NSF Award Abstract - #9818258

AWSFL008-DS3

Alternative Globalization: Community and Conflict in New Cultural of Finance

Abstract

The second-largest Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise in the United States runs according to Islamic banking principles, which prohibits interest and replace debt-financing with profit-loss sharing arrangements. Community activists in Ithaca and other small towns across America and abroad are printing their own money and establishing alternative economic arrangements in the name of community values and environmental sustainability. More and more Caribbean countries are abandoning agriculture and tourism development in favor of becoming tax havens. Do these seemingly unrelated events reflect a common process? What do they reveal about contemporary shifts in economic, social and political life co-occurring with the new geographies of money and financial integration generally labeled under the blanket-term "globalization?"

This research focuses on people participating in movements whose visions of financial integration provide alternatives to dominant narratives of globalization: Islamic banking, offshore finance, and alternative currency systems. Although these people are differently situated, their visions are all variations on a theme. In each case, on-going discussions around money and alternative finance emphasize exclusionary notions of community and quasi-legal concepts of jurisdictional autonomy. The problem of "community" and the problem of "jurisdiction" exist in a productive tension, since these new cultures of finance embrace community and connection while enforcing sharp jurisdictional boundaries around themselves. At the same time, each case aspires to more global reach, disseminating its principles and practices in order to secure legitimacy and, for some involved, to change the world for the better. This research examines resonances among these apparently disparate alternative strategies of dealing with "globalization" to better understand the changing nature of jurisdiction, community and conflict in new cultures of finance. Specifically it seeks to answer questions such as: (1) What conceptions of money, property and person are implicit and explicit in alternative globalizations? (2) What conceptions of time and space figure in alternative globalizations and how are they put into play in the practice of finance?, and (3) How are these put into play in the construction of community and history?

Fieldwork will be conducted in southern California, Ithaca, New York, Surabaya, Indonesia, and the British Virgin Islands. Open-ended, semi-structured interviews will be conducted with select groups of people (e.g., founding members and staff of relevant financial institutions, lawyers, businesspeople, legislators, and religious leaders) at each location.