"Monsters of Finance" with Associate Professor Caroline Schuster

Please join us for a seminar by Associate Professor Caroline Schuster (Australian National University).

Monsters of finance: an anthropology of horror in agrarian Paraguay

This talk develops an anthropology of horror as a vernacular critique of speculation. Drawing on fieldwork with sesame farmers in San Pedro, I track horror across three registers: relations with pombero tricksters; plata yvyguy (buried money) as founding myth of post-war finance; and obligation binding sesame farmers to monsters, patrones, and creditors. Horror – a critical ontology and distinctive wonder – arises when obligation becomes undecidable: when one cannot tell whether the forces manipulating time and the future are persons who stand in relation, with whom one is complicit or not, or how far the liability extends. Paraguay has produced this condition twice: under the Stroessner dictatorship with his network of civilian informants, and under climate finance running through the same clientelist orders. Recuperating Martha Blache’s (1982) study of Guaraní folklore, I argue that finance bears rather than subsumes the moral arrangements of obligation and complicity (and their uncomfortable quandaries) and horror is a native theorisation of speculation rather than a response to external capitalist threat.

Caroline E. Schuster is an economic anthropologist with a research interest in the gendered and gendering effects of financialisation, and new forms of risk emerging from the climate crisis. She received her PhD in socio-cultural anthropology at the University of Chicago in 2012 after having pursued an interdisciplinary development studies degree from Stanford University, which she completed in 2005. Following a post-doc at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies (2012-2014), Caroline joined the faculty of the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at the Australian National University. Her research appears in major anthropology journals, as well as interdisciplinary cultural economy, science studies, and development studies journals. Her most recent book, Forecasts: a story of weather and finance at the edge of disasteris a graphic ethnography (i.e. comic) awarded the Kate Browne Award for Creativity in Research, and co-authored with Paraguayan artists Enrique Bernardou and David Bueno. With Bernardou and Bueno, Schuster co-founded the Asunción-based comics studio CómicsClub.