This podcast discusses Professor Ferry’s book in progress, Gold Matters: Elemental Worldmaking in Finance and Mining. The conversation addresses the enduring significance of gold in both mining and finance, despite its formal detachment from global currency systems since the end of the gold standard, in 1971. Hosted by Daromir Rudnyckyj and Ferda Demirci, the discussion explores how gold is both a powerful symbol and material through which people construct meaning, value, and political relationships. Ferry describes the concept of “elemental world-making” to apprehend how both miners and financial professionals engage materially and symbolically with gold. She distinguishes between “intrinsicists,” who believe gold has inherent value, and “pragmatists,” who view gold’s value as socially constructed. The exchange highlights how anthropology reveals dimensions of finance and extraction often overlooked by economics, such as embodiment, affect, and materiality. Ferry also reflects on the challenges of conducting ethnography in financial contexts and draws connections between gold and newer forms of value, such as cryptocurrency. She argues that the physical properties of gold—its weight, shine, and non-reactivity—continue to shape its role as both a financial hedge and symbolic icon. The episode underscores how gold serves as a lens to examine the entanglement of materiality, abstraction, and power in contemporary capitalism.
Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Her work includes Not Ours Alone: Patrimony, Value, and Collectivity in Contemporary Mexico (Columbia UP, 2005); Minerals, Collecting, and Value across the U.S.-Mexico Border (2013, Indiana UP); and La Batea (with Stephen Ferry) (2017), which won the 2019 Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing, among other awards. She is co-editor of Timely Assets: The Politics of Resources and Temporalities (2010) and The Anthropology of Precious Minerals (2019). She is currently completing a co-edited volume, How Transparency Works: Ethnographies of a Global Value, with Filipe Calvão and Matthieu Bolay, and a single-authored book, Gold Matters: Elemental Worldmaking in Finance and Mining.
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