An Anthropologist on Wall Street

If you thought anthropology was confined to the study of some obscure tribe of the Amazon rainforest, Karen Ho wants to teach you otherwise. Her academic target—the investment tribes (AKA banks) of Wall Street—has been anything but obscure in the past year.

Ho is an associate professor in the University of Minnesota’s anthropology department whose first book, Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street, is due out from Duke University Press in July. She was a graduate student in anthropology at Princeton when she detoured into a job at Banker’s Trust (now part of Deutsche Bank) in New York in the mid-1990s. Ho worked there as an internal management consultant for a year, then returned to academic pursuits. But she also pursued questions raised by her Wall Street experience, completing additional field work on the culture of high finance from 1998 to 2000. Her PhD dissertation is the foundation of her book.

Ethnography is a branch of anthropology focused on the scientific description of an individual culture. Ho delineates a Wall Street culture of “liquidity”—an extreme meritocracy where the results of the moment are all that matter—that “reshaped corporate America in its own image” and ultimately led to economic crisis.

What makes your book an anthropology book?

What anthropology means is that you want to understand a particular set of ideas, communities, a set of events. You have to immerse yourself among the people and practices and in the language of what you’re attempting to understand.

Second, you have to understand these phenomena not as naturalized events—not as events that occur without a time and a place—but as deeply cultural events . . . . Social, historical, cultural, and political contexts matter, as do power relationships.

What’s your central theme?

It’s a cultural approach to markets. Instead of saying that what happens on Wall Street, or what happens in corporate America, is the just the result of national emotions or just the result of natural market cycles, it’s actually a result of concrete decisions and concrete cultural practices from people with quite a bit of influence writ large.

The crucial takeaway is that the cultural practices of Wall Street investment banks, in the name of shareholder value, enact massive corporate restructuring, and often also promote and instigate financial market crises.

You focus on the people of Wall Street.

Part of what empowers Wall Street investment bankers to seem quite righteous in their advice is that they have been able to create, through recruitment at only the most elite universities, what might be called a ‘halo effect’ or a ‘culture of smartness’—a pinnacle status where investment bankers are the best and the brightest. And as such, what they say about the market must be believed. As such, outrageous compensation schemes are rationalized.