----- Original Message -----
From: "Steve Diamond" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Ian,
>
> Really, you can't back down now... you were the one who introduced
the piece
> by referring to "reconstruction", after all.
=====
What? No playful provacativeness in the headers anymore? :-)
Your beef is with him not me. Just because I post a piece doesn't mean
I agree with it. Like when I post Alan Greenspan or something from the
NYT.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Bill Maurer
Position Associate Professor , Dept. of Anthropology
Degrees Ph.D. Stanford University
M.A. Stanford University
Distinctions Distinguished Assistant Professor Award for Research,
1998; Teaching Assistant Development Award, 1999; Distinguished
Assistant Professor Award for Teaching, 2000
Keywords anthropology of law; globalization; Caribbean; anthropology
of money and finance; gender and kinship
Research
Summary My research concerns the power of law and legal institutions
to shape cultural realities. My first project investigated how British
Virgin Islanders craft notions of identity in terms of legal
categories of belonging and citizenship, and use those notions of
identity to imagine intractable differences between themselves and
immigrants from other Caribbean places. The British Virgin Islands,
like many other small states, is a tax haven, and as I became
interested in the cultural ramifications of offshore finance, I
developed a second research project. In this work, supported by a
grant from the National Science Foundation (SBR-9818258), I bring
anthropological analyses of cultural forms to bear on the world of
finance -- an area often assumed to be bereft of cultural content. The
project investigates alternatives to financial globalization that seek
to rewrite the cultural scripts of finance from the ground up. These
include alternative currency movements in the US, digital cash or
e-cash efforts of banking and computer companies, and Islamic banking.
I am interested in what happens when people seek to redefine (or
undermine) some of the taken-for-granted cultural terms of finance --
terms like "money," "property," "capital," "interest" and so forth --
that are our "native" categories and that we rarely subject to
cultural analysis.
