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.
Podcast Co-Hosts
Ferda Nur Demirci, co-host of Currency Experiments & Value Conversions, is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, working in the Department of Economic Experimentation. Her research explores the intersections of financial inclusion policies, kinship obligations, resource extraction economies, and authoritarian governance, with a particular focus on the cycles of indebtedness affecting working-class families in Turkey. Her work has been published in both English and Turkish in outlets such as Antipode Online, Dialectical Anthropology, and 1+1. She is also a research associate in the Counter Currency Laboratory at the University of Victoria.
Daromir Rudnyckyj, co-host of Currency Experiments & Value Conversions is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Victoria, where he serves as Director of the Counter Currency Laboratory. His research addresses money, religion, development, capitalism, finance, and the state. Dr. Rudnyckyj’s current project examines the techno-politics of money, with a focus on experiments in producing complementary monetary forms. His most recent journal articles include “Econography: Approaches to Expert Capitalism,” in Current Anthropology and “The Protestantism of Neoliberalism” in Culture, Theory, & Critique. He is the author of Beyond Debt: Islamic Experiments in Global Finance (Chicago 2019) and Spiritual Economies: Islam, Globalization, and the Afterlife of Development (Cornell 2010), which was awarded a Sharon Stephens Prize by the American Ethnological Society.