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- Convenors:
-
Gustav Kalm
(Sciences Po)
Horacio Ortiz (CNRS)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Lanyon Building, LAN/0G/074
- Sessions:
- Thursday 28 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel analyzes how global inequalities, states, territories and national identities become articulated in the everyday workings of foreign investment. The presentations analyze foreign investment looking at the contrasting perspectives of different involved parties.
Long Abstract:
This panel studies global hierarchies of monetary distribution through a critical analysis of the imaginaries of foreign investment. Investment itself is a multifaceted category that centrally relies on ideas of profit, dedication, and control. The anthropology of finance has studied multiple forms of investment—from short-term financial speculation to long-term plans for building infrastructures, production facilities and extractive operations. This panel focuses on the global character of these operations by questioning how the fact of crossing state territory sets foreign investment apart from other financial flows. Investors often seek to profit from territorially structured differences in the levels of disposable income, the cost of labour or the strength of fiscal and environmental regulations. Over the past decades, making countries attractive to foreign capital has also become one of the leading themes that is mobilized to justify a variety of state reforms from privatization to digitalization. As strong as the desire to attract foreign investment for economic growth may be, foreign investment flows can also be shunned as (neo)colonial domination or alien occupation. A host of intermediaries facilitate the liaisons across the murky waters that separate capital holders in one country from the place in another country where their money is used. In all the various guises, foreign investment solicits very different and often contradictory imaginaries. The presentations in this panel address questions pertaining to territorial difference, statehood and national identity through ethnographies of foreign investment from a great variety of observation points.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 28 July, 2022, -Horacio Ortiz (CNRS)
Paper short abstract:
Based on participant observation carried out with consultants in cross-border mergers and acquisitions in Shanghai, the presentation explores how they co-constituted the distinction between national and foreign with the rules and legitimacy of states and global finance to produce global hierarchies.
Paper long abstract:
This presentation analyzes how the social hierarchies produced by the financial industry are co-constituted with power relations outside of it. Based on participant observation carried out with consultants in cross-border mergers and acquisitions in Shanghai, the presentation explores how for the financial professionals observed, crossing a national border meant partly establishing distinctions between what is and is not finance. Financial professionals observed in this study produced differences between “China” and the “West”, which they defined in terms of economies, states, nations and cultures, exploring different roles for the financial industry. In a process close to what Jane Guyer described as conversion, they used standardized methods of valuation to bring together these incommensurable entities into a single price for a single transaction. Studying transactions with companies centered on health and environmental protection, the article shows how, through these conversions, professionals enclosed these activities within the limited possibilities provided by the imaginaries of states, cultures and nations and the global role of the financial industry. Financial professionals thus co-constituted the distinction between national and foreign with the rules and legitimacy of states and global finance to produce global hierarchies.
Milana Cergic (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz)
Paper short abstract:
The retail trade sector in BiH is dominated by a domestic company, one of the biggest economic players in the country. This paper discusses conflicting imaginaries of foreign investment after the announcement of a the arrival of a German discounter.
Paper long abstract:
Retail trade represents one of the thriving economic sectors in Bosnia and Herzegovina and is led by mostly one domestic company, Bingo. Founded during the war in the 1990s, it is now one of the most important companies in the country. It is active in several domains, from retail to food production, often privatising bankrupt companies, and even the tourist sector. Bingo’s mangers have created a narrative that presents the company’s success as a savvy way of doing business in a complex political context. By forging their own notion of a domestic (domaće) economy, customers and employees are asked to participate in a common effort to unite the country through economic growth.
Now, after years of assured monopoly, the German discounter Lidl is coming to Bosnia. This development will be accompanied by manifold transformations in the Bosnian retail trade sector. Lidl is beloved by many as a discounter, providing ‘German’ quality products that are very popular among the population. However, Bingo’s success is based on strong regional economic development and the support of domestic food production, providing stable employment and securities for numerous citizens also outside the stores. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the city of Tuzla, I discuss these conflicting representations and ask how this development shapes perceptions of foreign intervention and economic growth on the European semi-periphery.
Tariq Rahman (University of California, Irvine)
Paper short abstract:
WhatsApp groups are the infrastructure of Pakistan’s speculative real estate market. I explore the relationship between liquidity and WhatsApp’s sociotechnical features. Contrary to the scholarly emphasis on expertise, I show how liquidity is created through the ignorance afforded by social media.
Paper long abstract:
With an estimated valuation of US$1 trillion, real estate is the most common form of investment in Pakistan and described by critics and proponents alike as the backbone of the country’s economy. At the same time, foreign investment firms are wholly absent in Pakistan due to an entrenched national reputation for political and economic instability. Instead, Pakistan’s real estate market is what I term a “diasporic market” made up of migrant workers living across the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and North America. Subject to temporary work visa regimes, state surveillance, and racialized discrimination, overseas Pakistanis invest their money in the local real estate market in anticipation of an inevitable return home. These remittance transfers are part of a transnational economy that is five times greater than FDA and ODA combined, forming a booming diasporic market that transcends national and global investment.
This paper draws on four years of ethnographic fieldwork in a WhatsApp group for overseas Pakistanis to examine the role of social media in mediating foreign investment. In the absence of foreign firms, WhatsApp’s ubiquity and user-friendliness promise to distribute information and produce consensus about the market. However, the constant stream of data and segmented chains of information found on the app make shared understanding all but impossible. I explore the relationship between liquidity in Pakistan’s real estate market and WhatsApp’s sociotechnical features. Contrary to the scholarly emphasis on expertise, I show how liquidity is created not through knowledge, but the ignorance, obscurity, and manipulation afforded by social media.
Andreas Streinzer (University of St. Gallen)
Paper short abstract:
The paper discusses frictions between foreign investment and nativist politics centring on Saudi Arabian real-estate investment in the alpine region of Zell am See in Austria. The introduction of a “burka ban” law revealed the importance of a multi-scalar perspective on foreign investment.
Paper long abstract:
Luxury chalets overlooking pristine lakes and alpine meadows are prime real-estate assets in Austrian capitalism. In recent decades, regions riddled by poverty and depopulation managed to attract billions worth of foreign investment by selling such property to foreign investors. In the region of Zell am See these investors are mainly Saudi Arabian businesspeople who sought to territorialize assets in Europe while the Austrian government sought to attract foreign investment.
“Silamsi”, as Zell am See is called among Arabian tourists and investors, is a conservative Catholic region fuelled by Saudi and Emirate foreign investment. The frictions caused by the combination were boiling beneath the surface until the 2017 introduction of the so-called “burka ban” by the federal government. The “burka ban” raised more than eyebrows in the curious combination of huge sums of real-estate turnover, Alpine tourism, and the growing visibility of wealthy Saudi Arabians on alpine meadows, along turquoise glacier streams and in high-class hotels in Silamsi. An improbable coalition of local investment brokers, conservative catholic politicians and Saudi Arabian investors joined forces to fight the law and to secure investment, chalets, and the right to wear head-scarves.
I use the Silamsi controversy to use “frictions” as conceptual lens to discuss the inherent contradictions of foreign investment and nativist politics in one of the wealthiest regions of Europe. The case reveals the importance of a multi-scalar perspective on containing and territorializing assets in the investment nexus.