Anthropology and finance capitalism. Remarks in the Brexit’s aftermath

Abstract

This article aims to bring attention to a predominantly anthropological literature that poses important questions about the influence of the financial world on our daily lives and on the lives of businesses. Although this literature remains scarcely present in the anthropological debate in Italy, the latest crisis following Brexit invites us to consider more carefully those connections that began to expand from the finance sector not only across different economic sectors, but also to broader social and cultural realities. In particular, the ethnography of finance offers since the early Nineties many important insights into the world of flexible and competitive forms of life of stockbrokers, ranging from analysis of their social identity, the deconstruction of the ideology of the infallibility and the rationality of financial practices, and the analysis of the implementation and extension of these practices to real economy models of businesses and the creation of widespread job insecurity, implemented not only in the poorest countries. In sum, the article suggests lines of ethnographic research able to cross traditional partitions of anthropological knowledge with the purpose to provide a critical analysis able to offerr a reinterpretation of new forms of inequality and of the new contradictions of the contemporary world.