Actually Nik I have a short statement of my position pasted in below.
One evening about a decade ago I found myself at a dinner party seated next to a former-central banker. He asked what the Hell is an anthropologist doing in a central bank? I answered something like this:
I was investigating ethnographically a series of ongoing experiments by which officials working in five central banks—the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, the Bank of England, the Riksbank, the Bundesbank, and the European Central Bank—endow money with decisive linguistic, communicative, and relational dynamics.
These experiments which were first designed in New Zealand go by the prosaic name of ‘inflation targeting.’
He asked me to elaborate.
I am interested in how central bankers seek to endow the future with discernible features that we—members of the public—can reflect and act upon, animating or curtailing our propensities to produce, consume, borrow, and lend.
They, central bankers, rather than predicting the future, seek to create elements of a tractable future. They do this with words. They use language to explore, promulgate, and sustain the ideas that animate our economic future, as well as the structures of feeling, the sentiments, expectations, and desires that make them real. (Holmes 2018, 85).
Central bankers create and enter, as it were, a communicative field in which countless protagonists, that is you and I, model economic phenomenon for our own purposes, employing our own pragmatic insights and grounded truths.
These officials are thus confronted with actors whose futures are enlivened by just about every emotional sensibility, every constellation of thought and belief, reason and unreason, rationality and irrationality, as well as every human proclivity to create truth, untruth, virtue, beauty, and depravity (Bronk 2009; Rudnyckyj 2014).
The stories told and embraced by these unruly figurers, these protagonists, can impel or impede the leaps of faith that ratify or foreclose a tractable future (Beckert 2016, 263).
The efficacy of monetary policy thus rests on the representational enterprise of members of the public with whom central bankers must orchestrate prospectively the contingencies of economic stability and growth (Holmes 2018, 85).
I thus sought to elucidate how central bankers relate to the public and not solely or necessarily to the market. And crucially, how members of the public are not merely served by monetary policy, they enact it.
In other words, I have demonstrated how distinctive forms of communication and relational knowledge underwrite domains of monetary affairs. I asked how and why markets operate as a function of language, as an expansive economy of words?
Over the course of two decades I have shown that at the limits of calculation and measurement markets operate as discursive phenomena available to us ethnographically. I further demonstrated how we, members of a self-organizing ‘agentive public,’ become by virtue of these communications protagonists and antagonists in a global monetary drama
Geithner expressed surprise and what I took to be approval of my answer as did several other senior central bankers on other occasions. Again, what he and they recognized in simplest terms was that the role of the central banker could be understood in relationship to the public and not solely or necessary in relationship to the market.
Accursed autocorrect in the first line acknowledged.
Actually Nik I have a short statement of my position pasted in below.
One evening about a decade ago I found myself at a dinner party seated next to a former-central banker. He asked what the Hell is an anthropologist doing in a central bank? I answered something like this:
I was investigating ethnographically a series of ongoing experiments by which officials working in five central banks—the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, the Bank of England, the Riksbank, the Bundesbank, and the European Central Bank—endow money with decisive linguistic, communicative, and relational dynamics.
These experiments which were first designed in New Zealand go by the prosaic name of ‘inflation targeting.’
He asked me to elaborate.
I am interested in how central bankers seek to endow the future with discernible features that we—members of the public—can reflect and act upon, animating or curtailing our propensities to produce, consume, borrow, and lend.
They, central bankers, rather than predicting the future, seek to create elements of a tractable future. They do this with words. They use language to explore, promulgate, and sustain the ideas that animate our economic future, as well as the structures of feeling, the sentiments, expectations, and desires that make them real. (Holmes 2018, 85).
Central bankers create and enter, as it were, a communicative field in which countless protagonists, that is you and I, model economic phenomenon for our own purposes, employing our own pragmatic insights and grounded truths.
These officials are thus confronted with actors whose futures are enlivened by just about every emotional sensibility, every constellation of thought and belief, reason and unreason, rationality and irrationality, as well as every human proclivity to create truth, untruth, virtue, beauty, and depravity (Bronk 2009; Rudnyckyj 2014).
The stories told and embraced by these unruly figurers, these protagonists, can impel or impede the leaps of faith that ratify or foreclose a tractable future (Beckert 2016, 263).
The efficacy of monetary policy thus rests on the representational enterprise of members of the public with whom central bankers must orchestrate prospectively the contingencies of economic stability and growth (Holmes 2018, 85).
I thus sought to elucidate how central bankers relate to the public and not solely or necessarily to the market. And crucially, how members of the public are not merely served by monetary policy, they enact it.
In other words, I have demonstrated how distinctive forms of communication and relational knowledge underwrite domains of monetary affairs. I asked how and why markets operate as a function of language, as an expansive economy of words?
Over the course of two decades I have shown that at the limits of calculation and measurement markets operate as discursive phenomena available to us ethnographically. I further demonstrated how we, members of a self-organizing ‘agentive public,’ become by virtue of these communications protagonists and antagonists in a global monetary drama
Geithner expressed surprise and what I took to be approval of my answer as did several other senior central bankers on other occasions. Again, what he and they recognized in simplest terms was that the role of the central banker could be understood in relationship to the public and not solely or necessary in relationship to the market.
Thanks for sharing this Douglas; I find the anthropological language used very suggestive - is the 2018 article available online?
Dear Nik,
I have argued that central bankers are acutely reflexive.
I have a short piece which addresses these reflxive imperatives that I can send you, if you are interest.
Take care,
D
I'd be very interested, thanks Douglas
I actually thought the errant sentence was kind of interesting. I mean, worth thinking about. Surely declining birthrates would fit the bill?
Your concluding thought here animates my friend Doug Holmes Economy of Words.
Nik, How can I send you an attachment? Thanks, D