This paper explores fieldsites as devices, in the sense, given in the introduction to this special issue, of 'patterned teleological arrangements'. Drawing on a discussion of my own ethnographic fieldwork with field behavioral ecologists, the article seeks to parse the insights of two...

The post-World War II period gave rise to a large number of social-scientific techniques for investigating and intervening in social reality. A particular group of these, exemplified here by the experiments of Moreno, Lewin, Bion, Milgram and Zimbardo, worked by establishing suggestive...

Economic rationality and reciprocal help are values that are often posed as contradictory within exchanges. However, there are instances when these values work in tandem, such as when justifying informal purchases of work, svart arbete, in contemporary Sweden. Svart arbete are omnipresent...

In recent years, significant studies of finance have explored, on the one hand, the ways in which a specific financial theory might act as a ‘performative utterance’ which through its use makes itself true and, on the other hand, the ways in which discourses and practices of finance might...

This article examines the Terrorism Financing Tracking Programme (TFTP), or 'Swift affair,' as exemplary of what have been called 'Data Wars' in this special issue. In the TFTP, access to data about global financial circulations was offered as a means to govern uncertain security futures. The...

In a rapid sequence of events in 1499--1500 the maritime Republic of Venice lost three of its four chief private banking institutions, labeled by the contemporary observer as the ‘four columns of the temple’. While economic historians have already analyzed the immediate causes of the crisis...

The proximate causes of the global financial crisis (GFC) have been widely attributed to ‘financialisation’. However, we argue that the global financial crisis had cultural conditions of possibility that were imbricated with economic factors in complex ways. The idea that the crisis was the...

In this article the author examines a number of ways in which the real world economy is currently merging with practices that have been classically understood as belonging to the spheres of culture and play. The article discusses several areas in which the conceptual line between the supposedly...

The development of submarine telegraph systems and telegraph news -- the global media of their time -- in the late-nineteenth century deserve study for many reasons, not least because they were front and centre in the global financial crisis of 1873 and fit the criteria used to define...