Offshore ontologies: global capital as substance, simulation, and the supernatural
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Offshore ontologies: global capital as substance, simulation, and the supernatural Samuel Weeks 1 # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract
In this article, I bring ontological anthropology into a register that is recognizably political and critical in orientation. My intention is to apply the powerful conceptual approach of the “ontological turn” in order to address a contemporary politico-economic problem of acute importance: offshore finance. Drawing from archival and ethnographic data collected in Luxembourg, I argue that officials from this country’s offshore financial center have employed ontology in particular ways in the service of a drastically imbalanced global capitalist system. In doing so, I contend that anthropologists are not the only people at present engaged in an “ontological turn”; so too are the thousands of bankers, lawyers, fund administrators, and accountants currently at work in Luxembourg. Thus, in exposing anthropologists to a set of concurrent “ontologies,” I move away from how the turn’s proponents within the discipline have to date thought of their ontological explorations as pointing to a somehow more desirable and progressive future. Keywords Ontological anthropology . Offshore finance . Luxembourg . Corporate personhood . Political economy A prominent recent “turn” in the qualitative social sciences concerns ontology—the branch of philosophy long concerned with questions of being, existence, and materiality. If the number of publications and conference panels is any indication, the topic has caught in particular the imagination of anthropologists. In the broadest of senses, these studies of “ontology” are the result of ethnographic enquiries into the making and conceiving of worlds that emanate from, but also span, oft-held divisions between humans, animals, plants, and things. Given this purview, the question of ontology raises a set of conceptual and methodological challenges that, according to the approach’s proponents, the field of anthropology seems uniquely capable
* Samuel Weeks [email protected]
1
Thomas Jefferson University, 4201 Henry Avenue, Philadelphia, PA 19144, USA
S. Weeks
of addressing (Hage 2012). Indeed, to the great relief of Sahlins (2013), the ontological turn has re-affirmed both alterity and interconnectedness as central problematics for the discipline. This general orientation has resulted in an emerging body of literature that brings together a number of avant-garde transdisciplinary subcurrents: multispecies ethnography (Kohn 2013; Tsing 2015), post-humanism (Descola 2005; Braidotti 2013), Science and Technologies Studies and Actor-Network Theory (Latour 1984, 2005; Law and Hassard 1999), among others. Topics covered by ontologically minded anthropologists range from vast indigenous cosmologies from the Andes and Amazonia to Mongolia and Melanesia (Blaser 2013; Londoño Sulkin 2005; Viveiros de Castro 2009; Pedersen 2011; Kapferer 2011) to subtle, phenomenological explorations into the places, practices, and things of everyday life (Henare et al.
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