Emergent Conversation 20

The Politics of Inflation

Moderated and Edited by Charles Dolph

To consider the current dynamics of inflation anthropologically, Charles Dolph facilitated a virtual discussion with Federico Neiburg and Myriam Amri, edited and compiled here in three parts. This is Part II.

Charles Dolph

Thank you both for such insightful and thought-provoking responses to the question of what the anthropological archive, including in its interdisciplinary engagements, offers us as we think anew about inflation. In this second installment, I want to take up a few points related to what you, Federico, call “calculative devices” that purport to measure inflation and what you note, Myriam, are certain “aggregates” (of goods, of populations, of the national economy) which may be baked into them, under the broad rubrics of geopolitics and materialities.

A notable aspect of current discussions in this regard is the profusion of definitions, measurements, and resulting explanations of inflation. Monetary hawks pinpoint government spending in Covid-19 relief bills; other economists emphasize disruptions to global supply chains resulting from the pandemic and Russian invasion of Ukraine; still another type of explanation stresses long-term dynamics of financialization relative to the dismantling of underlying productive capacities.

We need not think of these positions (and others) as mutually exclusive, and I’m not so much interested in debating their relative merits. Rather, I’m concerned, firstly, with how particular explanations of inflation—and their translation into policies—have definite effects at various scales. For example, the continued policy dominance of an orthodox view that inflation results from an increase in the money supply leaves policymakers with little recourse to any tools to confront it except to raise interest rates. While rates have leveled of late, they are projected to remain high for the foreseeable future. In this, there are echoes of the U.S. Federal Reserve interest rate hikes of the 1970’s. Among the many effects of this was to devastate developing economies, which held large amounts of dollar-denominated debt. In Latin America, for instance, interest rate hikes precipitated a spate of currency and debt crises which plunged the region into its so-called “lost decade” of the 1980’s. Now again, the U.S. has exported inflation via interest rate hikes. In another echo of this earlier moment, when surging food prices and OPEC oil price hikes were key drivers of inflation, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has precipitated a global spike in energy and food prices. These global dynamics fundamentally challenge explanations of inflation based on an aggregate like the “national economy” and its corresponding currency (Appel 2017).

I would thus like to lean on your respective areas of expertise to think more about what might be glossed as the geopolitical dimensions of inflation. Part of what I intend from this conversation is a geographical and cultural breadth that does not ignore the relative novelty of renewed inflation in the U.S. and Europe, but which also considers this as part of an uneven global process whose effects need to be specified. In our first installment, you articulated what I think are similar concerns: with histories of global monetary flux connected to the slave trade, circulations of multiple currencies, (de)colonization and the end of the Cold War (Federico), and what inflation might tell us about the spatial categories of the economy (Myriam). I’m curious, then: how have your respective geographical and historical foci informed your perspectives on issues of money, inflation, central banking, etc. in your scholarship? Further, given the unevenness of current inflationary phenomena, how do you see them taking shape in your areas of expertise?

Second, and relatedly, I would like to probe the materialities lurking behind calculative devices and their aggregates. Federico has noted that rather than neutral instruments, devices such as price indexes interact with the very inflationary phenomena they purport to describe. They perform pedagogical functions of instructing populations on the perils and opportunities of chronic monetary instability, even becoming fully cultural devices—“public numbers” which orient social agencies and expectations in time and space (Neiburg 2006, 2010). In this sense, price indexes can be productive of what you point to, Myriam, with reference to geographer Derek McCormack (2015) as the “atmospheric” aspects of inflation and attempts to govern it.

This opens onto what I think are all sorts of fascinating questions that I want to explore further. One thread which concerns the sociality of inflation I want to take up more directly in our final installment. Before doing so, however, if you’ll indulge me, I want to take this in a slightly different direction here. That is, while I find the notion of “atmospherics” as deployed in much performativity theory and its “new materialism” suggestive (see also Callon 2012 on “atmospheric markets”), a different sort of materialism informs my preoccupations with inflation as a question of atmosphere and environment.

Here, what is included and—perhaps even more so—excluded from the aggregates upon which inflation indexes rely is telling. For example, as soaring food and energy prices drove inflation in the U.S. over the 1970’s, Federal Reserve Chairman Arthur Burns moved to specifically exclude these from the Consumer Price Index (CPI) on the grounds that such volatile “special factors” are separate from underlying inflationary trends—and therefore from monetary policy. This was the beginning of what is known as the “core” inflation rate. Now, amid another surge in food and energy price inflation, indexes such as the CPI continue to filter these out from their aggregates.

This underlines what I think is an urgent challenge—for anthropologists and in politics and policy more widely—to grapple with inflationary phenomena in light of climate change. Indeed, this is now commanding increasing attention in public and policy debates. While U.S. president Joe Biden touted his administration’s Inflation Reduction Act to the public, environmental activists lamented its limited allocation for climate initiatives. Parallel to this, one of Biden’s nominees to the Federal Reserve Board withdrew her candidacy in the face of opposition to her stance on climate change led by West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, whose support by and representation of coal and other fossil fuel interests are well-known.

Planetary changes associated with the Anthropocene have prompted various responses from social scientists. World systems scholar Jason Moore (2016), leveling a trenchant critique of the notion of the Anthropocene, implicitly suggests a path for linking inflation and climate change by arguing that capitalism has historically depended on “cheap nature” in forms of food, energy, labor, and raw materials. Again, there is a geopolitics here, as capitalist extractions of cheap nature have historically flowed from Global South to North. Anthropologists, for our part, have begun experimenting methodologically and stylistically with novel ways of apprehending and writing about global transformations of agriculture (Hetherington 2020) and energy (Boyer 2019) in relation to climate change. Gustav Peebles is developing a proposal for a cryptocurrency whose value would be backed by carbon sequestered from the atmosphere (see Peebles and Luzzatto 2019).

But I see a persistent disconnect within the discipline between thinking about inflation and climate change. For example, the 137-page final report of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) Global Climate Change Task Force (Fiske et al. 2014) makes no mention of inflation, while the program for the 2019 AAA annual meeting on the theme of “Changing Climates” lists exactly zero papers with “inflation” in the title, and just one with “price.”

Have you found yourselves grappling with climate change at all as you think about our current era of inflation? What kinds of theoretical and methodological challenges do you think we face in such an endeavor? Conversely, do you see any ways that anthropologists might be well positioned to contribute to wider public debates and discourses linking inflation and climate change?  

Myriam Amri

Inflation as Feel and Ideology

The question of scale

Thank you for these provocations, Charles. To think about inflation from one’s field site or even political arena and from the perspective of climate change opens up questions about: from where do we study inflation? How do we attend to inflation as a central index of financial capitalism while also one which finds its expression in everyday material lives? How are scales of inflation activated or invisibilized, and how do we articulate them together?

The question of scales opens up an issue we often have to confront as scholars of political economy:  that of methodological nationalism. In the questions we pose and our analyses, we often struggle with the national fold as a site either taken for granted or dismissed altogether in favor of the “global.” Here I am reminded of the work of historians Manu Goswami (2004) and Timothy Mitchell (2006), who show how the sphere of the “economy” is co-produced with the national scale. It doesn’t mean we should exit the national scale but rather that we should perhaps ask, like Hannah Appel (2017), “What is a national economy? What does it measure, value, or represent? What does it do?” (294). I would even argue that global capitalism loves its national scales, which bears the question of why?

Inflation is a measurement which best reproduces the national as the natural scale for the economy and at the same time is a sign (in the semiotic sense) of contemporary capitalism—the capitalism of scalar jumps (Tsing 2000), routine crisis (Muir 2021), and wider dynamics of accumulation (Hanieh 2020). Tracing what you call “the profusion of resulting explanations of inflation” helps us see what each particular explanation does politically and ideologically, what forms of opacity it deploys, and what story about “the economy” it serves us. We struggle to get out of this interplay of causes and solutions even as critical researchers reveal the enduring epistemology of crisis—as a temporal event that will eventually end—when in fact capitalism is perhaps only a process of overlaid crises.

The way inflation is measured and the way it is dealt with always confines the rise of prices and the monetary policies that mitigate inflation as national issues (regional perhaps for the EU, although it’s fascinating that the European Central Bank (ECB) still seems to govern like the Central Bank of a national territory). Inflation is “managed” as a domestic policy, meaning it erases and renders opaque the articulations of inflation beyond national territories such as the U.S.’ “exporting” inflation to Latin America or the EU attempting free trade agreements with countries south of the Mediterranean to turn the trade balance to their advantage.

Inflation from North Africa onto the world

Inflation as “Feel”  

I want to take inflation out of its scalar articulations and ground it in the context of my research in North Africa, particularly in Tunisia and Algeria. It has been fascinating to follow the current global discourses of inflation, while in Tunisia inflation has been the site for talk, critique, policies, and contestations for over a decade now. The perspective from Tunisia outward gives us a different sense of inflation not as a sudden boom-and-bust but rather as this pervasive and gradual “rise” which seems to take a life on its own, almost independently of the possible causes of this rise and potential policies to mediate it. In Tunisia, inflation seems like it’s in the air, a measurement of a rise that is now atmospheric. It creates a sense of the world as mediated by inflation, or what I call “inflation as feel,” dominating the way people perceive, sense, and imagine what the economy is (Amri 2023). In this context, inflation moves from policy discourses into everyday talk, becoming a device for people to mediate between their everyday lives, where prices are increasing and their economic conditions worsening, to larger and always more abstract talk of “the economic crisis,” “the national economy,” and even recently “the global crisis.”

In Tunisia, inflation becomes a measure not only of economic crisis but of the failed promises of the uprisings of 2011. Against its own wishes, it has turned from a technical policy into the index of political transformations or their lack thereof. In this context, inflation isn’t only the measure for a national feel—of defeat, loss, or “revolution and its disenchantment” thinking with Fadi Bardawil (2020) here—but one whose conditions of existence and strategies of relief require transnational processes. In effect, even more than inflation being exported, it is inflation spilling (I’m thinking here with a vocabulary of toxicity to begin bringing the environment into our conversation) across borders. In particular, with prices rising across North Africa at different times and for a variety of reasons, a myriad of modes of accumulation and circulation deploy the differential of prices and currencies to receive Turkish, Indian, or Chinese commodities from Libyan ports into the entire region, buy and sell state-subsidized goods from Algeria to Tunisia and vice-versa, or devise an intricate system to smuggle contraband car oil from neighboring oil-exporting economies. As such, the feel of inflation generates different strategies of survival and accumulation which shouldn’t be perceived as outside of, but rather as part and parcel of the making of inflation economies.

Inflation as a historical and global ideology 

If we consider inflation as performative device, then we ought to trace its making into an instrument which transcends its material iterations; inflation perhaps as ideology. In the archival research I conducted on the creation of the Algerian and Tunisian central banks, the language of inflation came through quite significantly. As these newly independent states were experimenting with socialist policies, their central banks were, in contrast, already from the 1960s (from 1958 for Tunisia) the prime institution for (neo)liberal policies and discourses. In Tunisia, from its first annual report on the state of the economy in 1959, the Central Banks takes issue with state spending and developmental strategies, warning that inflation looms and calling for the economy to unfold “naturally.” In effect, the ghost of inflation precedes signs of prices rising and becomes a tool against socialist policies from the 1950s onwards.

This postcolonial focus on the threat of inflation can be traced to the circulation of expertise from Western central banks into these newly independent countries. In Tunisia, the first governor of the Central Bank, Hedi Nouira, went on a widely-documented trip to the U.S. Federal Reserve in 1958 while French central bankers made it across the Mediterranean right after independence to train North African central bankers. Inflation emerges here as a measure that precedes its own “reality,” existing in policy documents, bureaucratic training, and the structure of central banks before it is visible in the fluctuations of currencies, prices, or purchasing power. More importantly, inflation is inscribed into the institutional ideology of central banks from the post-World War II era onwards.

Studying inflation here means tracing when it takes center stage for central banks, clouding all other possibilities for monetary policy. In fact, we should attend to the history of central banks not only in relation to national trajectories but by tracing institutional models as they are exported with the advent of a new kind of economic ideology. What histories of economic liberalism, central bank identity and expertise can we trace if we suppose inflation as ideology? How do we think about the endurance of colonialism, or new forms of imperialism through inflation?

The relationship between central banks which cuts across national histories is still very much relevant today. When we think of central banks we need to think of “the central bank of central banks”—the International Monetary Fund (IMF)—and its role in pushing for global inflation targeting policies. Here too, the circulation of knowledge and expertise is at stake as most central bankers around the globe, especially those in monetary policy departments, are sent for training at the IMF, while Western central banks (the ECB or the U.S. Federal Reserve) have invested significantly in training and best practice workshops for central bankers across the Global South. In my fieldwork, I was struck by how Tunisian central bankers understood the entanglements of the political and the social as affecting “the economy.” The economy did not seem to them a neutral realm outside of politics. Yet in their models and their policies, the social would not creep in, as the economics theories and models they were working with—the Econ 101 the world seems to be under—did not and could not account for the social. The predictions had to remain disconnected from the messy entanglements of life outside economic abstractions. This seems to be ground not only for research but also for political nudging. How do we break down the circuits of production and circulation of a specific kind of knowledge of the economy?

These perspectives from North Africa outward tell us something about inflation, institutions, knowledge production and circulation, and the workings of financial capitalism. Yet I am often still asked “How can we study capitalism from North Africa, the Middle East, or even Africa?” as if there was something inherently archaic about these regions. Instead, I would urge us to foreground the co-production of capitalist processes and consider the extent to which certain geographies become prime sites for economic experiments while being erased from the study of capitalism. Moreover, this means doing away with our methodological nationalism (or national exceptionalism) to, for example, view American capitalism as inextricable from the logics of violence and extraction enacted through imperialism in the Middle East and elsewhere. The financial crisis in Lebanon for example, often depicted as a local story of sectarianism, of legacies of war and political instability, should actually be perceived as an articulation of rapacious finance aided by dollarization, the collusion between a Central Bank and the financial sector against the backdrop of privatization of what ought to be functions of the state. From that perspective it becomes a story that resonates in many other places.

Climate change and the greenwashing of finance

Finally, on climate change in a world of inflation or inflation in a world of environmental disasters. What strikes me first is the slow greenwashing of finance, which has recuperated climate change as a site from which to save financial capitalism from itself, albeit by making it greener. How do we recuperate the radical perspectives needed to face climate change?

Here I can’t help but think about the image of capitalism as a balloon (a nod to Derek McCormack (2018)) which keeps inflating and eating up its critiques in the process. Yet in filling up with air, the balloon becomes distended and more fragile. In some way, inflation in its first meaning, as the act of filling with air, offers a metaphorical and methodological thread against inflation’s second meaning as a measurement producing a certain feel of the economy. Inflating produces inflation but also swallows what unsettles it—climate change as the consequence of a certain economic model. This means that to think of the triad of climate change, inflation, and economy we can’t just turn to green finance but we ought to highlight the contradictions of a financial system that worries about price fluctuations at the same time as it produces the causes for these fluctuations in the first place.

Federico Neiburg

Thank you, Charles, for your provocations. I think you and Myriam touch on fundamental points, to which I would like to add a few layers.

I believe it is worth underscoring this character—at once national and international—of inflation. Taking Myriam’s point and putting it in Timothy Mitchell’s terms (2002, chapter 3), we might say that, when thinking of and acting on inflation, the privileged “space of calculability” is the national space (101). In tune with the nation-centric character of the economic sciences (Desorosièrs 2003, Fourcade 2010), the social genesis of these devices which are the cost of life indicators, that are central to the realization and government of inflation, have taken as their reference, precisely, national spaces (e.g. Tooze 2001 on Germany or Stapleford 2009 on the United States).

As we know, these techno-scientific devices which aggregate the monetary value of goods that are considered to be “basic,” and order them in percentage scales, were created in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, at the exact same time that economics gained autonomy as a science. Take Alfred Marshall (1902), for example. In his “plea for a creation of a curriculum on economics” in Cambridge he defended that the scientific character of this new discipline derived from its capacity to measure behaviors and human relations, in particular monetized relations expressed as prices and in other concepts such as supply, demand or elasticity—concepts which are at the core of the (neoclassical, monetarist) economics of inflation.

The concept of inflation comprises a moral substrate enmeshed in a scientific axiom in the form of theories of equilibrium, which are the foundation of a large part of economic science. To put matters simply, a (good or healthy) functional economy tends to be or at least should be balanced, with relatively stable prices. Such stability supposedly mitigates uncertainty and risk. In contrast, disequilibrium, uncontrolled spikes in prices, and the devaluation of money are viewed as characteristic of ailing economies (and currencies) (Neiburg 2010).

As I have shown elsewhere (Neiburg 2023), we must speak of inflations in the plural, rather than inflation in the singular. We can identify three principles that specialists use when conceptualizing inflation: intensity, contrast, and causality. The first confers order on price variations on a progressive scale: for example, creeping inflation, walking inflation, galloping inflation, hyperinflation. Contrast allows for distinctions between chronic or endemic inflation and occasional inflation resulting from sudden crises. It also enables distinction between inflations deemed to be “healthy,” which tend to be moderate and may favor economic growth, and those (always more intensive) negative and disruptive inflations which requires urgent action. Causality also organizes interpretations of the origins of inflation, contrasting, for example, those who attribute price spikes to monetary expansion and those who underscore structural issues, distributive conflicts, and disequilibria in chains of production and supply—variables which experts take to be “externalities.”

Typically, these externalities include supra- or infra-national global processes that are described in a pandemic key, as effects of contagion. The association between uncontrolled rising prices and pandemics has a veritable longue durée, predating by quite some time the existence of the national framework, as we can see, for instance, in the arguments of Nicolas Oresme (in his treatise Da Moneta, circa 1360), in which the accelerated devaluation of coins used in Europe at the time is related to the Black Plague (Kaye 1988). Closer to home, we might recall the so-called “tequila” or “dragon” effects, in reference to crises originating in Mexico and South Korea in the 1990s, as well as, of course, the contagion effects of the subprime mortgage crisis originating in the United States in 2008.

Stressing this “more-than-national” perspective, we must also consider the circulation of economic theories and market and money-governing devices. The missions of the US “money doctors” to Latin America at the start of the last century (Drake 1994) are a good example of the historical depth of this international circulation, in a space that is, as always, highly hierarchized (the money doctors’ missions were, of course, systemically related to the North American “Big stick” policy). The following decades gradually see the construction of what would come to be known as the “system of national accounts” which, while making national economies visible (Appel 2017), sought to construct comparable measurements. It is worth noting that, to this day, national accounts manuals continue to treat inflation as an anomaly or a distortion of the “proper functioning” of the economy, in alignment with the axiom of orthodox economic science of systemic equilibrium and stability.

Turning to Charles’s excellent question, I believe that it is today crucial to observe that the climate crisis is increasingly at the heart of the issue of inflation, stressing its global scale. In the domain of conceptualizing and governing inflation, these fuel critiques, for example, of the use of the concept of core inflation which central banks use to draw monetary policies. Coined in the wake of the US inflationary crisis of the 1970s, the concept of core inflation is intended to describe general tendencies in the behavior of prices identifying a certain stability (always stability…) excluding the more volatile prices of products such as food and energy, more affected by seasonal factors or temporary supply conditions. Yet, the increasingly intense price variations of goods, such as food, which the concept of core inflation exclude, is characteristic of Anthropocene landscapes.

Protests against the expensive life which spread after 2008, particularly in the Sahel and some Caribbean countries, triggered by the international price spikes of commodities, were to a large degree linked to climatic phenomena, especially drought (Bonnecase 2019; Samuel 2013; Neiburg 2022). While we are conducting this conversation, the last G7 meeting, held in Hiroshima in May 2023, saw the signature of a declaration against “resilient food insecurity” which explicitly mentions the effects of climate change, drought in particular, on the price of foodstuffs on a global scale, affecting, as always, poorer populations who spend most of their income on food. Forecasts are even more concerning when we consider the last Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, released in May of this year (IPCC 2023), which states that a 1.5-degree Celsius temperature rise in the next five years is inevitable, with a drastic impact on droughts and food production.

Contemporary Argentina offers a tragic example of what declarations such as this mean at a global scale. The intertwining of the largest drought of the century in one of the main food producers in the planet and an acute and growing inflationary process makes the present Argentinian drama a particularly productive case study for investigating what seem to me to be two central points in the construction of an ethnographic understanding of inflationary processes (see Neiburg 2023). The first point indicates the heuristic productivity of combining a pragmatist perspective on money, one that is attentive to its uses (and not to its functions, as established by economic theory) with a phenomenological perspective on economic lives and the relations between people and money—what I have been calling “inflationary sensoria” (Neiburg 2023), and which seems to echo with Myriam’s suggestion regarding inflationary “feelings.” The second point has to do with the need to observe complex entanglements between expert and ordinary monetary theories and practices, which, as I have shown for Brazil and Argentina (Neiburg 2006), are better understood through concepts that are closer to Bateson’s idea of cybernetics (and multiple feedbacks), rather than with frameworks mustered by concepts such as the effect of theory (Bourdieu 1985) or performativity (Callon 1998).

Argentina is going through an accelerated inflationary process which has already surpassed a rate of 300 percent per year. Debates on the causes and remedies for this disease abound, gaining traction in the public sphere in a context of high political instability. One of the few points on which there is agreement is, precisely, on the effects of the climate crisis. According to some calculations, drought led to a 50 percent decrease in food exports (particularly maize, soy, and wheat; Argentina is the third largest exporter of the first product, the fourth of the second, and the seventh of the last). The abrupt fall in the production of these foodstuffs has two effects. It is reflected in prices in the country, including the price of animal protein that need these grains (Argentina has long abandoned a policy of national stocks that regulate the price of basic goods). It also aggravates the scarcity of dollars that would have entered the country through exports, increasing the value of the dollar against the peso. The situation is the all the more delicate because the value of the dollar has, for decades, been the main price reference for the nation’s economy, as well as being a currency used daily in the country (Luzzi and Wilkis 2023), long before and after the period, between 1992 and 2001, in which the Argentinian monetary system was legally dollarized. Today, while some propose re-dollarization, the presence of the U.S. currency proliferates and acquires diverse forms. There are at least one dozen different types of dollars that gravitate in the daily life of Argentines, with greater or lesser degrees of intensity, among different social classes: from the “official” dollar and the “blue,” or parallel, dollar, to the “solidary” dollar (that serves, for example, to buy air fares with a rate of 65 percent) and the “crypto dollar” (which is used for cryptocurrency operations) right up to the “Netflix dollar” (which has a differentiated rate for paying streaming services).

Two characteristics which are common to inflationary landscapes are here revealed in dramatic and exemplary fashion: the disentanglement of the canonic functions of money (one can calculate, pay, and save using different monies) and their pluri-monetary character. Both characteristics contribute to shaping in multiple ways the inflationary sensoria and the ways of navigating inflationary processes. These multiple forms are, of course, based on social differences and in dispositions incorporated throughout the extensive inflationary history of the country, which has taught people to manipulate numbers and currencies, incorporating successive monetary crises to the flux of ordinary lives (see also Muir 2021).

One last comment on a crucial issue evoked by inflation and heightened by the climate crisis brings to light what, in my point of view, is a fundamental nexus: that between economy and life (Neiburg 2022). Inflation is a temporal phenomenon, with consequences on ways of imagining the future. Inflation and cost of living indexes variations in past times (weeks, months, years) in order to predict (and govern) the behavior of prices in the future—the indexing system or so-called “monetary correction,” which was in place in Brazil between 1964 and 1994, regularly adjusting wages and contracts according to the cost-of-living index in the preceding period is an example of this (Neiburg 2011). The mismatch between the prices of the economy, the persistent devaluation of national currencies, and the increase in the cost of living make hazy the imagination of personal and collective futures. The climate crisis adds a further layer of haziness to what Adriana Petryna (2022) call “horizoning,” shuffling certainties and theories of what is known and unknown, whether in the specialist sphere or in the day-to-day lives of ordinary people. These layers of meaning and practice situated in an uncertain temporality are also part of inflation as a public issue, in the double sense of the term (as noted by Fassin 2016) of politicizing and popularizing the issue, in controversies involving specialists and in protests against the rise in the cost of living and the expensive life, thus bring to the core of debates these always, and as yet largely unexplored by anthropology, tense nexuses between life and economy.

Charles Dolph received his PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 2022. His dissertation, titled “The Cultural Battle Against the Dollar: Struggles over Hoarding and Democracy in the Twilight of Argentina’s Soy Boom,” examines state monetary policies and their legal entailments against the backdrop of the Argentina’s material transformation into a major producer and exporter of soybeans and ongoing debates over its post-Cold War democratic transition. He is currently a Research Fellow in the Anthropology Department at University College London, where he is researching a new wealth tax introduced in Bolivia in 2020.

Federico Neiburg is a professor of Social Anthropology at the National Museum, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, a principal researcher at the Brazilian and Rio de Janeiro Research Councils (CNPq and FAPERJ), and founder of the Center for Research in Culture and Economics (www.nucec.net). He has research experience in Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and the Republic of Haiti. His interests have focused on the anthropology of economy and money, economic emergencies and crises, inflation and monetary disequilibria. In addition to editing special issues and publishing articles in journals such as Comparative Studies in Society and History; Cultural Anthropology; Anthropological Theory; Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory; International Sociology; Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales; Genèses: Sciences sociales et histoire; Mana: Estudos de Antropologia Social; Etnográfica; and Social Anthropology, his more recent publications include the volumes The Real Economy: Essays in Ethnographic Theory (ed. with Jane Guyer), The Cultural History of Money in the Age of Empires (ed. with Nigel Dodd), and Conversas etnográficas haitianas.

Myriam Amri is completing her PhD in the joint degree in Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. Her scholarship investigates the articulations between money, the economy, and global capitalism from North Africa. Through ethnographic, multimodal, and archival research, her dissertation examines the making of Tunisia’s official currency – its institutions and policies – in relation to its subversions – the informal, illicit, and illegal. In addition, she has published on border economies, inflation, environmental degradation, photography and visual methods, and the colonial histories of fire and coral in the Mediterranean. Her recent writings have appeared in Anthropology of the Middle East, NiCHE, and Kohl Journal. She is also a filmmaker and visual artist and her related creative practice explores crises and dystopias using film, photography, and sound.

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