Focaal

The people of Ceuta see their town as an exemplary model of coexistence between Christians, Muslims, Jews, and Hindus. This “convivencia” is described as the brainchild of their mayor-president, who funds clients to enact his charismatic vision. Anthropology is sensitive to the moral ambiguities of patron–client relations but has overlooked the role of charisma in the reproduction of patronage. This article explores the theoretical and political implications of a process by which convivencia-patronage becomes seen as the extension of the patron's charisma. Obscuring the historical dimensions of power, charisma blocks nuanced discussion toward the colonial legacy of convivencia as a way of controlling suspect minorities. It prevents change by channeling resistance toward the removal of the mayor-president, not the structures that enabled his rise.

Despite a history of labor militancy in past decades, Nepal's large construction sector remains unorganized and lacks social protection, prompted by high levels of informality. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among construction laborers in Kathmandu, this article argues that labor subsumption to capital in the construction industry takes place through a systemization of expertise through which access to work is negotiated. I show how this “culture of informality” shapes labor relations and creates a semblance of transparency and justice in otherwise chaotic and fiercely competitive labor communities. Drawing on concepts from political and urban anthropology to probe how informality indexes forms of power, I argue that authority and status become distributed through processes of distinction and thereby extend and deepen inequalities permeating contemporary industrial relations.

With the use of financial technologies to address social and environmental problems, the global finance industry now has a new proclaimed moral aim. While impact and sustainable and climate finance are promising new frontiers for the management of social and environmental public concerns, a closer scrutiny reveals a more complex picture than the industry's surface narratives. Here, new forms of finance extraction legitimize the reproduction of old power hierarchies. We explore the historical trajectory of financial moralities, situating these within the history of capitalism. This special section explores the articulation of a growing sustainability–finance nexus across intersecting institutional, political, and cultural contexts. The contributions included document ethnographically how emergent preoccupations about concrete environmental and social outcomes generate new kinds of financial products, transactions, and financial subjectivities.

 Sustainable finance is generally understood as the integration of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) considerations into the investment process. Based on participant observation of sustainable finance and impact investing conferences between 2015 and 2020, and a series of interviews with the sustainability team and several portfolio managers at a large European bank in 2018 and 2019, I show how the compulsion to define and measure sustainability indicators reflects the emergence of the market itself as an ethical subject, one that is capable of making the most efficient, and thus the most ethical, decisions. This has implications for ethical intersubjectivity in sustainability more broadly. I situate this claim alongside recent work in anthropology and geography on the translation of social and environmental values into financial values, as well as on work in the anthropology of ethics and its intersection with the anthropology of finance.

 Climate finance has grown rapidly. What does this mean for people who construct careers in finance that leverage expertise to frame sustainability and climate change as investment decisions? What do their identities mean for the markets they create? This article examines how the careers of climate finance professionals impact them both as professionals and as people. I examine what climate action and impact mean in their decision-making. I find that practitioners interpret their careers around pivotal decisions that brought them into climate finance. This moralistic decision-making embedded in practitioner biographies highlights the effect of a particular ethical field in climate finance. In producing climate finance instruments through performative and data work, people transform into climate finance professionals.

 The article examines the first Chinese green bond issued in Europe to explore how a green bond is created and how it can be issued across boundaries. Raising questions of “green” valuation at multiple scales, it follows the way the bond's proceeds hit the ground in Portugal, refinancing wind farms previously built under a Feed in Tariff (FiT) regime. It shows how if on the one hand green bonds are designed as abstract and fungible instruments, then on the other they are spatially situated and predicated upon the larger dynamic of global financial accumulation with its recurrent and contingent crises. In this context, the rush over renewables intersects with expansive Chinese financial monetary policy and the EU austerity process.

 A recurring theme in academic, moralizing, and religious discourses laments the individual and societal perils of debt and praises equity. Contemporary Islamic banking and finance is one conspicuous example. This article recontextualizes this conversation by demonstrating that since the 1980s financial practitioners have been interpreting debt and equity as increasingly illegible cognitive schemas that nonetheless retain their historical and moral connotations. This line of argumentation suggests that normatively contrasting debt and equity is a red herring—a literary device and theoretical construct that misleads and distracts from the fundamental discussion of what constitutes salubrious or odious finance. Little will change in social life if we seek to replace “debt” with “equity.” Rather, since all financial instruments describe social relationships, our conversation should turn to normatively proscribing the kinds of financial instruments that match our normative values for contractual relationships.

Focaal's recent Forum discussion, prompted by Jan Newberry and Rachel Rosen's (2020) “Women and children together and apart: Finding the time for social reproduction theory,” takes a fresh view on finance capitalism by foregrounding its unlikeliest of actors: children. Children usually feature in scholarship as objects of care and investment in future goals that are not their own, rather than as the active building blocks of society. Indeed, their very positioning as children implies their non-agency. The authors in this Forum offer alternative understandings of children's agency, and of the price of its retraction, as a lens into the workings of contemporary capitalism.

Marek Mikuš. Frontiers of civil society: Government and hegemony in Serbia. New York: Berghahn Books, 2018.

Theodora Vetta. Democracy struggles: NGOs and the politics of aid in Serbia. New York: Berghahn Books, 2019.