Market Collaboration: Finance, Culture, and Ethnography after Neoliberalism

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 politics”—a politics of intensified data collection—on 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