All of this week’s articles were thought-provoking and well written, but one was especially prescient in the era of Occupy Wall Street. Karen Ho’s Liquidated: an Ethnography of Wall Street, published in 2009, uses ethnography to examine the daily practices of individuals in the seemingly ‘exotic’ world of finance. She argues that, “The everyday practices and ideologies of investment bankers (which have solidified and gained currency since Wall Street achieved dominance over corporate America and global influence) continually set the stage for Wall Street’s possible liquidation - and reconstitution. Yet this insight is rendered invisible precisely because Wall Street investment bankers as well as academic and popular analysts of finance often resort to an abstraction they all ‘the market’ to explain these crises” (Ho 2009: 10). Ho posits that the crises of the market are mistaken for the results of abstract, purely economic cycles, not the more concrete, day-to-day practices of those working in the actual market place.
This embodied, Bourdieu-ian take on the financial sector, and global capitalism as a whole, is incredibly relevant as we see protesters hoisting signs that decry the greed and corruption on Wall Street. Ho’s chapter made me take pause, because the protestors (full disclosure, whose mission I generally support) seem to be protesting against the very same abstract notion of the ‘market’ that Ho seeks to problematize in the first place. In a sense, Ho is conducting an ethnographic study of the folk group called The One Percent, a study aimed at recognizing the group's practices, cultural modes of production, and its place in the global schema. At first, calling this elite group a 'folk group' seems a bit counterintuitive – I think most would naturally assume that it is the 99% that would contain folk aphorisms laden with meaning, Truth with a capital T, and a sense of righteousness only possessed by the dispossessed. How can it be that the 1% makes for a compelling ethnography, let alone deserves an ethnography written about them at all?
The very fact that Ho wrote this book, and the circumstances under which it was published (right after the stock market crash of ’08), demonstrates the need to localize the global phenomenon of the ever-expanding ideology of American capitalism. Ho writes, “Whereas nonmarket, premodern economies are assumed to be embedded in social relations, markets in modern industrial society are frequently imagined as operating according to formal and abstract economistic models” (Ho 2009: 32). Ho recognizes this false dichotomy of culture and economy, something I would argue that the Occupy protesters across the nation and globe are in essence asking to reconcile. Their calls for oversight, for eco-consciousness, for humane lending and finance processes, are above all else a cry for the recognition of the 99%’s place in the market - they are asking us to realize that culture and economy coincide. But, as Ho argues again and again, ‘the market’ itself must be conceptualized as concrete and embedded in practice, not as an abstract and disembodied notion. She argues that not only should the 99% be recognized as being affected by the market, but the 1% should as well. The unlikely folk group of the 1% is affected by market cycles; even as they themselves perpetuate crises and volatility, they depend on these crises to re-produce corporate and self identities. Recognition of these very localized and embodied processes in Wall Street workplaces by the Occupy protestors would go a long way to reinforce the very ideals of their movement, namely, to humanize the capitalist system. Yet as of now, they continue protesting against the abstract notion of ‘the market,’ which is not something that they should be blamed for; the neoliberal machine depends on this ingrained abstraction to keep doing what it does best – namely, produce crises while re-producing itself. This is why a book like Ho’s is so important. She educates her readers about the folk group of the one percent, because to understand it is to understand the other ninety-nine.
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