RESEARCH ARTICLES

Market Collaboration: Finance, Culture, and Ethnography

after Neoliberalism
Annelise Riles

ABSTRACT In the wake of the disasters of March 2011, financial regulators and financial-risk management experts
in Japan expressed little hope that much could be done nor did they take great interest in defining possible policy
interventions. This curious response to regulatory crisis coincided with a new fascination with culturalist explanations
of financial markets, on the one hand, and a resort to what I term data politicsa politics of intensified data
collectionon the other. In this article, I analyze these developments as being exemplary of a new regulatory
moment characterized by a loss of faith in both free market regulation and state-led planning, as well as in expert
tools. I consider what might be the contribution of the anthropology of financial markets and ultimately argue for
what I term a collaborative economy as a way to retool both financial and anthropological expertise. [too big to
fail, risk, debt, finance, collaboration, Japan]

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RESUMEN Tras los desastres de marzo del 2011, reguladores financieros y expertos en manejo de riesgos fi-
nancieros en Japon expresaron poca esperanza de que algo pudiera hacerse, y tampoco tomaron gran interes en
definir posible intervenciones en terminos de poltica. Esta curiosa respuesta a una crisis regulatoria coincidio por
una lado, con una nueva fascinacion con explicaciones culturalistas de los mercados financieros, y por otra, con el
recurrir a lo que llamo poltica de informacion una poltica de intensificada coleccion de datos. En este artculo,
analizo estos desarrollos como ilustrativos de un nuevo momento regulatorio caracterizado por una perdida de fe
tanto en la regulacion del libre mercado y la planeacion liderada por el estado como en las herramientas del experto.
Considero cual puede ser la contribucion de la antropologa de los mercados financieros, y ultimamente argumento
a favor de lo que llamo economa colaborativa como una manera de reequipar tanto el conocimiento financiero
como antropologico. [excesivamente grande para fallar, riesgo, deuda, finanzas, colaboracion, Japon]

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 115, No. 4, pp. 555569, ISSN 0002-7294, online ISSN 1548-1433. 
C 2013 by the American Anthropological

Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/aman.12052

556 American Anthropologist Vol. 115, No. 4 December 2013

NO ENERGY Yet by the early spring of 2011, something had

M ay 2011, Tokyo. It is only a few weeks after a massive

earthquake and tsunami left thousands dead and many
more thousands homeless; reduced factories, roads, train
changed fundamentally in much the same way that Slavoj
Zizek (1993:234) describes the sudden but utterly funda-
mental and irreversible collapse of the Big Other in Roma-
lines, and other crucial aspects of the national economic nia in 1989 and Alexei Yurchak (2006) describes the moment
infrastructure to rubble; and unleashed the worst nuclear at which everything that was forever in Russia suddenly
crisis since Chernobyl. I sit alone in my cubicle on the floor was no more. By the spring of 2011, few of my longtime
reserved for foreign researchers at the Bank of Japan, Japans friends seemed to recall, unless pressed into an embarrassing
central bank; the foreign economists who usually occupy moment of mea culpa, that they once had subscribed to such
this floor have returned home to escape the radiation. It a view. In what follows, I explore what this change of heart
is pitch dark everywhere beyond the immediate vicinity of might tell us about the current political momentthat is,
my desk, and the temperature is over 80 degrees, owing the moment after the collapse of pure faith in neoliberalism
to the governments mandate that every corporation and and its implications for the challenges and contributions of
government agency must cut 15 percent of its power usage critical scholarship. Following Ulrich Beck (2009), Sheila
to compensate for the outage of Fukushima. Jasanoff (1986), and others, my way into the problem is
My assistant monitors my every moveshe checks my through the question of the politicization of cultures of ex-
computer regularly, requests a report on each conversation pertise in risk management (Miyazaki 2012). Since 2008, the
with bank and nonbank employees, and follows up to find out expert management of risk has become a major site of po-
exactly what was discussed even in the case of meetings with litical controversy. From Occupy Wall Street (Juris 2012;
personal friends. Every day at 12:30, the entire team crowds Nugent 2012; Razsa and Kurnik 2012) to End the Fed
into the only working elevator that remains after the others (Paul 2009), to take examples from the United States alone,
have been decommissioned to save power, and we head once discrete cultures of expertise in risk management have
to the darkened employee cafeteria, where we are served become targets of new political movements on both ends
vegetables from Fukushima province, which, according to of the political spectrum. I am interested in how political
official government proclamations, are entirely safe. and epistemological crises surrounding expert knowledge
At these lunches, people keep their eyes down and eat generate new kinds of statemarket arrangements and vice
quickly. Occasionally they crack a half-joke about govern- versa. But I am equally interested in the consequences of
ment policy. I am repeatedly lectured on the failures of these developments for the expertise of the cultural critic as
United States free market ideology as evidenced by the fi- market collaborator.
nancial crisis of 2008 in ways that oddly replay Occupy Wall Along with the loss of faith in market competi-
Street themesthe traders bonuses, the income gap be- tion as the most efficient and just decision-making tool
tween rich and poor, the politicians who are beholden to (Foucault 2010:118), there was also a loss of hope for the
the banks, et cetera. When we do talk Japanese regulatory futureindividual or collective. Conversation with young
or fiscal policy, everyone insists again and again that there is regulators about their own plans for their future career
no hope for the given situationno way out of the current paths inevitably petered out with comments like, I dont
economic mess. The lights are never going back on again, I really know, or I guess I will just stay here for a while,
am told. and conversation with colleagues about their hopes for their
My assignment at the research division of the central childrens futures usually ended in resigned accounts of the
bank, as announced by the confident and brilliant individual lack of good jobs, the lack of options, the fact that their
responsible for negotiating the banks international agree- childrens future was sure to be darker than their own had
ments, was to conduct research on the too big to fail been. In the view of the regulators with whom I worked and
problemthe problem of what to do about corporations or my interlocutors in the financial markets alike, the best that
financial institutions whose failure could destabilize one or one could aim for was to forestall an inevitable decline in
more entire economies. My role as a researcher, arranged the economy and in ones own life chances.
by a longtime informant who knew of my interest in sup- This turn of events, marked by an opening up of a new
plementing a decade of interview-based ethnography with space for me as collaborator, also destabilized my critical
full-time research inside the central bank, was something of faculties. The premise and the problem of my earlier ethno-
an experiment for both myself and my colleagues: the very graphic work had been the authority, efficacy, and legitimacy
fact that there might be a place for a lawyer and an anthropol- of the marketof the zone of the private as against the state
ogist, and a question to be answered about too big to fail, over the last 20 years (Riles 2011a). One of the core themes
was in itself new. Before 2011, every one of my informants, of my work had been the question of how to respond to
to a person, had subscribed without question to the ideology the Hayekian critique of state intervention in markets I had
of the self-correcting free market, unfettered by regulation. heard articulated so forcefully by private and public actors
This ideology had animated their life work, their hopes for alike in the context of a time of widespread attack on the
their personal futures, their response to practical problems legitimacy of the regulatory state. The economist Friedrich
large and small. Hayek, a veteran of totalitarianism who then championed
 Riles Market Collaboration 557

democracy grounded in a market unfettered by state intru- explained breathlessly, to fundamentally change the nature
sion, focused his criticism of market regulation on ques- of the Japanese people from passive, collectivist receivers
tions of epistemologyon the inadequacy of the forms of of government authority into individual risk takersall
knowledge available to state planning (Hayek 1952). By def- through the creation of new financial instruments that would
inition, he argued, state actors could not adequately know encourage consumers and banks to take more risk.
the market because by the time they gathered information This was the kind of project that once would have tit-
about market conditions, it was already obsolete. Because illated many of my informants in both government and the
their market knowledge was always retrospective, it was private sector, and one offered by an individual who, at
inherently contradictory to the prospective orientation of the time of my first research, was a lion, a towering figure
planning, and hence they could not intervene in the mar- among regulators. Now, however, my informants counseled
ket effectively. The aggregate knowledge of private market me to keep my distance from this individual. His enduring
participants, in contrast, could fully coordinate the market free market views were out of favor, they told me. Nobody
in real time through the collective wisdom embodied in the bought that kind of project anymore, and so he had been qui-
nature of price. Market-based governance, therefore, was etly kicked upstairsshuffled over from a more important
more accurate and hence more efficacious. regulatory institution to a position in which it was hoped he
Yet by the spring of 2011, it was clear that the political could do less damage.
bargain that undergirded statemarket relations had changed Yet I was less sure than my informants about which
in important ways such that neither the political dangers that side to support. In the midst of the environmental and eco-
motivated Hayeks neoliberalism nor Hayeks economic pre- nomic crisis of 2011, my colleagues lack of motivation to
scriptions animated peoples passions. In Japan, at least, the try somethinganythinga kind of personal and political
old hegemony of free markets unfettered by state interven- apathy, a lack of energytroubled me. Why, at this mo-
tion has been superseded by something very different. ment of what would seem to be the resurrection of the state,
I naively search for what I might do to help at a time did regulators lack ambition, ideas, projects for saving the
of tremendous national suffering and need. Do they need nation at a time of crisis, even a sense of crisis itself?3 Why
research in English on comparable problems or assistance did this ethos of shouganaiof a disempowered, deflected,
with letters or speeches for foreign consumption? Are there defeated subjectivitypervade the bureaucracy? Why, at
any new research or policy questions beyond or different this moment of what would seem to be a rebirth of the reg-
from my agreed duties that demand immediate attention? ulatory state of exception (Agamben 2005; Schmitt 2005),
Any new questions . . . that is a good one. I guess we should did bureaucrats lack ambition, ideas, projects for saving the
come up with something, the leader of my team flashes a nation, even a sense of crisis itself? Why instead the tem-
smile at a coworker, and I realize I have said something very porality of no hope (Miyazaki 2009) and the inward turn
out of step. Mostly, things continue on, as if we were not in toward a heightened monitoring of one anothers perfor-
the dark and the heat, and as if the radiation was not falling mance of the very same mundane tasks that had framed state
and the aftershocks were not shaking our building. work in the time of free market ideology?
In the weeks that followed, my colleagues seemed to
resist any sense of the extraordinary and energized crisis MARKET CULTURE
moment, in which we the policy makers might emerge as One of the interesting aspects of this moment of loss of
semiheroic subjects empowered and compelled to act on faith in the neoliberal project was the newfound affinity my
behalf of the nation. Instead, my colleagues seemed to live interlocutors perceived between their own task and mine,
within a different time frameone of a long, inevitable and hence between the practices of market regulation and
decline, of a failure of agency, of no hope in the long run.1 the disciplinary orientation of anthropology. The word cul-
The phrase repeated again and again was shouganaithere ture was on everyones lips. Japanese markets were differ-
is nothing to be done.2 ent because the culture is different, I was told again and
In my last week of research, I met the only excep- again, in a way that would have sent the same informants
tion I encountered this time, either in government or the recoiling into counterclaims about the essentialistic arro-
marketa high-ranking official at the central bank. After gance and hegemonic orientation of culturalist explanations
securing a meeting space away from others ears, he be- a few years earlier. This time, my informants projected a
gan by laying out his admittedly impressive credentials as a popularized version of familiar arguments in the social the-
Thatcherite privatizer. It was he who had single-handedly ory of financial markets concerning the many possible forms
dreamed up, and then executed, the privatization of Japans of capitalism and their cultural articulation (Comaroff and
postal service so reviled by the Left as an example of the dis- Comaroff 2000; Ong 2006; Vogel 1999; Zizek 2007).
mantling of the state gone too far (Fukase and Tudor 2009). This explicit turn to culture, and to an anthropologi-
It was he who had overseen the creation of new financial reg- cal vision of markets, in the aftermath of a crisis of faith
ulatory institutions devoted to the UK model of so-called in the predictive and regulatory power of economics and
light touch market regulation with ex post facto laws. law is now in itself a transnational phenomenon demanding
Now he wanted help with an ambitious new project, he its own critical account. One hears incessant accusations,
558 American Anthropologist Vol. 115, No. 4 December 2013

sometimes bolstered by professional anthropologists, con- big to fail took on a particular valence in Japan. It had also
cerning the problematic culture of Wall Street, and the become a euphemism among bureaucrats for Tokyo Electric
imperative to address the culture problem has given rise Power Company (hereafter, TEPCO), the electric company
to a new professional niche for anthropological consultants that owned the Fukushima Daichi nuclear power plant and
within financial institutions as well as funding opportuni- that was now in danger of bankruptcy if it proved to be
ties for diagnostic social scientific research. Within regional responsible for the full damage caused by the nuclear crisis.
and international organizations of financial regulators, like- What my colleagues wanted from me was an academically
wise, the rise of so-called New Governance techniques for legitimate account of too big to fail as it looked to centrist
global regulatory coordination, which purposely retool an- elites in Tokyo at that time: TEPCO was indeed too big to
thropological and sociological insights into an enforcement fail; somehow or another, TEPCO would have to be saved,
regime in which states are peer reviewed and bureaucrats either by legal arguments clearing TEPCO from liability,
named and shamed rather than legally punished or fined, by injections of taxpayer funds, or by securing concessions
is yet another example of this turn away from law and eco- from bondholders and banks (Morita 2012).
nomics and toward society and culture as a regulatory force Yet TEPCO was too big to fail in a different sense than,
(Draghi 2011; Riles 2013; Walter 2010). There is a new say, Lehman Brothers. First, was it really a private corpora-
market for sociological and anthropological techniques for tion? TEPCOs actions were so closely intertwined with gov-
making sense of markets as cultural spaces. ernment policy, its employees so connected to government
The material that follows, therefore, is in essence an officials, and its policies so collaboratively produced with
account of a failed collaboration along these linesof a bold government officials that most of my informants immedi-
experiment on the part of my colleagues to produce a new ately found the category of private somehow problematic.
account of the economy and of market differences that in Its missionproviding the power to every business, every
the end failed to produce the results for which they might residence, every factory in the once-sparkling city of Tokyo
have hoped. Perhaps they just got the wrong anthropol- and providing the electricity that fueled Japan Inc., an indus-
ogist: I ultimately could not bring myself to produce the trial giant entirely lacking in natural energy resourceswas
cultural account they might have found ideologically use- such a public one that TEPCO was too big to fail in the
ful, or at least intellectually interesting. And perhaps I was way Japan itself was too big to fail, if indeed it was. Energy
wrong to resist: the new political and economic configu- was the unstated but ubiquitous backbone of the economy,
ration I believe they hoped to enlist me in describing and the crucial collaborative task of the government and of
crystallized in the concept of too big to failindeed raises TEPCO was to ensure its plentiful supply. It followed that
profound political, policy, and ethical, not to mention intel- the task of the resident anthropologist was to translate this
lectual, challenges. However, collaborations have long and difference in the possible character of the too big to fail
often unintended half-lives beyond the temporality of the problem to a North Atlantic audience in a way that might
project, and hence as a first tack, I want to pursue, as an make North Atlantic policymakers engaged in international
ethnographic thought experiment, some of the lines of argu- regulatory coordination aware of their own cultural biases,
ment that we might have taken up together, after the quake their tendency to take their own specific institutional con-
(Murakami 2003). figurations as natural universals.
My assignment to study and write about the so-called The fact of this utter interdependence of fatesof each
too big to fail problem was indeed topical since it was individual and enterprise, and of the market and statewas
and remains a central puzzle of current regulatory initiatives represented financially as follows: TEPCO was one of the
around the world. One of the widely accepted lessons of largest issuers of corporate bonds purchased by other com-
2008 among experts has been that certain financial institu- panies and banks at the direction of the government, and
tions are too big, or too complex and interconnected with the TEPCO itself as well as these companies and banks together
global economy, to be allowed to failand hence, for better held the vast majority of Japanese government bonds, such
or worse, governments must step in and bail them out (de that TEPCOs failure would seriously hurt the economic in-
Larosiere 2009). But as transactors come to be recognized by terests of those to whom the Japanese state itself is so deeply
the state and by other transactors as too big to fail, they come indebted (Miyazaki in press; Tett 2011). The ownership
to have an increasingly explicit promise of support from the structure is significant: neither private ownership nor col-
state. When what the state will actually do at moments of lective ownership but, rather, an intractable web of mutual
crisis is entirely known, corporations have less incentive to obligations.
meet their obligations (Johnson and Kwak 2011). Hence, One necessary discursive task, then, was to articulate
during the period of my fieldwork many large banks were what my interlocutors perceived as a different model than the
jockeying to be designated too big to fail so that they could North Atlantic one of how and why corporations become
borrow more cheaply (because their creditors understood too big to failone that foregrounds the interrelation of the
they would not be allowed to fail; see Cox and Larsen 2011). corporation and the state from the start and that begins from
As the human and economic costs of the nuclear accident the standpoint of debt relations rather than capital relations
began to become clear in the summer of 2011, however, too and hence of the vulnerability of all to one anothers potential
 Riles Market Collaboration 559

failure. The anthropological contribution, therefore, might privatebetween the market and the institutions that reg-
have been to show that an important shift is taking place ulate itengendered by this mutuality of debts, the state
from economic and political relations structured around alone encompasses all other forms of governance; it alone
markets for capital, regulated at the margins by states has power and agency. Yet the anthropologist might respond
intervening more or less from the sidelines depending on to Hayek with the insights of Marcel Mauss (2000) that the
whether the particular state ideology tends more toward compulsion toward reciprocity in exchange relationsthe
Keynes or toward Hayekto debt economies in which states compulsion to create and continually rejuvenate relations
are no longer marginal figures but are principal actors. based on debt and mutual obligationis in fact the basis
The desire for an account of debt as the new economic of all ethics and sociality, the source of our humanity, and
paradigm is not at all uniquely Japanese. As the popular suc- what we can return to at points at which grand ideologies
cess of David Graebers Debt: The First 5,000 Years ( 2011) fail us. From the point of view of the gift, the reimagination
suggests, the debt paradigm is now pervasive throughout the of capitalist economies as debt economies engendered by
financial world. The rethinking of economies as founded on this dystopic moment would seem to open up a space for a
relations of debt rather than capital (and, in some cases, also different kind of politics and ethics of the transaction.
on reciprocity, altruism, affect, and the like), as well as the Yet should we accept this mission? How alternative is
return to earlier generations of foundational anthropologi- this alternative to capitalism? Does the very desire for the
cal theories of debt economies for new inspiration, is now alternative among regulators and traders not suggest that
attracting considerable attention among anthropologists and the turn to capitalisms outside in some sense holds out
social theorists as well (Dodd 2013; High 2012; Riles 2011b; the promise to re-energize the inside? Lets linger on this
Roitman 2004; Sawyer and Gomez 2008). question for a moment while I turn to another aspect of the
This vision of corporations and states as enmeshed in political moment.
a web of debts (Graeber 2011; Roitman 2004; Sawyer and
Gomez 2008) forces us to ask whether a market economy is DATA POLITICS
at all the right description of the current economic situation My experience of being the target of surveillance was in no
(Riles 2011b). Indeed, when market transactors around the way unique; rather, it turned out to be one of the most
world complain that they are overwhelmed with bad debt, salient, widely shared, and quotidian dimensions of daily life
they mean something very familiar to anthropologists who for those working in the government as well as those working
study so-called debt economiesthat is, that they are en- inside the regulated banks. One legal compliance expert for
meshed in debt that only engenders further debts that can a large Japanese bank described how, in the last several
never truly be repaid. And in fact, this is precisely the advan- years, the number of government inspections, requests for
tage as well as the conundrum of too big to fail: TEPCOs information, and requests for documentation and telephone
loans and bonds have such a low interest rate and such a inquiries had increased so much that more than half his time
distant repayment horizon that they are in practice debts in was now devoted simply to complying with daily, weekly,
perpetuity. The sovereigns debts, too, have been exposed quarterly, and yearly government requests for information.
as beyond any possible horizon of repayment. The Japanese His exhausted frustration was targeted in particular at the
governments debt is exceedingly cheap (the effective inter- arrogant tone of these government officials: You cant
est rate is zero), and (unlike Greece or the United States, for refuse. When they make a demand, even one outside their
example) it is held almost entirely by domestic banks, corpo- authority, you dont even want to be the last one [among
rations, and individuals who are themselves indebted to the the big banks] to comply. If you are slow, they punish you
same debtor state (Benner 2011). Financial commentators ruthlessly. They have all the power. They are shoguns and
have suggested that Japan probably in fact never intends to we are just common people.4
repay this debt and hence that this debt defies our normal And, indeed, some bureaucrats confirmed this descrip-
understanding of financial debt as a costly, temporary rental tion of a new informational politics. According to one cen-
of capital. tral banker, the regulators ultimately had all the power they
One point on which anthropologists, as experts in debt needed because the Japanese corporation, as a subject of reg-
economies, might contribute to the rethinking of the current ulation, was entitled to no business privacyregulators
economic moment is in bringing into view a richer concep- had access to all the information about all the economic ac-
tion of accountability and legitimacy in conditions of debt tivity, all the time. They could and did monitor both sides
(Strathern 2004:94102). From a Hayekian point of view, of every trade.
this mutual entanglement of the state and the market is a Whether, or to what extent, central bank officials actu-
grave political problem, as much as an economic oneit is ally had anything close to full information is not a question
the road to serfdom, a step on the path to totalitarianism I aim to answer. What is politically significant is that it was
(Hayek 2007). And, indeed, today the deflated legitimacy of now the ambition of some regulators to have total informa-
both the market and the state is born out of shared dystopic tion in real time. Banking regulation as implemented by the
fates, in which each is guarantor of the others bad debts. bureaucracy in Japan affords a wider latitude for regulators
After the collapse of the distinction between public and to inspect and make demands for information than in the
560 American Anthropologist Vol. 115, No. 4 December 2013

United States or in Europe. But in the past my interlocutors vidual market participants were up toeither to anticipate
often saw this authority as somewhat problematicevidence and resolve problems or to catch and stop bad behavior.
that they were still stuck in a developmental state moment In such conditions, traditional lines of criticism seem
and had not fully embraced a more advanced neoliberal somewhat out of step; there is little archaeology left for
approach. critics of capitalism to do. Foucauldian critiques of seemingly
The new emphasis on constant, total surveillanceno innocuous surveillance regimes (Foucault 1979) proved ef-
business privacywas jarring to me from the point of view fective enough when the target was the neoliberal state,
of the world of regulators I described in Collateral Knowledge which claimed to withdraw, passively and even-handedly,
(Riles 2011a) in which the regulators dream was to with- from the market. But what happens when surveillance is
draw from the market altogether and bring the Hayekian no longer hidden but explicit, accepted by the targets, and
vision of the rule of law to full fruition. My interlocutors even applauded by left-leaning interest groups as evidence of
vision of market regulation was now a darker one in which the state finally doing its job and keeping tabs on financiers?
private actors had to be monitored all the time. Indeed, in the As one centrist law professor put it to me: Whats so bad
spring of 2011, I often heard high-ranking regulators sayin about monitoring? The politics is no longer subterranean
a way eerily evocative of leftist postcrisis argumentsthat but on the surface for all to see and, indeed, has already been
the only way to make large profits in the financial markets accepted as just the way things are and should be done.
was to cheat and, hence, that the job of regulators was to Perhaps, then, the conversation with my collaborators
manage the market imbalancesfirst, by catching this bad might have turned to what anthropologists know about debt
behavior as soon as it happened and, second, by spreading economies: Mauss and many others after him have shown that
the costs and benefits of capitalism around, reallocating the what makes debt relations ethical is that they are relations of
fates of winners and losers toward some kind of equilibrium. two sidestwo sides that recognize one anothers autonomy
This turn to surveillance as an explicit modality of gov- and dignity (Mauss 2000:111). As Marilyn Strathern (1988)
ernance is not at all uniquely Japanese; it also has been has argued, in gift exchange (ironically, we might add, as
recognized by social critics in Europe and the United States in liberal capitalism), the Other (the exchange partner) is
as indicative of a moment in which neoliberalism appears opaqueyou dont go asking where the gifts you received
to be in retreat, giving way to a darker vision of society har- or the commodities you procured in the market come from
nessed to the valorization of policing as the primary mech- or what divisions or politics lay behind them (although you
anism of governance (Hyatt 2012:209; cf. Wolin 2010). could and might at other moments not of transaction but
And as emerging social criticism of companies from Google of critique). In that sense, that Other becomes legitimate in
to Facebook suggests, this modality of governance is not the precisely the way in which the corporations legal person-
purview of the state alone. hood was until recently deemed legitimatethe legal fiction
Yet what was interesting was not simply the quantity of corporate personality stands for the fact that the state will
of information but the tools by which it was obtained. The not pierce the corporate veil (Riles 2011b). Granting this
first of these was massive computerized nets for day-to- kind of autonomy and legitimacy to anothera competitor,
day, transaction-by-transaction, data collection. One of the an exchange partner, an enemyallows that other to be
sources of central banks authority was the fact that interbank continually re-created, even rejuvenated, and this is why for
transactions clear through accounts at the central bank. This anthropologists exchange is the basic human unit of ethics and
clearing mechanism was a source of datacomplete data, sociality (Miyazaki 2010). The anthropological point about
not samples or estimatesabout market activity. These data data politics might be, then, that it is not the current state of
were collected collaterally to the work of clearing but had mutual indebtednessthe recent collective discovery that
value, authority, and a source of power all their own (Mau- markets are not really markets but debt relationsthat is
rer 2012). the source of our political predicament as, ironically, critics
A second method of surveillance was what Dou- on both the far right and the far left are now suggesting. The
glas Holmes and George Marcus have described as the problem is rather the way we are going about being indebted
paraethnographic method (Holmes and Marcus 2005). to one another and, in particular, the way we lose our dig-
Regulators of different ages and ranks were assigned to en- nity when we lose our opacityour (business or personal)
gage their counterparts at the major banksthey called them privacy.
daily, visited them weekly or biweekly, built relationships,
immersed themselves in the detail, made it their business WHEN EXPERTISE FAILS
to know everything big and small before it even happened Yet here is why I could not follow through with this collabo-
as a market event. For Holmess interlocutors engaged in ration with financiers around cultural approaches to finance,
designing monetary policy, paraethnography served as a sup- alternatives to capitalism, and diverse cultures of capital-
plement to macroeconomic modeling, a way to understand ism and debt economies (e.g., Appadurai 2012): in debt
the general state of the economy as a whole. For the regula- economies, debts are highly calculable, rememberable, and
tory experts with whom I worked, paraethnography served liveable, and it is this calculability that engenders social-
rather as an alternative to law, a way to understand what indi- ity. What made TEPCO too big to failand, indeed, what
 Riles Market Collaboration 561

makes all cases of too big to fail so precariouswas precisely in Hayekian competition and price as objective sources of
that the debts, the harms, the risks, were beyond calculation. information. Both an earlier generation of Keynesians and
The issue was not the move to debt but, rather, the move to a more recent generation of Hayekians had held to ideolo-
a regime of incalculability. gies that translated into a kind of actionable hopefor the
Indeed, TEPCOs debts, incalculable yet real as they market-state system as a totality and for the professional
were, made visible the utter failure of the expertise of risk caught in that system. In contrast, this was a moment in
calculation: the legal discussion surrounding Fukushima cen- which hope for the marketstate relation and hope for one-
tered on the question of who bore responsibility for a harm self as either a regulator or a market transactor in that sense
that expert knowledge said was so statistically improbable had been lost. Manic surveillance is a strategy of despera-
that it was in effect impossibleand yet had nonetheless al- tion, born out of a lack of faith in ones theories and policies
ready happened (Morita 2012).5 In such a condition, it is not or, rather, out of having to accept that ones actions do not
surprising that civil society groups on all sides of the political conform to ones theories of how one should act. Shouganai.
spectrum, the media, and even the experts themselves had What is ultimately most salient about too big to fail
lost faith in any hierarchy of knowledge (Beck 2009:33) then is that the very recognition of the practical reality of the
premised on the superiority of the expert over ordinary obligation on the part of the state to save private entities from
ways of knowing. failure plunges the expert into a kind of ideological anomie.
I began to fear that to gloss this particular debt through The too big to fail problem forces regulators and market
the vocabulary of debt economies would constitute collab- participants who had steadfastly believed in the Hayekian
oration in the uglier sense of the termsomething more vision of the preferability of the market as a mechanism
attune to co-optation. In the end, therefore, I did not pro- for coordinating risk to accept that statestheir funds and
duce an account of cultures of indebtedness; I chose instead regulationare integral to markets, and hence that the fates
to write an oblique bureaucratic critique of the regulators of states and markets are entirely intertwined (Issing 2012).
desire for culture in the form of a critical evaluation of the This is a complicated, even intellectually corrupting, thing
sociological turn in global financial governance (Riles 2013). to accept: the necessity for state agents to act in a way that
Yet this ethnographic encounter demands more than simply is indefensible according to their own ideological commit-
accepting or refusing my informants invitation to collabo- ments (Morita 2012). And yet for my interlocutors, as for
ration; it also demands a critical account of the cultural turn U.S. free marketeers running the Federal Reserve in 2008
in finance itself. when they were also forced to violate their own free market
For risk experts, the incalculability of risk is the hall- principles to bail out the financial institutions, an expert was
mark of the failure of their expertise. The turn to big data a person who had suffered this loss of faith in ones theory
to gathering all the market information, rather than sam- and by extension a loss of moral high ground about the justi-
pling or simulating or modeling, and to paraethnography as fiability of ones own actions and yet was willing to live with
surveillanceis also a reflection of a loss of confidence in this practical cynicism. There are no atheists in foxholes
prior forms of expertise on which models, simulations, and and no ideologues in financial crises, Ben Bernanke told his
samples are premised. The rise of big data as the new so- staff in the midst of the U.S. financial bailout (Baker 2008).
called fourth paradigm for research, heralded by informa- The ideological purists on the left and the rightfrom the
tion scientists as after and beyond earlier research paradigms Occupy Wall Street to End the Fed movementswere not
of empiricism, theory, and simulation (Gray 2009), seems grown up enough to face the facts.
to be bursting with bravado.6 But from another point of Ironically, it is this cynical expertise that now seems to
view, the idea that the experts would abdicate to the data have such an avid appetite for culture. How should we under-
control even over the hypothesiswould allow the hypoth- stand this? Fieldwork conversations with lawyers, legal theo-
esis to emerge from the data rather than vice versais a rists, and regulators as well as extensive analyses of legal and
profoundly humbling moment in the history of expertise. economic texts in which culture is referenced (Riles 2004,
Indeed, it is important to understand that the new 2006a) have taught me that it is an ethnographic error to
surveillance of the excesses of the market was not assume that the term culture indexes anything that anthro-
paternalismmy interlocutors in the bureaucracy in the pologists might wish to claim as the province of their own
spring of 2011 were not claiming that they had the regula- expertise. Technocracy presumes a certain degree of faith
tory answers, could plan for the future, could do any bet- in rational actorsin an economistic view of the world
ter than market participants in salvaging the market (Wap- because if actors are not rational they will not respond to
shott 2012:193195). Such a faith in the epistemology of the carrots or sticks technocrats offer them. However, al-
the planthe hallmark of the Keynesian developmental most everyone acknowledges that the rational possessory
state period in Japanese political economy running roughly individual model cannot explain everything. Hence, culture
from the end of the occupation until the late 1980shad functions as a placeholder for what is not knowable within
been definitively defeated in the neoliberal era that I chron- the dominant paradigm (Riles 2013): it simply stands for
icled in Collateral Knowledge (2011a). But my interlocutors anything and everything that cannot be explained within
focus on total surveillance now also suggested a loss of faith the dominant rational actor paradigm as well as any and
562 American Anthropologist Vol. 115, No. 4 December 2013

every possible method exploring such phenomena.7 This is are the facts; you decide. Like many others, I found my-
an essentially negative gap filling view of culture. That is, cul- self thrown down a rabbit hole of statistical interpretation,
ture is necessary, but it is also always ultimately subordinate Internet searches, and academic research in my attempt to
to economic analysis.8 The desire for culture at the cur- answer the simple question of whether it was safe for my
rent moment then operationalizes a folk division between son to go to school that day. The answer was always the
culture and economy, or culture and rationality, that an- same: Who knows? And yet, like others, I could not curb
tedates anthropology (Davydd Greenwood, personal com- the compulsion to obtain and attempt to analyze the facts
munication, March 7, 2013). When regulators or market (Morita et al. in press; Petryna 2002). This was not citizen
participants indicate an interest in culture, then, they are science (Jasanoff 2007) but the enrollment of the citizenry
simply pausing to recognize, provisionally, the gaps in their in state disinformation through the flip side of data politics
analyses. What makes this confusing and tempting for the as surveillancedata politics as transparency.
professional anthropologist is the overlap in terminology and Now, one might say that after almost two decades of
mission. Anthropologists, too, talk about culture and con- engagement with science studies, I should have known bet-
sider themselves experts on and even professional stand-ins ter than to waste my sanity on a question as preposterous
for the Other. as is it safe? And, indeed, I was aware at the moment of
Rather than take up the call to fill in the gaps in the all the ways in which the very project of this question was
form (Riles 2001) with debt and culture, then, I wonder if nothing but a sociotechnical network rigged with glitches at
we might instead come to ethnographic terms with what has every turn (Riles 2011a). Yet my faith in my own theoretical
happened to risk expertise and to risk experts themselves. apparatus was not strong enough, nor did it offer me enough
To do so, however, will require incorporating into our in the way of alternative techniques, to counter the urge for
account the newfound but equally powerful desire on the a scientific answer. This is ethnographically significant: at
part of many anthropologists and cultural critics to be part the moment at which anthropological expertise is called into
of the actionto collaborate with financial experts around collaboration, that expertise also failed this expert. At the
the cultural turn. Let me explain what I mean with reference same time, other aspects of our tool kitincluding, in par-
once again to the situation after Fukushima. ticular, critical studies of expert knowledge as a modality of
governmentalityseem to have been exceeded by phenom-
CITIZEN COLLABORATION ena such as data politics. With the collapse of risk experts
As I mentioned, my office was pitch black, but so was my toolsthe recognition by all that experts failwe critics
home: in the spring of 2011, as the government experts also find that our tools for critiquing risk expertise become
proved incapable of shutting Fukushima down, the only somewhat beside the point. And for me, the most potent of
positive policy proposal was energy conservation. At this all was my loss of my most treasured expert tool, my ability
moment of political crisis, citizens were entreated to act col- to see the condition ethnographically. I became angry more
laboratively rather than point fingers (Sakai 2011). Private than curious. I could see only the thing in front of me, not
companies were forced and individuals were admonished to the shape created by the gaps in the form (Riles 2001). This
conserve at least 15 percent of their prior power usage by was my analog to their loss of risk expertise.
turning off televisions and computers, raising the thermo- In such a condition, to plow ahead with the collabora-
stat, and using the stairs rather than the elevator. We threw tion, heeding the call to fill out the gaps in the economic
ourselves into this project with a tragic energy, as if it was models with culture, or debt, would have been absurd. It
all we could do. Each morning, the Asahi newspapers web- would have been my own no-crisis moment, my own ex-
site published statistics about conservation numbers, and, pert cynicism, trundling on without acknowledging how the
sure enough, the people conserved enough to make up for tools that enabled such a perspective were already displaced
the lost power source. Activist groups began talking about and undone.
the magical 30 percentthe amount of conservation we
would need to achieve to shut down nuclear power alto- THE COLLABORATIVE ECONOMY
gether. But in this somewhat hopeful project, we citizens From transnational anime studios (Condry 2012) to
were also enlisted as collaborators, made responsible for the crowdsourcing, collaborationworking with the Other
governments longstanding task of energizing the economy is the postfinancial crisis platform (Allal-Cherif and
(without, of course, truly having any say over what that Maira 2011:865), the new institutional and intellectual id-
energy policy might become). iom, for activity once coordinated through the market. The
The same was true of the question of defining the risks. so-called collaborative economy is one that is more about
Each morning, the government released a deluge of data the use of something than the ownership of it (Chase 2012;
about sievert counts of radiationhere and there, taken in see also Botsman and Rogers 2010): consumers share cars
this and that system of radiation counting, taken by different rather than own them outright, for example. But it is not
government authorities who reported vastly different num- just a consumptive phenomenon; it is also about a differ-
bers. The data were dumped on us on government websites, ent way of imagining production, from mobile phone apps
in huge spreadsheets without analysis or interpretation: here in which people share restaurant reviews or gas prices to
 Riles Market Collaboration 563

peer-to-peer lending, to artwork that is coproduced by ative merits of formalist (Cook 1966; Schneider 1975)
strangers with different forms of expertise. Collaboration and substantivist (Dalton 1961; Polanyi 1944) approaches
is also the paradigm of the moment in management stud- to the economy, to the discovery of networked sociality
ies, where it was introduced a decade ago as an alterna- (Barnes 1968; Blok 1973; Mitchell 1973; Scott 1991)are,
tive to command-and-control organizational approaches in in both their form and their theoretical substance, reflec-
global supply chains, e-commerce, and Internet-based team tions of the markets from which they emerge; hence, it
collaboration (e.g., Basu 2001; Hansen and Nohria 2004; should be no surprise that the collaborative economy is al-
Mahoney 2001). As a cheerful article in the Japan Times ready impacting the anthropology of expertise. Chris Kelty,
puts it: for example, has mounted a sophisticated multidisciplinary
collaborative apparatus modeled on the Linux software pro-
The more people are participating, and the more diverse their duction model, with the organizing methodological chal-
areas of expertise, the better this model will work. And because
theres so much diversity and openness, the collaborative econ-
lenge of dealing with huge volumes of informationnot
omy is all about flexibility and experimentation, and, as a result, only as a consumer of information, but as a producer as
adaptation and evolution. What were finding everywhere is that well (2009:187) and with the specific intent of producing
people have a real desire and ability to participate in the econ- scholarship that, like Linux, would integrate the creativity
omy as producersand not just consumersof goods, and are of the intellectual crowd into something far greater than the
providing products and services among and between themselves.
[Chase 2012] sum of its parts. Paul Rabinow likewise has recently written a
book-length account of his own failed collaborationswith
A desire to participate as producers. What the collaborative scientists in the ethnographic venture and with students in
economy captures is the enrollment of market participants the pedagogical one (Rabinow 2011). Where Kelty borrows
in data politics, under conditions in which the state is as de- his method from his subject matterbig dataRabinow
flated, as weak, as the neoliberal state, despite its newfound understood his collaborative role vis-a-vis scientists as sup-
ubiquity. plying a set of ideas, a critical perspective on science.
The paradigm of neoclassical economic theory was not Such projects literalize a set of longstanding method-
collaboration but coordination. The market itself was imag- ological commitments in the discipline. As George Marcus
ined as a tool of human coordination, as were key institu- writes:
tional and conceptual building blocks of the market such as
Collaborations have always been integral to the pursuit of indi-
the institution of price, on the one hand, and the concept of vidual fieldwork projects. . . . They never have been, however,
private property rights, on the other hand. Debates among an explicit aspect or norm of anthropologys culture of meta-
successive generations and political camps of economists method. The fieldworker, for example, is not held accountable or
were premised on this shared commitment to the analysis of judged by the quality of his collaborations and his ability to manage
the problems and potentialities of coordination.9 them. Yet, today, collaborations of various kinds are increasingly
both the medium and objects of fieldwork. [Marcus 2009:29]
It is this coordinated economy, and its associated in-
tellectual projects, that has slowly eroded to the point Indeed, the theoretical foundation for this work predates
of collapse. Coordination as an institutional project has the collaborative economy to the theorization of culture
been replaced by governance through data politics and itself as the dialogical invention of subject and object
the enrollment of the citizenry in data collection and (Field 2010; Strathern 1988; Tedlock and Mannheim 1995;
autointerpretationa kind of merger of the institutional Wagner 1975). If culture is understood in Wagners terms
and descriptive dimensions of markets. Here, data about as the fieldthe intellectual premise for researchand
markets become a matter of a different order, become con- also as dialogical effect of anthropologists collaboration with
stitutive of markets in a more immediate way. their interlocutors, then, in retrospect, it has always been
When institutions collapse into representations collaborationthe transformation of social relations into
planning into data politicsthen collaborative thinking be- analytical relations (Strathern 1995)not culture, or theo-
comes constitutive and constitutional; it becomes the plat- ries of debt, that is our great disciplinary contribution.10
form (Benkler 2006; Thrift 2006). It is, in other words, the One of the hallmarks of much collaborative anthro-
alternative that market professionals so desperately seek pology seems to be that the traditional aesthetics of an-
from anthropology and the humanities at this moment, pre- thropological expertisethe division between the sphere of
cisely because one cannot collaborate with others who are data collection and the sphere of theorizationhave been
just like oneself; the aesthetic turns on some sort of difference productively eclipsed by other approaches to theorization.
(difference of expertise, difference of culture, strangerhood, Joanne Rappaport speaks of collaboration as a space for the
etc.; e.g., Bauwens 2005). Collaboration eclipses commu- co-production of theory (2008:2). As she explains,
nity, market, institution: it becomes its own politicsalbeit
one that is merely a format, a platformno more stable, no I purposefully emphasize this process as one of theory building
and not simply coanalysis in order to highlight the fact that such
more foundational, than that. an operation involves the creation of abstract forms of thought
Scholarly paradigmsfrom early anthropological the- similar in nature and intent to the theories created by anthropol-
ories of the gift (Mauss 2000) to debates about the rel- ogists, although they partially originate in other traditions and in
564 American Anthropologist Vol. 115, No. 4 December 2013

nonacademic contexts. Understood in this sense, collaboration disconnect and miscommunication, of distrust and duplic-
converts the space of fieldwork from one of data collection to one ity; and the crisis of faith in each genre of expertise. We
of co-conceptualization. [Rappaport 2008:5]
experienced the environmental crisis and its international
Kelty frames the same condition in terms of a challenge for consequences as a tragic confirmation that the tools of intel-
research: lectuals and practitioners alikeand hence the intellectual
and technical conversations across the Pacific and across our
In the age of inter-, trans-, multi-, and anti-disciplinary critique disciplineshad long been far thinner and less substantive
and innovation, however, the question is raised anew: If not
by discipline, then how does one identify a significant problem,
than necessary to the current moment. But above all, we ex-
how does one become satisfied with the appropriate methods perienced the crisis as existentialas the profound shaking
of research to pursue such problems, indeed, how does one of our own sense of intellectual, political, and ethical direc-
determine to whom one is speaking about these problems and tion. One person spoke, only half-jokingly, of drinking him-
for what purpose, in the absence of strong disciplinary signals? self to death. Another stopped speaking almost altogether.
[Kelty 2009:189]
The available avenues for interventionfrom volunteering
And yet there always remains a need for disciplinary dis- in the clean-up effort at tsunami-affected sites to provid-
tinctiveness (Reddy 2008:58): ethnographic response be- ing expert opinion to government ministrieseach seemed
gins with an appreciation of the ways in which ethnographers inadequate responses to our crisis.
and their collaborators are not the same kinds of thinkers We began holding online discussions under the name
and actors; the beginning points and ending points of their Meridian 180 on a range of topics from whether the con-
shared knowledge are not the same (Riles 2006a). Rappa- sumption tax should be raised to the meaning of happiness,
port gives the prescient example of discourses of culture and eventually we built a closed, online platform where
among the indigenous activists with whom she collaborated. participants could write in their own languages and have
She points out that the confusion lies in our assumption that their text translated within a short period of time by post-
their expert term, culture, is the same as our own expert doctoral fellows. What distinguished the collaboration from
term of the same name: most networks, virtual communities, deliberative experi-
ments, or political pressure groups, many of which are also
This is not a strategic deployment of essentializing discourses to
describe what exists out there but a model of what should be,
cross-disciplinary or transnational, is that we began from the
a blueprint for the future. As a result, indigenous activists de- standpoint of our sense of loss of any sense of the proper
ployments of culture cannot be equated with ethnography. Their questions to be deliberated: we were not collaborating to-
purpose is different. While ethnographers engage in cultural de- ward some common goal, to which each could contribute
scription with an eye to analyzing it, indigenous autoethnographers their respective expertise. We were simply living, side by
study culture to act upon it. [Rappaport 2008:21]
side, this moment of our loss of expertise and, with it, our
The anthropological collaboration differs in one other perspective on where we might be going.
important sense from the collaborations of the new plat- It was a curious project. Its aim was certainly not
forms: anthropological collaboration can never be straight- some liberal idea of overcoming barriers to common un-
forwardly instrumental. By definition, in ethnography, one derstanding through dialogue; members shared no such lib-
does not quite know what one is looking foror, rather, one eral faith in the power of language or deliberation. It did
is open to letting the questions emerge from the intersubjec- not emulate the methods of another field, as does Keltys
tive encounter. The only goals of the ethnographer are more collaborative project; the method and discursive frame re-
provisional: mastering the indigenous discourse enough to mained firmly if implicitly anthropologicalethnographic
get by, enrolling necessary local and global allies in the re- response (Riles 2006b). Nor was it a critical project, a tac-
search project (Reddy 2008), or finding the truth about a tical intervention in the political moment; members shared
particular episode in local history, for example. These are no common understanding of what the aims or goals of po-
as if goals because they are both actual goals and impossibil- litical intervention might be. The project also differed from
ities (there is no singular truth; it is impossible to master the paraethnography: just as there was no agreement about the
indigenous discourse), yet as such they stand in the place of, political goals, there was no shared conception of what we
and hence obviate the need for, actual instrumentalism. Is might want to describe or make sense of through the pooling
there anything that anthropologists might contribute, from of our expertise. Two years later, the project now counts
this vantage point, to the current moment, of big data and more than 500 members and includes a range of disparate,
the collaborative economy? disconnected projects of various orders and genres, from
Immediately after the earthquake and environmen- a multilingual book series to a project to build a common
tal crisis, a group of anthropologists, legal scholars, and currency for Asia. But its wider goals and objectives re-
economists, together with practicing lawyers, bureaucrats, main as unformed as ever. At a recent meeting, members
and financial analysts in Japan, the United States, and around pondered the question of what metaphors to use to under-
the Pacific Rim, initially in face-to-face, telephone, or e- stand ourselves. Possibilities that were proposed included
mail contact, began to think about this aspect of the evolving amateur think tank, guerrilla consulting group, black
transnational crisis: the lack of understanding; the points of box theater performance, and intellectual gym in which
 Riles Market Collaboration 565

people could just get some intellectual training, side by side, 2013, the Cornell Society for the Humanities Fellows Seminar Series
with other strangers doing the same. Yet what was different in February 2013 and as the keynote lecture of the 2013 Annual
about our project was the abandonment of any explicit aim Meeting of the Canadian Society of Socio-Cultural Anthropology. I
of producing knowledgecomparison, criticism, data, and thank those audiences, and Greg Alexander, Tom Boellstorff, John
so forth. What we wanted to produce, rather, was in an Borneman, Karen Knorr-Cetina, Josh Chavitz, Davydd Greenwood,
immediate sense a personal basis for survival after the loss Doug Holmes, Richard Janda, John Kelly, Bill Maurer, Bernadette
of our tools and the confusion of our politics. We wanted Meyler, Hirokazu Miyazaki, Eduardo Penalver, Jeff Rachlinski, Janet
some way to exist alongside others. For many of our group, Roitman, Geoffrey Samuel, Niranjan Sivakumar, Simon Stern, Ann
it became simply a reason to get through the day. Yet I Stoler, Chantal Thomas, Clark West, and two anonymous reviewers
believe it achieved this because it held the ends of collabo- of this journal for comments and criticisms that substantially shaped
ration in abeyance long enough to allow us to appreciate the the piece. I also thank Alexander Gordon, Eudes Lopes, and Chika
meansto revisit each of our expert tools by redeploying Watanabe for their research assistance.
them, against and alongside those belonging to others, after
professional expertise ceased to deliver a sufficient space of 1. This temporality was the precise opposite of the future-oriented
legitimation. modality of expert preparedness described by Andrew Lakoff
In retrospect, we can say that our collaboration retooled (2007).
anthropological technique in response to the collaborative 2. We might distinguish three general periods in marketstate
turn in market relations (Riles et al. n.d.). Recognizing the relations then: (1) the period of the developmental state, char-
paraethnographic condition and the rise of the collaborative acterized by widespread faith in technocratic planning (the state-
economy as opportunities as well as political constraints, coordinated capitalism of Japan Inc.); (2) the neoliberal reform
it brought the moment of ethnographic observation and period, characterized by a rejection of the very possibility of
co-creation into the moment of technocratic-expert par- planning, in which regulators substituted a faith in price and
ticipation while remaining firmly grounded in the kind of private law rules as coordination tools; and now, (3) a period in
responsiveness that is the anthropological hallmark. For the which all regulatory strategies fail to generate commitment and
anthropologists among us, the collaboration constitutes a hopea moment of shouganai.
field (what was once the taken-for-granted object of study). 3. Janet Roitman has cautioned critics of capitalism to refrain from
For the financiers and regulators, analogously, it constitutes unthinkingly falling prey to the markets own language of crisis.
an alternative to the market (what was once the taken-for- Drawing on her own research in Chad for whom what outsiders
granted object of professional work). Our expertise was might describe as financial crisis is endemic and unending, she
reinvigorated by our willingness to play as amateursas points out that the notion of crisis is parasitic on some vision of
those who, like amateur musicians, historians, or literary an alternative condition of stasis and, hence, is always framed
critics, do not lay claim to an instrumental purpose for their as the temporary state of exception (Roitman 2011). While I
work (no matter how skilled or dedicated they may be).11 share Roitmans concern that critical thought not reproduce the
If critique and anthropological comparison served as modal- unwritten parameters of capitalism, I also want to remain open
ities of intellectual response to the coordinated economy, I to the possibility that both the experience of crisis, and the expe-
wonder if ethnographically inspired amateurism may serve as rience of the lack thereof, may be more polyvocal than capitalist
a new politics of expertise in the era of market collaboration. logic presumes. As described below, for the experts with whom
I worked, the very ability to see crisis depended on certain
expert toolstools whose failure engendered potentialities of
Annelise Riles Cornell Law School and Department of Anthropol- another order.
ogy, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853; ar254@cornell.edu 4. I do not identify dates of interviews in order to protect the
identities of my interlocutors.
5. As Beck argues, nuclear accidents cancel the insurance principle,
NOTES whereby risks are rendered calculable, because although the very
Acknowledgments. Earlier drafts of this article were presented at possibility of the risk of a nuclear accident is produced by the
the panel Becoming Corporate at the annual meeting of the Amer- calculating mentality; the risk-caused accident itself, once it has
ican Anthropological Association in November 2011, the University occurred, is beyond calculability (Beck 2009:2728).
of Chicago Department of Anthropology in January 2012, the Univer- 6. As computing becomes exponentially more powerful, it will
sity of Toronto Faculty of Law in April 2012, the Cornell Law School also enable more natural interactions with scientists. Systems
faculty summer workshop series in August 2012, the Max Planck that are able to understand and have far greater contex-
Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law in September tual awareness will provide a level of proactive assistance that
2012, the annual meeting of the UK Law and Society Association was previously available only from human helpers (Mundie
in September 2012, the McGill Faculty of Law in September 2012, 2009:224). I thank Niranjan Sivakumar for bringing the fourth
the Cornell Law and Humanities workshop in November 2012, the paradigm to my attention.
University of Kent Faculty of Law Seminar Series in January 2013, 7. In this respect, culture works here much like gender works
the Harvard Law School workshop on political economy in February in UN practices and poses problems for anthropology similar
566 American Anthropologist Vol. 115, No. 4 December 2013

to those UN gender analysis poses for feminist theory (Riles Barnes, John A.
2006a). 1968 Networks and Political Process. In Local-Level Politics:
8. I have written elsewhere (Riles 2004) about how this notion of Social and Cultural Perspectives. Marc J. Swartz, ed. Pp. 107
culture bolsters the neoliberal project, and one can see it doing 130. Chicago: Aldine.
the same here, biding time until a new market fundamentalism Basu, Ron
can reemerge. 2001 New Criteria of Performance Management: A Transition
9. These debates revolved around which institutionformal legal from Enterprise to Collaborative Supply Chain. Measuring
rules such as property rights (Hayek) or technocratic planning Business Excellence 5(4):712.
(Keynes)was the best institutional solution to coordination Bauwens, Michel
problems. 2005 The Political Economy of Peer Production. http://www.
10. As Deepa Reddy writes of her government-sponsored research ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=499.
on local perspectives on genetic variation research, Beck, Ulrich
2009 World at Risk. Malden, MA: Polity.
Collaboration in this context is both enabling and limiting, I
suggest, but is nevertheless the overriding means by which a Benkler, Yochai
heavily deterritorialized and disjointed field is paradoxically 2006 The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Trans-
given a (rhizomic) coherence of a kind, and new objects of forms Markets and Freedom. New Haven, CT: Yale University
ethnographic study acquire definition. [Reddy 2008:52] Press.
11. Anna Grimshaw and Keith Hart, responding to Edward Saids Benner, Katie
critique of narrow professionalism in academic thought, propose 2011 Dont Bank on a Japanese Debt Crisis Yet.
that anthropologists rediscover anthropologys relationship to CNN Money, March 15: http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/
amateurism: 2011/03/15/dont-bank-on-a-japanese-debt-crisis-yet/.
Blok, Anton
It might be said that, compared with the other sciences 1973 Coalitions in Sicilian Peasant Society. In Network Analysis:
and humanities, anthropology has remained in important
ways an anti-discipline, taking its ideas from anywhere, Studies in Human Interaction. Jeremy Boissevain and J. Clyde
striving for the whole, constantly reinventing procedures Mitchell, eds. Pp. 151169. Paris: Mouton.
on the move. Thus, as the boundaries defining specialist Botsman, Rachel, and Roo Rogers
disciplines give way, anthropology contains within itself 2010 Beyond Zipcar: Collaborative Consumption. Harvard Busi-
many elements of a more flexible, constructive approach to
ness Review 88(10):30.
learning about the world. These are its strength and creative
source. [Grimshaw and Hart 1994:259] Chase, Robin
2012 The Rise of the Collaborative Economy. Japan Times, Oc-
One unlikely model, they argue, is W. H. R. Rivers, whose tober 4: http://www.japantoday.com/category/opinions/
project view/the-rise-of-the-collaborative-economy.
required the development of new methods; and the essence Comaroff, Jean, and John Comaroff
of his practice was a spirit of openness. But, just as impor- 2000 Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming.
tant, the example of Rivers reveals the potentially creative Public Culture 12(2):291343.
connection between individuality and community, for he Condry, Ian
saw that pursuit of his own eclectic interests entailed work-
ing for a collective scientific project. Rivers, in short, unified 2012 The Soul of Anime: Collaborative Creativity and Japans
within his intellectual personality both the professional and Media Success Story. Durham: Duke University Press.
the amateur. [Grimshaw and Hart 1994:257258] Cook, Scott
1966 The Obsolete Anti-Market Mentality: A Critique of the
Substantive Approach to Economic Anthropology. American
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