communities with which they collaborate to develop new reflexive critiques of the discipline (and Western epistemologies more generally) at the same time as they serve the pragmatic, political, and spiritual goals of Indigenous groups. With “Called to ‘Ankle Alley,’” Ieva Jusionyte tackles the violence suffusing migration across the southern Arizona border from less examined points of view—those of firefighters, EMTs, and paramedics encountering injured migrants who have attempted to traverse the fences and walls that have been built since 1990 to protect the security of the United States. Like others, Jusionyte shows how these infrastructures and surveillance technologies have created increasingly damaging insecurities for would-be migrants and their families as well as for caregivers negotiating complex political and legal landscapes of the border. She argues that analyzing the patterns of physical trauma on the US–Mexico border can provide an accountability structure for the US government, which now presents intensifying migrant injury as an unintentional consequence of security-oriented policy. By illuminating the perspectives of firefighters who rescue unauthorized migrants, Jusionyte tracks changes in both the political economy of migration and its embodied and affective relational effects. China Scherz also focuses on the affective dimensions of care in “Enduring the Awkward Embrace: Ontology and Ethical Work in a Ugandan Convent.” Scherz is interested in the relationships between ethics and practice, morality and self-cultivation. By working with Franciscan nuns in East Africa, she explores the effects of evaluative reflection and conscious practice on their ability to create a relation among the care they must offer for orphans and children with disabilities in her fieldsite, their ontological understanding of humanness, and the role of God in their own ethical development. She wants to broaden Foucauldian paradigms of subjectivity and “care of the self” to take into greater account the spiritual and nonsocial dimensions of ethics. She shows us nuns who are intentionally working to be able to more fully engage in the care of their charges via an understanding of ethical subjectivity—“God's grace”—that is not within the realm of human control. Ultimately, Scherz argues for a view of anthropological ethics that foregrounds nonsecular uncertainty as much as modernist intention. In the last research article of this issue, Robyn Taylor-Neu explores popular representations of Indigenous Canadian musician and performer Tanya Tagaq in order to think through issues of voice, language, and media ideologies within a context of multiculturalism. Interested in the ways reviewers and fans position Tagaq in relation to other popular music stars, Taylor-Neu parses the fine line between assessments of her demonstration of authenticity and her commercial viability, raising anew vexing questions related to recognition, settler colonialism, and liberalism. Reading the metapragmatic construction of Tagaq's voice through critics’ reviews of her music, Taylor-Neu argues that assessments of Tagaq's vocal performance already presuppose an opposition between tradition and modernity, as well as an unbroken continuity with Indigenous forms of expression. Tagaq's performances, then, cannot escape the domain of liberal multicultural fantasy, reassuring settlers that the dream of reconciliation is possible through embodied expression. Our World Anthropologies section this issue begins with a Luso-Brazilian anthropological conversation between Bela Feldman-Bianco and Miguel Vale de Almeida. They explore the effects not only of their colonial history but also of their exposure to US and UK anthropological paradigms and their pluri-territorial theoretical and practical scope. This conversation is followed by a roundtable discussion sparked by Iranian anthropologist Nahal Naficy's reflections on her training in the United States and her return to Iran as well as the complexities of conducting research on the Iranian state from her perch at the University of Tehran, given its particular institutionalization of anthropology. Having initially been told to focus on “America” as her area of specialization, given that others were already working in the fields of urban and political anthropology, she discusses the practices and forms of scholarship and research at the university and how they changed profoundly between 2009 and 2014. Her discussion of suspicions of anthropology as a field, and of Iranian scholars who trained in the US, is followed by several commentaries from anthropologists located in diverse settings. Many experienced similar trajectories, with others raising additional questions related to publication venues, language, methods, and intellectual imperialism. Our Multimodal Anthropologies section features an essay by Stephanie Sadre-Orafai, Jordan Tate, Andrew McGrath, and Sso-Rha Kang called “Critical Visions and the Unsteady In-Between.” They reflect on their Critical Visions program at the University of Cincinnati, in which students are encouraged to combine art and anthropological practice in order to develop nonlinear approaches to contemporary social issues. In thinking through the collaborative process of developing and publishing a critical theory/art journal (the CVSN Field Guide to Color), the authors—two of them founders of the program and two of them students—probe the generative relationship between visual and ethnographic work within pedagogical and analytic projects. We also offer “With the Smartphone as Field Assistant: Designing, Making, and Testing EthnoAlly, a Multimodal Tool for Conducting Serendipitous Ethnography in a Multisensory World” by Paolo Favero and Eva Theunissen. The essay describes a fieldwork app developed by the authors to help capture multimodal data. Finally, the section offers three film reviews (Women in Sink, The Anthropologist, and The Destruction of Memory). Remember to look on our website (www.americananthropologist.org) for new posts from our Public Anthropologies section. There are several new entries in the “De-Provincializing Development” series, the anthropological examination of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Also on our website, you will find two installments of the “From the Archives” series from our student contributing editors—the first by Evan P. Conaway on play, and the second by Anthony Tricarico on human-environment engagements. Finally, we are happy to present twelve book reviews in this issue, as well as two obituaries: Edith Turner and

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