Dr. Julia Elyachar, Professor of Anthropology, Princeton
A Doll Lecture on Religion and Money. In-person attendance at Robertson Hall 002, and Virtual attendance via Zoom (register).
Abstract
“Finance is classically thought of as abstract and devoid of cultural characteristics or social ties. As such, until recently, there was little research on finance by anthropologists, who focused on regions and cultures that were considered ‘primitive’ in civilizational logics. After the 2008 financial crisis, anthropologists turned more to study of finance, and yet the focus remained on western financial institutions and trading rooms. In this talk, I point to dynamism in finance in parts of the world that nineteenth century law called ‘semicivilized’—not primitive, not colonized, and yet definitely not ‘civilized.’ Drawing on methods of historical anthropology, I revisit the case of the Ottoman sarraf—a term usually translated as money changer, banker, or broker. The sarraf was a key part of political order in the Ottoman as well as Mughal Empires, and is usually read as a ‘pre-modern’ character that disappeared with the rise of ‘real’ banks in the mid-nineteenth century. Such an approach renders the Ottoman financial infrastructures of which the sarraf was a key part somehow ethnographic, local, particular, and exotic. But the sarraf was a node of global financial infrastructures in the ‘civilized’ west as well. From this approach, the sarraf reappears as a node in what economist Perry Mehrling calls, with reference to finance in general when examined from what he calls the ‘money-view,’ an extended ‘web of time-dated promises to pay that stretches from now into the future, and from here around the globe’ (Mehrling 2017).”