Resumen de Econography: Observing Expert Capitalism
In recent years anthropologists have increasingly conducted fieldwork among economic agents and on financial practices that would have seemed foreign to our predecessors of just a generation ago. This work can be broadly categorized as the analysis of expert capitalism. Expert capitalism is the knowledge-intensive, abstract, and often technical pursuit of profit. Anthropologists conducting such research have produced germinal insights regarding the contingent factors that make up expert capitalism, the key role of representations, language, and narrative in constituting the object referred to as an economy, and the unstated assumptions that frame the actions of expert capitalists. However, there have been as yet few systematic reflections regarding how to conceptualize expert capitalist fields and objects in such a way as to make them amenable to empirical, anthropological analysis. This article seeks to develop the anthropological documentation and analysis of expert capitalism by outlining a set of strategies useful in facilitating such research. These strategies fall under the rubrics of (1) mesoanalysis, (2) institutionalization, (3) reflexive practice and problematization, (4) subjectification, and (5) representations as economic facts. The article concludes that, taken together, these strategies constitute what might be termed econography: a mode of analysis suited to analysis of and writing about expert capitalism.
