This presentation is based on interviews and participant observation carried out with financial professionals working in cross-border investment on non-listed companies in Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong and Western Europe between 2011 and 2016. Following anthropological analyses that show that states are social relations that are also produced by people who are not officially state employees, the presentation avoids starting with a definition of states or focusing on a particular state as single research object, and studies instead how, in the circulation of money that financial professionals realize across the globe, states are produced in multiple ways that matter for the production of monetary hierarchies.
The presentation addresses four practices of the state, whereby financial professionals: 1) practice states as investment objects; 2) establish relations among various concepts of states, economies and populations; 3) practice states as business partners; and 4) practice states as legal and regulatory frameworks. In these different practices, financial professionals define states differently and give them various roles in power relations concerning the distribution of money. At the same time, in their everyday practice, financial professionals combine these four repertoires, with their internal variations, making the multiple power relations they imply contradictory, fragmentary or mutually reinforcing.
Proposing a global anthropology of states, the analysis starts from global monetary hierarchies and then studies how states are part of them, instead of focusing first on social groups defined by their location within a state jurisdiction and analyzing monetary hierarchies within the boundaries of that jurisdiction or from one jurisdiction to another. Thereby, the analysis moves beyond the opposition or necessary analytic distinction between states and the financial industry, showing how their various relations, mutual dependencies and conflicts must be thought together in order to understand their distributive effects.
