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Fabio Mattioli
Anuac
Anthropology, financial expansion and its relationalities from “marginal sites”: An introduction
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Thematic section: Anthropology, financial expansion and its relationalities
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2023-12-31
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Fabio Mattioli
2023/12/31
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-6064
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University of Melbourne, Australia
2239-625X
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urn:nbn:it:unica-29855
Anthropology, financial expansion and its relationalities from “marginal sites”: An introduction
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                                         2023 | anuac. VoL. 12, n° 2, DiceMbre 2023: 1-22




Anthropology, ﬁnancial expansion and its
relationalities from “marginal sites”
An introduction


Zaira T. Lofranco
University of Bologna
Fabio MaTTioLi
University of Melbourne



ABsTRAcT: In this introduction we map the tradition of thoughts and state of the art on
the study of finance and financialization in relation to the anthropological Italian debate.
We suggest a particular attention towards ethnographic approaches “from the margins”
of finance that can help build a non unilinear and west-centric agenda for studying fi-
nancial expansion also in the Italian context. Then we discuss conceptual trends on
financial expansion that emerged in the international anthropological debate after the
Global Financial Crisis (GFC), underlining a shift from the “double movement” analysis
to the rediscovery and the reframing of relational approach. Thinking of financialization
beyond the dualistic interpretative prism that sets finance against society, movement
against counter movement, center against periphery we invite to conceptualize financial
expansion as the result of a variety of independent but related processes which must
be apprehended holistically. We consider ethnography as an opportunity to unravel
the multiple spatial and temporal axes and kinds of processes that constitute financial
expansion. When analyzed ethnographically, financialization seems to proceed by si-
multaneous movements and countermovement resulting from the confrontation among
increasingly financialized subjects. This interactive practice produces attempts that, de-
spite the power asymmetries, might result in unplanned transformative outcomes.

KeY WORDs: financiaLiZaTion; anThropoLogy; MoVeMenT; counTerMoVeMenT, reLaTionaLiTy.




2023 | anuac. VoL. 12, n° 2, DiceMbre 2023: 1-22.
ISSN: 2239-625X – DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-6064
2                                                       Zaira T. Lofranco, Fabio Mattioli

Introduction
    This thematic section (TS) is an invitation to take stock of ethnographic ap-
proaches to financial expansion or, as often conceptualized in the literature,
financialization1. We hope this TS will help focus the Italian anthropological
debate on connections between socio-cultural and structural dimensions of
financialization and bring to the fore the importance of theorizing financial
expansion from (semi)peripheral financial contexts. This perspective is not con-
sidered only as a way to compare different case studies, but as an opportunity to
interrogate what constitutes finance beyond Wall Street, and which entangle-
ments of different processes (political, social, etc.) contribute to its expansion.
    The financialization process is conventionally dated back to the late ‘70s.
Economic stagnation in the West saw the emergence of a new “pattern of ac-
cumulation in which profit making occurred increasingly through financial
channels rather than through trade and commodity production” (Krippner
2005: 14). Financial services and markets expanded dramatically, accounting
for an increasing share of national income. This process reshaped radically the
relationship between different economic activities; market a decline of indus-
trial production and the Fordist mode of production; and reshaped where and
how states could operate (i.e. welfare, see Epstein 2005).
    From this relatively confined understanding of financialization as de-in-
dustrialization, marketization, and depoliticization, the concept has been
gradually expanded to describe the increasing role that finance plays in daily
life. Either to access (privatized) healthcare, education, housing, retirement,
or simply to build wealth that previously was guaranteed by wages, finance is
increasingly a mainstay of being alive—and a key factor in shaping how citi-
zens understand themselves in relation to others (Martin 2002).
    The increasingly expansive use of the concept of financialization has
pushed theorists to systematize (first) and question (later) its appropriate-
ness. Van der Zwan (2014: 101) distinguished between macro-level approaches
to financialization, focused on the transformation of capitalist accumulation
or changes in macroeconomic aggregates; meso-level approaches, which
addresses financialization of modern corporations and the emergence of
“shareholder value” or the imperative of producing profit for shareholders;

1. This article is the result of the guest editors’ joint effort. However, the sections titled
   Introduction, Anthropology of financialization from the (Italian) semi periphery and The re-
   lational perspective in emerging ethnographies of financial expansion have been written by
   Zaira T. Lofranco, while the sections titled From embeddedness to the rediscovery of rela-
   tional approaches and Our contribution have been written by Fabio Mattioli.


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Anthropology, financial expansion and its relationalities                           3

and micro-level approaches, which deal with non-elite actors (e.g. individu-
al investors, households) coping everyday with financial practices like saving
and borrowing and rationalities (van der Zwan 2014). More recently, van der
Zwan and fellow editors of the Routledge Handbook of Financialization suggest-
ed that, to overcome the risk of overgeneralizing and devaluing the usefulness
of the term “financialization”, we need a multiscale analysis and a careful
space-time contextualization which should lead to a (re-)conceptualization
of transnational financial expansion (Mader, Mertens, van der Zwan 2020: 6).
   So, what is gained, and lost, when we restrict the concept of financialization
to a “core” contribution, that is rooted in Western forms of finance? And what
multiple social forces should we consider, if we want to maintain an expan-
sive view of finance in movement across both spaces, and types of human and
non-human activity?
   To approach these questions, we first sketch the Italian anthropological de-
bate about financialization. Without ambition to be exhaustive, we outline
gaps and opportunities to carry out an anthropology of financialization from/
on quasi-marginal financial sites. Then, we propose a focus on relationships
as a key ethnographic strategy to unravel financialization paths outside “fi-
nancial cores”. We identify emergent anthropological trends that, by placing
relationships at the core of finance, go beyond dualistic explanations that op-
pose finance to society. Finally, we mobilize this framework in the context
of the case studies for this issue, highlighting the complex movements and
counter movements of finance.
   We argue that financial expansion is constituted by a variety of independent
but related processes (such as depoliticization, extractivism, commodification
but also social reproduction and distinction, political posturing, etc.), which
must be apprehended holistically. Only under this lens, there is neither a sin-
gular core trend, nor a singular chain of actions and reactions, in Polanyian
terms. Instead, the relationships that drive financial expansion constitute
multiple and simultaneous movements and countermovements across differ-
ent domains, which can be observed and theorized ethnographically.

Anthropology of financialization from the (Italian) semi periphery
   In Italy, economic anthropology has a long tradition. The country has been
a key case study for theorists of capitalism and industrialization (Blim 1990)
with a sizable involvement of anthropologists working in Italy and abroad
(Papa 1999; Yanagisako 2002; D’Aloisio 2003; Ghezzi 2007; Redini 2008). Yet,



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4                                                  Zaira T. Lofranco, Fabio Mattioli

historically, much less attention has been dedicated to issues of financial ex-
pansion. However, grappling with the impact of the Global Financial Crisis
(GFC hereafter), a growing number of studies have been filling this gap (see
for instance Fumagalli, Mezzadra 2009; Bellofiore, Vertova 2014), even though
with a late and still limited involvement of anthropologists.
   Most of the anthropological contributions written in response to financial
crisis in Italy had been published from 2016 onwards and were stimulated by the
outbreak in 2011 of the country’s sovereign debt crisis or by Brexit. This limited
engagement with the anthropological debate on financialization is partly ex-
plained by a tendency to consider the Italian economy as exception compared
to the Anglo-American financial core. Consider, for instance, the outsized pub-
lic debt that that the country accumulated since World War II, well before the
crisis of Fordism. Or the peculiarities of the Italian model of industrialization
(Papa 2016), fueled in part by medium enterprises that are not listed on stock
exchange and are often financed by small local corporate and retail banks. Or
the remarkably low size of mortgages and debt in Italian households, espe-
cially when compared to the USA or Spain. These particularities led political
economists and sociologists to analyze the rise of finance in Italy not as a con-
sequence of marketization and depoliticization – but rather as a political issue,
often connected to industrial policies and structural vulnerabilities.
   In different analysis this has been linked to the inclusion of the country
into the European Monetary Union (EMU) which led to the peripheralization
of Italian industrial production (Gambarotto, Solari 2015), or to the spread
of derivatives among Italian local institutions which reinforced public econ-
omy’s vulnerability, losses and austerity (Lagna 2016). Another important
effect of political intervention has been the changing regulation on banking
that supported a set of mergers and acquisitions and transformed the existing
network of local banks in big multinational banking corporations. These pro-
cesses entailed the internationalization of our banking system, as well as the
expansion of our banks in foreign (mainly Eastern European) markets, with
the effect of increasing the sensitivity of domestic real economy to financial
shocks and of diverting capitals previously channeled into local businesses
(Dagnes at al. 2022).
   These political and economic approaches did not immediately translate
into anthropological studies. The first studies where Italian anthropologists
tackled debt and finance explicitly were oriented by cultural and phenome-
nological approaches. These included cross-cultural comparisons between



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Anthropology, financial expansion and its relationalities                           5

witchcraft and finance/gambling in coping with the imponderable (Aime 2016)
or attempts to recuperate Ernesto de Martino’s horizons of crisis to explore
the existential precarity resulting from economic recession (Signorelli 2016).
A few finance-related theoretical reflections stemmed from critical readings of
seminal works authored by key global anthropologists like Appadurai’s Bank-
ing on words (Vereni 2016) and David Graeber’s Debt. The first 5000 years (Aria
2012; Pavanello 2017). In his introduction to the Italian translation of Appa-
durai’s book, Vereni supports an approach to the study of derivatives focused
on symbolic and semiotic reading of the economic practices expressed by
classical voices in social sciences like Weber, Durkheim, Mauss, deemed more
in tune with Italian cultural anthropological tradition. The author considers
compelling these solid references to grasp risks and uncertainties caused by fi-
nancialization. Aria (2012), on the contrary, acknowledges the limitations of a
Graeberian approach to debt in the overgeneralizations brought about by the
long-time historical frame adopted. Finally, he registers Graeber’s divergence
from recent trends in economic anthropology producing specific ethnogra-
phies of financial elites, enterprises, and multinational corporations which
give an account of what he defines “structural difficulties of the contemporary
economic model”.
   Increasingly, however, anthropologists working in Italy have demonstrated
an interest in interaction between cultural, social, and structural approaches.
A few of them elaborated on the role of finance in approaching it from related
themes like microcredit in the Global South (Lulli 2008; Zanotelli 2012); and
in post-industrial country (Crivellaro, Guerzoni 2014; Crivellaro 2015) or an-
alyzing deindustrialization and labor (India 2017; D’Aloisio, Ghezzi 2022) in
Italy facing the crisis.
   However, since Cristina Papa, in 2016, re-elaborated the concept of “fi-
nanzcapitalismo” to highlight the shift from “value production” to “value
extraction” (see also Gallino 2011), a few anthropological works expanded this
theoretical thread (Lofranco 2018; Lofranco, Zanotelli 2022; Carabini 2023).
   Yet, ethnographies openly addressing financialization, remain rare and are
born from collaborations abroad (Zanotelli 2013; Lofranco 2021; Dal Maso
2020). Most of them are recent and mainly inspired by fieldwork experiences
of the tangible effect of financialization in urban spaces and housing (Lenzi
Grillini 2022; Stefani 2022; Bonfanti 2022; Carpini 2022; Lofranco 2022; Por-
telli at al. 2023).




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6                                                  Zaira T. Lofranco, Fabio Mattioli

   Nonetheless, the confrontation between cultural and structural aspect of
financialization, appears decisive in the possibility to unfold an Italian de-
bate on this issue. In our view, theoretically and methodologically bridging
these two approaches is essential to grasp a multifaceted and pervasive phe-
nomenon like financialization. Furthermore, we will argue that ethnographic
research is crucial to situate geographically and historically these structur-
al transformations and to understand, beyond determinism and dualism, the
specific forms through which they relate to sociality and value production.


From embeddedness to the rediscovery of relational approaches
   Before the Global Financial Crisis, anthropologists had understood finan-
cial expansion as a cultural and phenomenological process, affecting financial
elites or “the poor” (see for instance Zaloom 2006). By 2007‑08, the devastat-
ing and enduring socio-economic impact of the crisis highlighted the need for
a novel approach which embraced structural issues.
   To make sense of the multifaceted dimensions of indebtedness post GFC,
several anthropologists contextualized finance within classical references to
Mauss ([1925] 1990) and Polanyi ( [1944] 2001), which articulated economics
as a constitutive part of social relations. Following in Mauss footsteps, this ap-
proach involved looking retrospectively to ethnographic settings where credit
and debt were part of an indissoluble dyadic unit generative of moral debates
about social, political and space-time boundaries and co constitutive of their
material effects (Peebles 2010). In a similar retrospective vein, David Graeber
(2011) elaborated his famous treatise on the cultural history of debt. Engaging
in a long diachronic analysis, he showed that it is precisely when institution-
alized and financialized logics infiltrate social life and abstract it from its
relational component that violence of debt’s extractive practices escalates.
The actualization of Karl Polanyi’s work has been linked to his critical view
on a self-regulated market that inspired liberal economic theory elaborated
after the Great Depression of 1929. Polanyi’s reflections were recuperated to
understand the continuities in the passage From the Great Transformation to
the Great financialization (Polanyi Levitt 2013). The concept of three “fictitious
commodities” – land, labor and money — seemed particularly useful to shed
light on the ongoing debt crisis and to highlight the need to re-embed eco-
nomics into society — at the crossroad of local and global processes (Hart,
Ortiz 2014). Similarly, Karl Polanyi’s attempt to understand the history of cap-



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Anthropology, financial expansion and its relationalities                           7

italism as a result of a “double movement” has appeared particularly reliable
also for investigating global financial expansion and its social backlash since
the ’70s (Atzmüller et al. 2019; Mikuš 2019). Notoriously, within the double
movement explicative framework, “movements” of expanding commodifica-
tion and marketisation are opposed by “countermovements” through which
society seeks “protection” from market dynamics (Polanyi 2001: 138).
   These early attempts to understand the crisis by re-theorizing debt anthro-
pologically were successful in challenging economists’ intellectual hegemony
in the world of finance but were less accurate in addressing the specificities
of financialized capitalism (Lofranco 2018). As other contributions suggest-
ed, Mauss and Polany’s works need to be recontextualized to deconstruct
the dualistic relations between finance and real economy (Hart, Ortiz 2008).
Under financial capitalism, money and finance, distributed unequally in lo-
cal and global context, constitute an “integral part of society rather than
semi-detached from it” (Hart, Ortiz 2008: 1). In other words, thinking about
embeddedness in relation to debt and the GFC analysis should be subordinat-
ed to the task of considering the “social consequences of political economy
and the way it is understood by those who make it, as one and the same so-
cial process” (Hart, Ortiz 2008: 3). Nevertheless, in neoliberal capitalism the
universal heuristic validity of the double movement has been challenged by
scholars who observed that the image of finance as a fictitious commodity
depicted finance and society as separated spheres dominated by contrasting
logics, while “finance is no less embedded in society than any other social tie”
(Pittluck et al. 2008: 7). If so, can we still talk about a singular movement and
counter movement, as if finance was driven by a singular logic?
   Although Mauss and Polanyi continue to be essential references to under-
stand contemporary financial dynamics, these shortcomings have increasingly
pushed anthropologists to embrace relational analyses, drawing eclectically
from Marxist sources. Historically, the Marxist tradition has described finan-
cial expansion as a process of abstraction that transforms the purposes and
functioning of monetary credit, enabling an additional appropriation of sur-
plus compared to classic industrial capitalism (see Fine 2013: 53). In this view,
the problem is not monetary credit or debt per se. Under advanced capitalism,
however, the expansion of financial markets transforms monetary credit into a
speculative tool geared towards maximizing returns for investors, rather than
enabling distributed purchases.




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8                                                  Zaira T. Lofranco, Fabio Mattioli

   In Marxist analysis of history, this transformation of credit is the conse-
quence of falling rates of profit, understood as a driving logic within capitalism.
The copious literature on the subject (Moseley 1991; Hodgson 1974) acknowl-
edge that capitalism is founded on competition. Over time, competition drives
down prices and profit margins, forcing capital owners and investors to cut
salaries. This undercuts the spending power of consumers ultimately causing
crises of overproduction. To avoid this double bind, capital owners can look for
new avenues to sell their goods and accumulate profits. This can mean enlist-
ing state bureaucrats and supporting imperial projects aimed at opening new
markets through military domination (Luxemburg 1960; Arrighi 1994). Or it
can mean branching into new domains of activity such as urban construction,
and ultimately its financing, as observed since the 1960s in the Western world
(Aalbers 2008; Harvey 1982).
   During and after the GFC, anthropologists increasingly drew from these
Marxist analyses to explain the housing shock and, more expansively, the expro-
priative dimensions of finance. This process of re-discovery proved productive,
as it allowed anthropologists a certain intellectual freedom to experiment and
mix scholarly traditions — for instance mixing Marxian, Polanyian, Schum-
peterian and Keynesian approaches to move beyond the separation between
economic and social activity (Kalb 2020). Or, mixing critical and semiotic ap-
proaches to the world of financiers to discuss how inequality is both created
and justified (Souleles 2019; 2017). Overall, anthropologists who adopted
Marxist-adjacent, relational approaches, tended to explore two key issues.
   First, a focus on relationality allowed anthropologists to highlight political
dimensions of finance. Inspired by E. P. Thompson (1963) or Arrighi (1994),
anthropologists detailed the politics that embedded class conflicts within fi-
nancial expansion. Typically, this involved mapping the material, moral, and
existential lives of blue-collar workers under financialization (Mollona 2009;
Kofti 2016; Palomera, Vetta 2016). But it also meant analyzing the patchwork
dimensions of state deregulation in arenas such as migration, banking, welfare
(Rajković 2018; Lofranco 2021) that not only forced workers to supplement
income with debts, but also generated new vulnerabilities—and informal
spaces of subprime lending exploited by entrepreneurial brokers (Palomera
2014). The institutional contradiction promoted by financial expansion gen-
erate messy bureaucratic and everyday interactions, which, in some cases,
offered fertile ground for the resurge of authoritarian (Mattioli 2020), illiberal
(Bakic-Hayden, Muir 2022), nationalist (Mikus 2019; Nunez 2023), imperial



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Anthropology, financial expansion and its relationalities                           9

(Schuster, Kar 2022) and crypto-fascist state tendencies (Maskovsky, Bjork
James 2019) – as well as a variety of anti-austerity, solidarity, or dignity-based
movements (Franquesa 2016).
   The second trend amongst Marxist-inspired relational approaches focused
on the historical process of building households in a context where one’s
place in the world was not only uncertain, but often, collapsing (Narotzky
2016; Begim 2018). These contributions highlighted how financial expansion
supercharged the power dynamics within and against households, increas-
ingly experienced as both an object and a site of power (Mikus, Rodik 2021).
Thinking about households and financial expansion allowed anthropological
contributions to shed light on the “domestication” of finance into pre-existing
social relations and values (Pellandini-Simáni 2015; Mikuš 2021). Intersecting
with logics of trusts and kinship (Lofranco 2021; Sabatè 2021), the mingling of
finance with the domestic sphere generated new tensions across current fam-
ily groups. But it also fractured the strategic repertoire that allowed citizens to
inscribe their existential trajectory within larger social groupings – families,
class, nations (Mateescu, Kalb forthcoming). Here, financial debt and credit
are often equated to formal, bank-centric channels and transactions which,
over time, penetrate local communities, fostering local counter reactions
(Mikuš 2019) or allowing commodified forms of violence to infiltrate existing
relationships (see Palomera 2014).

The relational perspective in emerging ethnographies of financial expansion
   In the past decade, Marxist-adjacent approaches have brought relationali-
ty to the fore. However, newest ethnographies of financialization contributed
to re-focusing the relational approach, and ultimately the relation between
finance and society, on the peculiar and changing dynamics of financial ex-
pansion in globalized capitalism.
   Many works have increasingly embraced a “generative” approach to finan-
cial capitalism. Systematized by Laura Bear, Karen Ho, Anna Lowenhaupt
Tsing, and Sylvia Yanagisako in their Gens: A feminist manifesto for the study of
capitalism (2015), this “feminist substantivist approach to the socio-econom-
ic” (Bear et al. 2015, 2023) challenges the assumption that “non-capitalist”
institutions (like household, kinship) are radically different in their forms of
sociality from the world of the market, including financial markets. Capitalism
should not be considered a determining structure, logic and trajectory over
other forms of sociality. Systemic and structural analyses should contemplate



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10                                                    Zaira T. Lofranco, Fabio Mattioli

not only explicit economic practices guided by the goal of accumulating and
distributing capital, but multiple divergent life and productive projects which
can lead to heterogeneous and unexpected results in terms of social hierar-
chies. These, in turn, can generate a variety of financial forms, which can serve
different purposes and mutate over time.
   In rethinking the generative dimensions of finance, speculation emerges
as a key organizing concept as it has been extended to the wider population
by the sale of various financial products and credit instruments (Weiss 2015,
2018). As a new form of labor, speculation is not just a type of alienation, or
domination. Instead, it performs a social task similar to divination or magic
as “we speculate by using various technologies of imagination [...] deployed
to anticipate the future; to stimulate its emergence; and to control it” (Bear
2020: 8). As Bear remarks, the ability to accumulate capital through specu-
lative labor is unevenly distributed as “nodal institutions”, global forms and
contracts (e.g. between the State and the market) organize speculation and
give direction to the accumulation of surplus value.
   A second key trend within the emerging ethnographies of financialization
is the re-working of the relation between sociality and morality. Works that
discuss the emergence of “social finance” showed how, instead of re-embed-
ding the market into society, a broader “moral turn in finance” has tended to
anchor the social in the market logic (Langely 2020: 131). To develop this point,
scholars have reflected on the increasing application after GFC of the valuation
technique that considers the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) im-
pact of investments. Leins (2020) has explained that promoting “responsible
investment”, non-financial factors (such as moral concerns) are used to sup-
port speculative investment narratives in a way that broader social and ethical
implications remain subordinated to the primary goal of profit-making.
   Dissecting the narratives and the practices of “moral” finance at the time
of Covid19 pandemic, a group of ethnographers engaged within the project
“the Hau of finance”2 proposed a novel approach to rethink early Maussian
reading of the debt crisis as structural and expansive features of contemporary
financial capitalism. In their readings, social impact finance not only appears
regulated by a complex intersection between gift-giving and financial returns,
but it is able to promote an unprecedented shift in the frontier between the


2. “The Hau of finance: Impact investing and the globalization of social and environmental
   sustainability”, is an ERC funded research project led by the anthropologist Marc Bright-
   man (https://site.unibo.it/impact-hau-finance/en).


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Anthropology, financial expansion and its relationalities                          11

public and private. Notably, drawing from the relational approach (Dal Maso
et al. 2022: 3), the analysis of the “moral turn” sheds new light on the reconfig-
uration between the state and finance nexus. This form of “intersectionality”
between the state and the realm of sustainable finance, is signaled by the ex-
tensive emission of green bonds. As argued, this post-Covid financial products
constitute a remarkable shift in the modus operandi of the private sector which
used to treat society and environment as external fields to capital and mar-
ket activity (Dal Maso et al. 2022: 6). Financial “value” is increasingly linked
to the sustainability of cheap and disposable resources like food, energy and
raw material. This growing ubiquity of financial extraction makes it extremely
difficult to distinguish between material and financial expansion — a perspec-
tive that brings novel life to the work of Arrighi, Luxemburg, and other critical
scholars (see above).
   Significantly, other recent anthropological contributions documenting the
financialization process and its upswing have introduced alternative perspec-
tives on its spaces and scale of analysis. However, this did not simply end up
in ethnographies of financial expansion and financial crisis from the (semi)
periphery. Instead, they frame their insights in a renewed perspective of “geo-
graphical relationality”.
   In their essay on the “Subprime empire” Caroline Schuster and Sohini Kar
and deconstruct the same conceptualization of financial “core” and “periphery”
(Schuster, Kar 2021). Drawing from a comparative observation of the microf-
inance sector in India and Paraguay, they document how the massive sale of
subprime loans to precarious workforce in the Global North and the steep rise
of microfinance industry in the Global South are two sides of the same process
of extraction of debt capital from poor households. As they show, this prof-
it-making model increasingly marks global banking and reshuffles the typical
colonialist polarization between a North pooling capital and a South trans-
formed into a site of extraction. Positioning themselves “in-between”’ these
spaces, Kar and Shuster advance a multiscale analysis that demonstrates how
expansion of financial capital is not a top-down process that simply includes
the unbankables of the poorest countries. Instead, financialization relies on a
work of mediation and translation of finance’s abstract imperatives into rela-
tions and understanding of people’s social worlds.
   Dealing ethnographically with the functioning of the big business of remit-
tances and digital wallets in Nigeria, Janet Roitmann has similarly questioned
the usefulness of a concept of financial inclusion that proceeds from North to



                                      2023 | Anuac. Vol. 12, n° 2, Dicembre 2023: 1-22
12                                                 Zaira T. Lofranco, Fabio Mattioli

South. According to Roitman this common vectorial understanding of finan-
cial expansion denies the complexity and heterogeneity of contexts, subjects
and institutions involved. Worst, it does not contemplate instances of fail-
ure for a straightforward process of financial inclusion of people in the global
South that are thought to behave according to predefined interests and strat-
egies (Roitman 2023).
   In recent anthropological literature alternative perspectives on financial
expansions have been paired with new takes on the spread of the financial cri-
sis. In his ethnography of financialization in Macedonia, Fabio Mattioli (2023)
basically reverses the common belief of the domino effect by which the 2008
crisis propagated from the United States to the rest of the capitalist world.
Looking at the GFC from this peripheral country that routinely experiences
economic and political crisis since the decline of socialist Yugoslavia, Mattioli
shows that the GFC has not been considered a major disruptive event. As Mat-
tioli observes, in an already “failed economy”, the GFC just served as another
reconfiguration of power that strengthened new elites through increasingly
oppressive relations of financial (inter)dependence.

Our contribution
   The emerging literature on the relationality of finance is pushing anthro-
pologists to rethink key global economic assumptions. Instead of seeing
financial expansion as a homogenizing process or an oppositional dynamic
of movement and countermovement, core and periphery, presence and ab-
sence, financialization is increasingly understood as an emergent property of
unequally distributed powers and contested set of relations. It is this concep-
tual and methodological approach, that constitutes the red thread of this TS.
Differentiated by their geographical focus, the scale of the analysis, and the
subjects involved, the pieces destabilize the commonly accepted idea of how
finance moves in space and time, articulating the importance of ethnographic
analysis in understanding the relational bundles and the contradictory ac-
tions and reactions that enable finance to expand. Looking at these expansive
and intrinsically relational dynamics from three marginal financial locations,
the articles make the social, cultural, political complexity of this process even
more evident.
   Based on ethnographic research in Italy, Dagnes’ contribution analyzes
the strategic moves of “critical and active shareholders”, a group of citizens
who mobilize ownership of financial instruments to push forward progressive



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Anthropology, financial expansion and its relationalities                          13

agendas. Through an ethnography of shareholder meetings, documents, and
calls, she offers an account “from within” of the limits to financialization and
value extraction of stock-listed companies. Here, critical shareholding can be
interpreted “as an emerging and unexpected effect of financialization”. It is
made possible by the same market economy and the process of financializa-
tion which relies upon the principle of shareholder value. And yet, it mobilizes
these economic tools to reach different political goals. In other words, the
centrality of the stock market becomes a political arena, mobilized to generate
dialectical relationships between financial actors and society. Seen ethno-
graphically, critical shareholding fragments the homogeneity of finance and
of its movement. Instead, what emerges from this methodological approach is
a heterogeneous set of relationships, which brings into focus the formal and
informal interactions between financial actors, media, or corporations; but
also the slippery slope of ethical practices in financial circles, where skilled
financiers can turn oppositional ideas into business opportunities.
   A similar, unexpected, contraposition between different forces is at the
heart of Sabatè’s contribution. Here the focus is on the role of the Spanish
State in stimulating, or preventing, the expansion of real estate and its finan-
cial mechanisms. In particular, she addresses the centrality and contradictions
in state policy and regulations of financial processes. As she demonstrates, it
is the combination of these policies and financial processes that cause the
current housing crisis in Spain. As she concludes, “states should not be under-
stood as outsiders with respect to finance, as, to the contrary, they are part of
finance’s very conditions of possibility”. Sabate’s analysis demonstrates the
powerful analytical purchase of combining ethnographic insights with con-
textual analysis of documents, legal proceedings, and archival material. Her
work highlights the importance of excavating a multiplicity of leads, agencies,
and facets of “the state.” More importantly, she highlights the crucial role of
failures, delays and ineffective measures. These deficiencies (for instance to
enforce right-based legislation), are not, however, symptoms of a state’s in-
trinsic incapability to act. Instead, Sabaté argues that inaction is very much a
political strategy aimed at generating specific economic outcomes — a strategy
that is vehemently opposed by leftist movements, also by mobilizing specific
political regulations and processes. It is only from analyzing the assemblage
of these different, contradictory, data sources, movements, and countermove-
ments, that we can reconstruct a chronology of financial relationships.




                                      2023 | Anuac. Vol. 12, n° 2, Dicembre 2023: 1-22
14                                                 Zaira T. Lofranco, Fabio Mattioli

   Richards, Sellers, and Mattioli take the analysis of financial expansion to
the world of startups and innovation. Through an ethnographic journey with
startup founders in Australia, a wealthy country that aims at becoming a new
Silicon powerhouse and overcome its colonial past, they detail how startups
are encouraged to present themselves as disruptive to gain financial funding
from Venture Capitalists (VCs); and yet, these same financial considerations
push startups to avoid actual transformative innovation (as too expensive,
and often unappealing to investors). Through their operations, VCs seem to
cast “disruption” as a simply rhetorical device largely disconnected from ac-
tual innovation. At the same time, the complex maneuvers that founders have
to undertake trigger profound personal transformations, which they resist by
deploying gendered tactics. The contribution thinks through what disruption
means vis-à-vis established economic practices—and how it reflects a patchy
transformational approach to the social relations that structure the contem-
porary relations of finance.
   Methodologically, all the contributions are held together by an angle of
observation that holistically catches the relational aspects of financial ex-
pansion declined in their interactive, dynamic and above all transformative
features. Positioning themselves at the point of interaction among simul-
taneous movements and countermovements, the articles show that the
expansion of financial capital proceeds by the confrontation among increasing-
ly financialized subjects (the State and households; shareholders and critical
shareholders; startups and VC). Such an interactive practice encompasses
clashes but also inaction, pretense, tactical moves, negotiations, performanc-
es. It produces attempts that, despite the power asymmetries, might result in
new and unplanned outcomes. In this framework, the articles offer an ethno-
graphic account of financial expansion and of its possibility to transform and
to be transformed. Overall, they outline a path to do an anthropology of finan-
cialization from Italy or other countries situated at the margins of the global
financial system, where finance might involve different economic sectors or
subjects and might be manifested through variegated financial processes and
products. This pushes to look empirically for the combination of different eco-
nomic, social relations (remittances, forced credit, informal lending, etc.) and
cultural values through which finance expand. Crucially, ethnography from
the margin can document how financialized relations and their hierarchies of
power can be questioned and eventually recasted.




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Anthropology, financial expansion and its relationalities                             15

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anThropoLogy, financiaL expansion anD iTs reLaTionaLiTies                              21

  Zaira T. Lofranco is Research Fellow at the University of Bologna and Adjunct Pro-
  fessor of Economic Anthropology at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia.
  She has been Visiting Fellow at the Max Plank Institute for Social Anthropology
  in Halle (financialization group) and Research Fellow at the University of Graz,
  where she carried out a research project titled “Anthropological explorations into
  the financial dimension of Europeanization in Bosnia and Herzegovina”. Her recent
  publications include theoretical and ethnographic reflection on the financializa-
  tion of everyday life, of inter-household solidarity and on the link between financial
  expansion and urban space development.
  zaira.lofranco@unibo.it

  Fabio MaTTioLi is a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the School of Social
  and Political Sciences of the University of Melbourne. Dr Mattioli has received sev-
  eral fellowships and honours, including the Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fellowship
  and a Postdoctoral Fellowship at NYU Center for Mediterranean and European
  Studies. Dr Mattioli’s research focuses on the social impact of economic change. He
  has spent a decade studying ethnographically the impact of financial speculation
  on European candidate countries – culminating in his book Dark Finance: Illiquidity
  and Authoritarianism at the Margins of Europe (2020).
  fabio.mattioli@unimelb.edu.au




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Zaira T. Lofranco, Fabio Mattioli
Anthropology, financial expansion and its relationalities.
2023 | anuac. VoL. 12, n° 2, DiceMbre 2023: 1-22.
