Week 11.2 D'avella - Ecologies of Investment

How do different materialities and ecologies play/ed a role in Argentina's economic crisis discussed in this article?

Week 11.1 Bruce Grant - The Edifice Complex

This week's readings focus on speculative construction projects in different cities in the world. Bruce Grant's article focusses on a building boom in Baku, Azerbaijan. What is the source of cash for this building boom? What are the various motives behind this boom--by private corporations but also by the government? How does the socialist experience of construction influence contemporary commentaries and imaginaries around these constructions by the residents?

10.1 & 10.2 Musaraj & Woodworth/Ulfstjrne & McGregor - Social Networks and Speculative Finance

All readings of this week discuss how social networks -- of family, kin, migrants -- play a role in fueling speculative finance or are transformed/shaped by speculative finance or bubbles. Taking one of the articles, discuss how in this specific case are social relations important in the circulation, expansion and/or collapse of the respective speculative bubble?

7.2 Fast Money Schemes and Pentecostal Christianity in Papua New Guinea

The authors of this week's article note from the outset that: "[Their] research into Melanesian 'fast money shcemes' (Ponzi of pyramid scams) explores questions of social and economic change in relation to Christianity." Discuss the findings and examples of this research as pertains to changes in forms in Christianity in Papua New Guinea.

Verdery - Virtue, Fortune, and Faith

How did changes in the morality of money in postsocialist Romania affect the rise of the pyramid scheme, Caritas? What does Verdery tell us about the religious ethos that also accompanied these shcemes?

6.2 Occult Economies (2)

After reading this article, reflect on the following statement: "I am saying we should contextualize Madoff as an effect of finance capital, rather than a bad apple, just as I am trying to suggest that el millionario's scheme "worked" by mixing development culture with "traditional" beliefs in ways that morphed human connections ("social capital") into money. In so doing I hope to transform the objects of the ugly stereotype of the gullible Maya (or the greedy Jew) into rational moral actors." (p. 216)

6.1 Occult Economies

What, according to Comaroff and Comaroff, is the connection between the rise of so-called "occult economies" in post-apartheid South Africa and the expansion of a global economic regime of neoliberal markets?