Liquidated By Karen Ho Summary

Usually when one thinks of anthropology, they think about how it largely focuses on what westerners perceive as distant, primitive cultures like the BaMbuti in Central Africa. It is true that anthropology does originate as a discipline focusing on “primitive cultures” like the Andaman Islanders of Papua New Guinea. However, since the 1960s, postmodern anthropologists have turned the discipline on its head. Many anthropologists have started to write ethnographies about western, contemporary culture. For example, many anthropologists have written ethnographies on the diffusion of baseball to the far east. Karen Ho’s, Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall St., continues this trend of focusing on culture that is western. Karen Ho, while taking a leave of absence from Princeton, took a job on Wall St. only for the purpose of studying its culture.
culture (specifically, investment banks, hedge funds, private equity firms) was to determine its role in reshaping corporate America and how that reshaping affects market formations. Ho takes a really interesting take on participant observation, first of all. Bronislaw Malinowski simply participated in the New Guinea Argonaut culture by moving to their villages. To participate in the culture of her subject, Ho simply had to get a job where they also worked. It shows how much the discipline has changed in a century. Anyways, at the core of the book, she is seeking to answer how experiences shape the actions of those working on Wall St., and how those actions culturally produce what she calls a “financially dominant, though highly unstable capitalism.” Her methodology for deciphering Wall St. culture was to conduct extensive interviews with investment bankers, shadowing, and observing industry