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 III.

Charles Dolph

Thank you both for such wide-ranging responses in our first two installments. We’ve covered a lot of ground! In our final round I want to pick up more directly on what we’ve touched on as the affective and social dimensions of inflationary phenomena. In this, I’m reminded of Elias Canetti’s (1962) observation, apropos Weimar Germany’s hyperinflation and the upheaval it unleashed, that “an inflation can be called a witches’ sabbath of devaluation where men and the units of their money have the strangest effect on each other” (186). Inflations, in other words, are mass phenomena capable of generating the kind of collective effervescence in which social totalities become newly conscious of themselves and their precarity.

Seen this way, we can ask after what you, Federico, and Jane Guyer probe as the mutual constitutions of inflation and “the real” in economic and social life (Neiburg and Guyer 2017). You point in a similar direction I think, Myriam, in discussing what you call “inflation as feel” and how central banking in postcolonial Tunisia and Algeria anticipated price rises in documents and bureaucracy before they became a fact of life, thereby showing how “inflation is a measure that precedes its own ‘reality.’”

So, where does authority come from amid the ferment that inflations catalyze?

I’ve been struck, for example, by the contrasts that Argentina and Bolivia—neighboring South American countries both with recent histories of hyperinflation—present in this regard. As you point out in discussing a “pragmatics of money and inflationary sensoria,” Federico, Argentina’s current experience of over 100 percent annual inflation is part of the country’s long history with monetary instability and technical and popular attempts to devise ways to live with it (see Neiburg 2023). Linking these specialist and popular domains, Argentina’s national statistics institute has been embroiled in scandal which began fifteen years ago over allegations that it was systematically underestimating inflation for political reasons. While in Buenos Aires last year, I heard expressions of continued distrust of government estimates of inflation. So pervasive is skepticism of state monetary authorities in Argentina that Javier Milei, a self-described libertarian and cryptocurrency enthusiast, won a resounding victory in recent presidential elections on a platform of abolishing the country’s central bank altogether and fully dollarizing its national economy. Countering this atmosphere of distrust of the state was a slew of ads I saw in subways and other public spaces touting various cryptocurrencies as the way to “beat inflation.” Of course, the recent implosion of various cryptocurrency schemes lays bare that these have always been much more closely tied to post-2008 crisis easy money policies of central banks than their advocates are willing to admit.

In neighboring Bolivia, meanwhile, where I spent the first half of 2023, the situation is markedly different. Its traumatic 1985 hyperinflation, when the exchange rate between the national currency (the boliviano) and the U.S. dollar skyrocketed to 1,900,000-to-one, looms large in collective memory and monetary policymaking amid renewed inflationary pressures. Yet, state authorities claim credit for the fixed exchange rate policy in place since 2011 as the key to Bolivia’s “lowest inflation in the region” as massive billboards proudly proclaim (although as I’ve written about elsewhere, Bolivia’s macroeconomic stability has also become increasingly strained, see Dolph 2023). In one South American context, then, the state is widely discredited as a source of moral and technical authority for even representing, let alone managing, inflation, while next door it enjoys wide credibility in this regard.

Questions of authority and reality proliferate here. What founts of authority—political, social, interpretive—do you see ordinary people turning to in their attempts to make sense of and navigate inflationary phenomena? Is it government officials? Professional economists or central bankers? Media pundits and personalities? Cryptocurrency hawkers? Evangelist figures? Others? What do you think is at stake in this multiplicity and jostling of voices claiming different interpretations of inflation and, in some cases, how to stay one step ahead of it?

Finally, given the more public-facing nature of this conversation, I would like to solicit your thoughts about our positions as anthropologists in all of this. A century ago, Marcel Mauss was an active financial journalist who wrote a series of articles about France’s post-World War I exchange rate crisis for his political party’s newspaper (Fournier 2015, 209–12). But he also maintained “a sort of Chinese wall” between this and his academic pursuits (Hart 2014, 37). Nowadays, Gillian Tett is perhaps the most prominent anthropologist to have made the move to financial journalism, writing extensively about the 2008 global financial crisis (and much else besides) for the Financial Times (see Tett 2010), and now back to academia as incoming provost at King’s College in Cambridge. But it seems far more the exception than the norm for anthropologists to wear different hats this way.

To conclude, then, I wonder how you see our position as anthropologists with respect to inflation, given our apparently awkward location as generally not considered “experts” on the subject in the way economists and policymakers are and yet occupying a distinct place from the public at large? As anthropologists consider the role of an “agentive public” in unfolding inflationary processes (Holmes 2023), are there particular ways you see us, from within or without the discipline, contributing more directly to broader policy debates and public conversations about our new inflationary era?

Myriam Amri

The witches, the gods, and the anthropologists of inflation

Thank you for getting us started, Charles, especially by reminding us of the bewitching effects of inflation, which conjures the magical allure of prices rising without halt and producing in its wake a trail of witches.

Witches, bewitching

In Tunisia, decade-long inflation produced all sorts of witch trials, from blaming contraband traffickers for hoarding national currency to deploying the term “rent economy” (as if capitalism was not premised on private property rent), to make sense of crony monopolies that lead to prices rising. In the latest iteration, the country’s current president is blaming different groups for having sparked inflation, becoming “traitors to the nation.” An economy of inflation needs its villains, its witches.

At the same time, inflation’s bewitching effect comes from the measurement, an aggregate flattening the complex social dynamics behind the referent of prices and from the policies to tame it, key rates going up and down as if disconnected from the complex socio-political dynamics that link central banks, to states, to a global hierarchy of currencies and international price volatilities.

The trope of witches and bewitching, the magic of inflation in other words, provides a helpful entry-point to ask: What kind of collective affective, social panics and, what you deem quite justly “effervescences” does inflation generate?

Crises generate their iconic visual imaginaries, of piles of cash, stacks that only amount to the price of a bread loaf, or improbable prices written on boards in markets… These spectacular sights are in contrast to the quiet affects, the background vibrations of price rising. One of the things that struck me (thinking generatively of the comparison between the Middle East and Latin America) was Sarah Muir’s (2021) account of the intersections of discourses of psychological trauma (and the rise of psychotherapy) and life in times of inflation. In Tunisia, inflation, evoked through the expression “el denya ghlet” (life/the world is more expensive) has turned into a general statement on crisis, precarity and post-revolutionary disenchantments. Inflation becomes an affect that, as I argue, condenses a sense of loss—of purchasing power, of stability, of the familiar even (Amri 2023).

Knowledge and authorities; or, who are the gods of inflation?

Effervescence generates a multiplicity of knowledge formations and a proliferation of authorities and preachers. In Tunisia, for example, a kind of “folk economist” type has blossomed in the inflationist decade—an individual loosely trained in mainstream economics who utilizes social media, radio, tv shows—to explain inflation. One of them, for example, asserted that the Central Bank was printing money, leading to a myriad of rumors about the hidden printing of banknotes. These individuals are perhaps akin to preachers. This multiplication of experts and sources of measurement is strangely in line with our post-truth era, materializing in the suspicion of numbers, of authorities and the rise of conspiracy theories that imagine that people in a closed room are toying with prices.

The proliferation of new authorities comes hand in hand with a kind of existential shrug from traditional ones. In case of the Central Bank of Tunisia, I’ve noticed the proliferation of admissions of failure, of loss of control, of the unmanageability of inflation. In interviews, employees of the bank openly talked about the mismatch between economic models and the political and geopolitical shocks that produce conditions of inflation—ones they are not able to anticipate or tame. Interestingly (and terrifyingly perhaps), these instances of reckoning with the failures of models and policies have an anthropological flair to them. In my fieldwork at the Central Bank, I heard about the fetish of money—to explain why key rates sparked such intense public debates—and assessments of what constituted the social and even conversations of the global division of labor. These terms circulate, of course, in ways that befit the authorities that deploy them, as a way to deflect responsibility. A shrug in the face of rises.

We should be careful in claiming that inflation reorganizes the field of power. On the contrary it enables states and capital to control while claiming this is the new normal. For example, the relation between conditions of inflation and modes of policing ought to be further examined. At the border between Algeria and Tunisia, the differential prices across both countries were always a way for people in the region to hustle and make ends meet. With the growing inflation in both countries, the policing of people and goods circulating across the border has intensified in recent months. Similarly, moments of refusal of the price conditions leading to protests and strikes allow the state to deploy forms of policing and repression. In other words, cops become guarantors of price.

The banal, the dramatic, and the anthropologist of inflation

The current crisis has perhaps shaken the black box of mainstream economics and orthodox monetary policies. At the same time, the fault lines emerging are not being attended to, and they are not used as generative fissures from which other forms of knowledge—critical, political—can emerge. This is an essential paradox. I might be pessimistic but it’s striking to me that anthropologists have seldom been part of conversations that critical political economy—through Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), for example—is trying to engender. Even in terms of methods, the domain of the economy remains one of numbers and quantitative tools, far away from our ethnographic gestures. Much of that distance is obviously due to the epistemological divide in knowledge production, the professionalization into traditional disciplines, the imagined separation between the ivory tower and the rest of the world, and the enduring fixity of what is known as “the economy.”

Inflation has become part of everyday talk, shifting from a metric of economics to a collective measure of crisis. Yet why are the interventions of anthropologists working on these topics still at the margins of mainstream conversations? Or perhaps to put it more optimistically, what would it mean to collectively elaborate an anthropology of inflation? Prices are banal. They are mundane objects that structure life under capitalism. Prices, when they rise, become dramatic. They turn into tense social objects, sites of collective effervescences, junctures that can reorder social life. The banal and the dramatic. Two modes anthropologists are well-equipped to study, articulate and organize from.

Federico Neiburg

I think your question, Charles, regarding the relations between the government of currency and the reality of inflation and your stimulating insights, Myriam, on the relations between inflation and witchcraft link up productively and invite us to hazard comments to the last provocation concerning the place of anthropology and anthropologists in all of this.

As we have been discussing, the reality of inflation is extremely variable, which forces us to be ethnographically cautious. The realities and realizations of price increases are multiple. Despite being first and foremost an expert or technical-scientific concept, as we have said in this conversation, inflation exists in the ordinary world, again in various forms. And the numbers through which we realize inflation are also diverse in nature. I think it is an important task of ethnography to distinguish between those numbers and to show their potential relationships (Fourcade 2016; Guyer 2014). For example, expert knowledge is dominated by numbers in the form of percentages that indicate variations over time. In the ordinary lives of individuals and families who must deal with price increases on a daily basis, there is a predominance of ordinal numbers associated with the prices of certain items that serve as a reference: the price of a can (botijão) of gas in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, the price of a bowl (mamit) of rice in Haiti, or the price of the U.S. dollar in Argentina. People tend to think about how much these products cost in absolute terms (and compare them with past prices), not necessarily in terms of percentage variation.

There is an interesting line of social science inquiry on price perceptions that needs to be reconstructed and expanded: from the work of Hilde Beher (1978), Jean Lave (1984), or Florence Weber (2013) to the more recent research of Luzzi and Hernandez (2023) or Motta and Neiburg (2023), for instance. The baskets of goods considered “basic” are aggregated according to calculations that are themselves varied: on the one hand, formulas based on relatively stable weights of products; on the other hand, compositions of products that vary according to personal or family circumstances. In this landscape of realities and varied realizations of inflation and the rising cost of living, a fascinating field opens up for the anthropology of numbers, of calculations (expert and ordinary), of prices and predictions and uncertain future forecasts—accommodating, at the same time, policies and agencies that as, as we anthropologists know too well, we humans do in so many ways, using so many different oracles.

When we think about the place of anthropology in controversies surrounding the government of the economy (or the government of money, as in the more specific case of inflation) we must do two things. First, we must clearly reject the argument of “ethnographic realism” used explicitly or implicitly to criticize expert narratives and concepts—according to which anthropologists would be better suited to describe the reality of a phenomenon such as inflation because we would be “there,” close to “real” people and situations. The critique of “ethnographic realism” seems to me crucial because it largely ignores the complexity of expert views and because it places our discipline in a paradoxical situation of subordination in relation to those disciplines that claim a monopoly of knowledge and government of the economy (such as, obviously, the economic sciences). Secondly, it is necessary to radicalize ethnography by including expert knowledge as our research objects and, as I argued before, especially by studying the spaces that communicate expert and ordinary knowledge and practices.

I think that when we speak of inflation today, we are focusing on a layer of a crisis that is multiple, a “polycrisis” as some argue (e.g. Henig and Knight 2023), inherent to the Anthropocene: climate crisis (floods and droughts that dramatically affect the supply of water, food, and energy), ongoing wars (such as those currently occurring in Palestine, Eastern Europe, and the western Arabian Peninsula), risks of nuclear escalation, pandemics. The multi-scalar character, at the same time local and global, of the processes we observe has given rise to lively debates and generative ideas that are increasingly considered in the centers of the government of the global economy (such as the World Economic Forum in Davos, or by international agencies, such as the IMF) (see, e.g., Weber et al. 2022). “Modern Monetary Theory,” for example, discusses orthodox recipes for combating inflation that seek to reduce the monetary base by increasing interest rates; “degrowth” theories question the relationships between the availability of goods and the satisfaction of human needs, opening space to question the very idea of cost of living (e.g. Kelton 2020); “doughnut economics” (Raworth 2018) is an attempt to think about the planetary limits within which well-being and access to goods is possible.

I believe that together these and other attempts provide holistic visions of economic processes in general and inflation in particular, in relation to which the anthropology of economy/ics (as opposed to “economic anthropology,” predominant towards the middle of the last century) cannot be an auxiliary discipline, but must effectively be integrated with the task of imagining possible humanities in the opaque and uncertain future we all face, of which the persistent inflation experienced today in planetary dimension is only a further, and dramatic, installment, a machine for producing inequalities—a new image of the satanic mill described almost a century ago by Karl Polanyi (2001 [1944]).

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.

Works Cited

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