Duy Vu

Professor Marilyn Jenna Musket

Anthropology 101-002

21 January 2020

ASSIGNMENT #1 – REFLECTIONS ON ANTHROPOLOGY

I am Duy Vu, freshman and majoring in Finance. When I first looked at this assignment, I

felt a little bit weird and surprised because it told me to identify three pieces of writing to see the

intersection between my major and Anthropology. To get started, as writing about the whole

Anthropology is too wide, I will illustrate the connection by using some aspects of Anthropology

such as culture and people’s behaviour instead. Besides using the sources of American

Anthropological Association or Hagerty Library, I have also searched on the Internet such as

“relationship between finance and culture”, “finance anthropology”, etc and I have some

amazing results. The three pieces I chose are “How Culture Influences Our Financial Decisions”

by Adam Alter on The New Yorker (which I will concentrate on), “Beyond Culture and Society:

Prospects for Ethnographies of Finance” by Daromir Rudnyckyj, University of Victoria and

“Notes on the Anthropology of Gender in Finance” by Melissa S.Fisher, New York University.

First, I have a look over the other two essays. The “Beyond Culture and Society: Prospects

for Ethnographies of Finance” illustrates that the cultural forms and social structures have

affected the way people behave on the economy. I totally agree “the pure exercise of market

principles is actually the site of an elaborate array of social codes, mutual obligations , and

reciprocity”, or in other words, the economy operates based on market rules, but in overall, it

depends on people’s behaviour, which is created from their culture, region or religion, a branch

of Anthropology that anthropologists and sociologists are still doing research on. It also has a
research done by anthropologist Arjun Appadurai about the cultural dispositions that led to the

financial crises in the United States. I am a bit astonished by his argument of “a series of magical

practices” and “mystical faith” of capitalism, of financiers and traders, and even he didn’t

understand them.

On the other hand, in “Notes on the Anthropology of Gender in Finance”, Fisher has

provided us with the role of ethnographies in analyzing the gender factor in analyzing financial

factors. There is a noticeable sentence in this essay “investment firms, … were and continue to

be gendered spaces in which (mainly) men perform hyper masculine performances, part of the

male drama of capital that constructs women as inferior, ‘other,’ or ‘invisible’”, which somehow

shows the reality - discrimination between the “front office” workers – elite male investing

bankers and middle and low class backgrounds – colored people and women. It also states that

the ethnographers haven’t seen more than the workplace, which is the financial practices in

family dynamics and civic obligations, where women are usually in charge with loans and

mortgage. In the end, the author claims that is just some examples of how anthropologists can do

more research about: gendered rules, market actors, the work-family life with the new practice.

Finally, come to my main piece, “How Culture Influences Our Financial Decisions?”. The

relationship between Anthropology and Finance is pretty clear, because culture is the main

aspectof Anthropology, and we don’t just make decisions, What makes me feel most interesting

is even the very normal numbers can affect people’s business and financial behaviour. For

example, Western people think that number 13 is unlucky, especially Friday the 13th. As a

result, according to a study conducted by Robert W.Korb and Ricardo J.Rodriguez, stock market

returns are far lower on Friday the 13th than on other Fridays, which creates a “wow” for me. On
the other hand, the Easterners (China, Taiwan and other East Asian countries) are afraid of

number 4, because when pronouncing it in another way, it has the same meaning as “dead”;

therefore, according to the research of Richard Chung, Ali F. Darrat and Bin Li, “US copper,

cotton and soybeans experience a lower commodities-market return on the fourth day of each

month”, because the Chinese usually postpone their decision until the fifth. The unique in

Eastern culture even apply to big companies such as Samsung or Nokia. such as the cell-phone

model numbers never contain the digit 4, or there is no S60 fourth edition. Another interesting

point made in this essay is how Western and Eastern people behave in choosing the stocks to

buy. Once again, the results make me amazed: The Chinese often trade for erratic stocks since

they don’t think the appreciative stocks still increase, whereas the Americans keep the hope that

the appreciative ones are still the winner, so they keep investing in them. This idea also illustrate

the idea of Anthropology here: people in different races behave in different ways, based on how

they see other people do that or they are taught to do that. Looking more thoroughly, I also notice

there are more Western start-ups than Eastern, as it depends on the culture: Western people

always encourage taking risks of innovation ideas, whereas the Eastern people tend to be

followers with safer choices, because of the different way of taking care of their children: the

Westerns let the children experience the world themselves, whereas the Eastern parents care “too

much” for their kids.

Because Anthropology is the science researching about humans and culture, it’s easy to

understand all aspects in people’s life have connection with it, and Finance is not an exception.

Through my reflection on three essays, I hope that I have clearly illustrated the relationship

between Anthropology and Finance in all of them. As a student majoring in Finance, besides
core knowledge, I think having knowledge about various cultures and different people is the

same important as I don’t want to regret any of my future decisions, whether in finance or not.

Works – Cited Page:

Alter, Adam. “How Culture Influences Our Financial Decisions.” The New Yorker, The New
Yorker, 19 June 2017,
www.newyorker.com/business/currency/how-culture-influences-our-financial-decisions.

Rudnyckyj, Daromir. “Beyond Culture and Society: Prospects for Ethnographies of Finance”,
Journal of Business Anthropology, Spring 2013,
https://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/jba/article/download/4071/4450/.

Fisher, Melissa S. “Notes on the Anthropology of Gender in Finance”, Journal of Business

Anthropology, Spring 2013
https://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/jba/article/download/4071/4450/.

Appadurai, Arjun 2011 'The Ghost in the Financial Machine.' Public Culture 23 (3):517-539.

Appadurai, Arjun 2012 'The Spirit of Calculation.' Cambridge Anthropology 20 (1):3-17.

Kolb, Robert W., and Ricardo J. Rodriguez. “Friday the Thirteenth: 'Part VII'-A Note.” Wiley
Online Library, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd (10.1111), 30 Apr. 2012,

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1540-6261.1987.tb04373.x

Richard Chung, Ali F. Darrat & Bin Li (2014) Chinese superstition in US commodity

trading, Applied Economics Letters, 21:3, 171-175, DOI: 10.1080/13504851.2013.848012

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13504851.2013.848012?
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