Colleagues are organizing a panel on decrypting financial discourses at the annual conference of the International Society for Ethnology and Folklore (SIEF) in Aberdeen next year.

Besides operationalizing governmental bureaucratic structures (Hull 2012), documents, official paperwork and written law structure much of our contemporary economic life. In finance specifically, this includes credit reports, loan agreements, Basel Accords and many other kinds of documents. These texts are often hidden from the larger public and can both ratify and (re)produce societal stratifications. They “unwrite” locally embedded notions of value, and their opaqueness makes them hard to contest. Cultural studies of finance have long pointed to the need to consider narratives and media representations of financial institutions and industries to critically engage with dominant paradigms of finance (Appadurai 2015; Holmes 2014; Leins 2018; Preda 2023). Yet more quotidian and technical financial documents have received less analytical attention (see e.g., Riles 2011), even though idioms describing distinct financial practices reflect the written modality (“writing off” or “underwriting” debts).

 

With the double-pronged focus on financial discourses and financial documents, the panel invites anthropologists, ethnologists, and scholars from neighbouring fields to address these and related questions: Who are the authors and audiences of financial discourses and documents? What do the latter enable financial and legal institutions to accomplish, and how do they reshape traditional customs and beliefs? How does digital technology and machine learning alter, update, and contradict the production of financial documents? And what should deconstructing academic writings be about in a case where scholars face subjects who are often more discursively powerful than themselves?