Finance, Anthropology of

The anthropology of finance is composed of an interdisciplinary set of approaches for analyzing the mechanisms, worldviews, networks, and far-reaching socioeconomic effects of finance. Given the influence of financial values and practices, not to mention the tendency for academic and public approaches to finance to further obscure its workings, anthropology's ethnographic toolkit has a crucial role to play in unpacking the cultural specificities and underpinnings of finance. Indebted to and in conversation with many subfields, from economic sociology to political economy, the anthropology of finance navigates the theoretical and methodological challenges of abstraction and old binaries of economy and society to investigate the contours and consequences of finance and financialization.