Banking on Words: The Failure of Language in the Age of Derivative Finance by Arjun Appadurai. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. 176 pp.

Abstract

American Anthropologist • Vol. 118, No. 4 • December 2016 trades,” which I find confusing: Can one really speak of self- invasion?) of new trades such as the production and sale of paintings and new types of garments. But, here again, the reliance on local connections and collaborations and hence the inability to move operations to new localities generally do not permit prosperous actors to expand their enterprises beyond a certain point. To be sure, the authors’ argument that prosperous actors ultimately contribute to the welfare of the entire industry—because their activities as middlemen expand the market as a whole—comes dangerously close to trickle-down “Reaganomics.” Nevertheless, the differences between successful and less successful entrepreneurs are not necessarily based on differential access to capital nor on be- ing initiators of innovations; thus, unlike in trickle-down Reaganomics, advancement is actually quite open to many actors. A winner-take-all economy, then, does not negate the benefits of cooperation in a commons. The authors’ interest in the role of the commons in small enterprises leads them to complement their studies of indigenous craft enterprises with small-scale industrial production of garments in the mestizo town of Atuntaqui. Initially built on the demise of a large foreign-owned factory, the isolated family businesses, founded by the workers who had lost their jobs, prospered as a result of a government- sponsored program of innovation and mutual collaboration, only to return to mutual isolation when individual firms made deals with large-scale clients that left little room for the continued pursuit of common projects. The reader is left with the question of whether, in the long run, indigenous enterprises are more apt to involve sharing resources than those dominated by mestizos—a question whose answer is complicated by the fact that mestizos often work for Otavalo entrepreneurs and vice versa. All in all, Fast, Easy, and in Cash is a welcome breath of fresh air in the study of artisans. REFERENCE CITED Colloredo-Mansfeld, Rudi 2009 Fighting Like a Community: Andean Civil Society in an Era of Indian Uprisings. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Banking on Words: The Failure of Language in the Age of Derivative Finance by Arjun Appadurai. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. 176 pp. DOI: 10.1111/aman.12760 Bill Maurer University of California, Irvine This little book seeks to do a lot of big things. Some of those things have been done already, and others are not as big as they seem. Still, there is enough to keep the interested reader occupied after some brush clearing, as Arjun Appadurai has a knack for synthesizing and sparking conversations. With his characteristic skill at naming large-scale phe- nomena (think difference and disjuncture, or the social life of things), Appadurai equates contemporary finance with a specific form, the derivative form. The derivative is a con- tract through which new assets are created from other series of contracts, only distantly connected to any underlying as- set. As promises, derivatives are a linguistic phenomenon. Appadurai sets out to track the failure of the derivative utterance in the global financial crisis and what came next. Appadurai differentiates his effort from that of others who have been tackling finance for some time. He distin- guishes between social studies of finance scholars, mainly following Michel Callon, who seek to understand finance’s devices and mechanisms, and anthropologists (mainly), who seek to understand finance in relation to “religion, ethics, and salvational ideologies” (p. 16). His “intention is to put these two traditions back in live contact to achieve a paradigm shift to study the ethics of calculative action” (p. 17). Those of us whom Appadurai identifies on either side of this di- vide have very much been in live contact for the duration of our professional careers. The focus on mechanisms has never been entirely separate from the focus on ethos: de- spite some excesses of the performativity paradigm (that market devices format markets, tout court), those working on the tools have always been open to their more talismanic qualities. There is by now an extensive literature on num- bers’ magic and quantification’s qualities. From within this live conversation, the disagreement has always been less be- tween social studies of finance and anthropology and more between these two intertwining groupings and Marxist or otherwise world-historical accounts of the global economy. This is still true today. Appadurai’s real contribution is his exegeses of the work of Max Weber, E ´ mile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, John L. Austin, and the popular author and options trader Elie Ayache. From Weber, Appadurai adopts the insight that Calvinism depended on “radical uncertainty about salvation or, more precisely, radical uncertainty about the value of a person’s life” (p. 5). From Ayache, he sidelines the probability or math of derivative pricing to focus instead on