Frontiers of Capital:
Ethnographic Reflections on the New Economy
With the NASDAQ having lost 70 percent of its value, the giddy, optimistic belief in perpetual growth that accompanied the economic boom of the 1990s had fizzled by 2002. Yet the advances in information and communication technology, management and production techniques, and global integration that spurred the “New Economy” of the 1990s had triggered profound and lasting changes. Frontiers of Capital brings together ethnographies exploring how cultural practices and social relations have been altered by the radical economic and technological innovations of the New Economy. The contributors, most of whom are anthropologists, investigate changes in the practices and interactions of futures traders, Chinese entrepreneurs, residents of French housing projects, women working on Wall Street, cable television programmers, and others.
Some contributors highlight how expedited flows of information allow business professionals to develop new knowledge practices. They analyze dynamics ranging from the decision-making processes of the Federal Reserve Board to the legal maneuvering necessary to buttress a nascent Japanese market in over-the-counter derivatives. Others focus on the social consequences of globalization and new modes of communication, evaluating the introduction of new information technologies into African communities and the collaborative practices of open-source computer programmers. Together the essays suggest that social relations, rather than becoming less relevant in the high-tech age, have become more important than ever. This finding dovetails with the thinking of many corporations, which increasingly employ anthropologists to study and explain the “local” cultural practices of their own workers and consumers. Frontiers of Capital signals the wide-ranging role of anthropology in explaining the social and cultural contours of the New Economy.
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Jeffrey H. Cohen, American Anthropologist
“[A]n interesting and provocative set of chapters. . . . [T]he strength of the collection lies in the ways in which the authors weave clear ethnographic discussions with rich theoretical concerns. Combined ethnography and theory allow us to more clearly understand the give and take that exists between the creators and users of new technologies.”
Alex Preda, Canadian Journal of Sociology
“Reading this valuable collection of essays . . . made clear to this reader that good old participant observation has lost none of its force. True, new challenges are there, concerning field access, the apparent lack of face-to-face settings, and a reversed asymmetry of power between the ethnographer
and the observed subjects, to name but a few. Yet, if we are to cognitively mine out the depths of the technologies which are taken as definitional for the new forms of capital, then, as many essays in this volume show, we cannot easily discard the miner’s old tools.”
Mitchel Y. Abolafia, American Journal of Sociology
“This volume is a convincing display of the continuing power of ethnography to explore the embeddedness of contemporary economic relations in the social world. These essays are impressive for their eagerness to make sense of some of the latest changes in a fast-moving economy.”
Charles Piot, author of Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa
“Frontiers of Capital is a synthetic state-of-the-art account of anthropology’s contribution to thinking about the current economic moment. The essays are—without exception—brilliant ethnographic excursions into the terrain of what the editors call the ‘New Economy.’ Together they enable an understanding of the post–Cold War, neoliberal, information-saturated, finance-capital-dominated world we inhabit.”