This post builds on the research article “Occupy Wall Street and the Economic Imagination,” which was published in the November 2014 issue of the Society’s peer-reviewed journal, Cultural Anthropology.
Editorial Footnotes
Cultural Anthropology has published numerous articles on banking crises, debt, and finance, including Nicholas D’Avella’s “Ecologies of Investment: Crisis Histories and Brick Futures in Argentina” (2014), Hadas Weiss’s “Home Ownership in Israel: The Social Cost of Middle-Class Debt” (2014) and the Theorizing the Contemporary series edited by Bill Maurer, “Finance.”
Cultural Anthropology has further published on activism and social movements, including the global Occupy movement, and their role in generating ethical openings, such as Michal Osterweil’s “Rethinking Public Anthropology through Epistemic Politics and Theoretical Practice” (2013), Amira Mittermaier’s “Bread, Freedom, Social Justice: The Egyptian Uprising and a Sufi Khidma” (2014), and the Hot Spot series on the global Occupy movement that included a dedicated a digital-resources page.
About the Author
Hannah Appel is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She thinks and writes about the economic imagination, and more specifically, the daily life of capitalism, the private sector in Africa, and the re-emergent dialogue between economics and anthropology. Her current book project—Futures: the Licit Life of Hydrocarbon Capitalism in Equatorial Guinea—dwells on questions of infrastructure, the contract and the corporate form, and the ethnographic life of Equatorial Guinea’s national economy in the wake of oil. She also works extensively with Strike Debt and the newly formed Debt Collective, projects that work to reimagine finance, capitalism, and economic possibilities, and demand that the tools of critical theory be tested and sharpened in public praxis.
Multimedia
Hannah Appel has recently done an interview with Tavis Smiley on the work of the Debt Collective.
More Works by Hannah Appel
The articles below are also available from Appel’s faculty page.
2012. “Offshore Work: Oil, Modularity, and the how of capitalism in Equatorial Guinea.” American Ethnologist 39, no. 4: 692–702.
2012. “Walls and White Elephants: Oil Extraction, Responsibility, and Infrastructural Violence in Equatorial Guinea.” Ethnography 13, no. 4: 439–65.
2014. “Finance is Just Another Word for Other People’s Debts: An Interview with David Graeber.” Radical History Review, no. 118, 159–73.