In 1863, a group of Victorian men (yes, they were all men) assembled in a London club. They were there to create the Cannibal Club, a so-called anthropological society that, its members hoped, would explore far-flung cultures in order to uncover what made humans tick — even cannibals.
This might seem like a strange snapshot of long-forgotten Victorian history but it has considerable relevance today. The club was not composed purely of professors with an academic interest in exploration. Many members belonged to the so-called Corporation of Foreign Bondholders, which was linked to the London Stock Exchange. In the 19th century, the British empire was expanding, creating new trade and business opportunities around the globe. That prompted London financiers to extend credit to remote parts of Asia, Latin America and Africa, as well as parts of North America.
By the middle of the 19th century, much of that debt was turning sour due to defaults, corruption and fraud (some of it perpetrated by British swindlers who misled their fellow investors about the opportunities on offer in foreign lands). Sovereign loans in places such as Venezuela kept delivering nasty shocks. Some British lenders belatedly realised that understanding other cultures was important and — more specifically — that it was a mistake to assume that everybody shared the same ideas about how to value assets, impose laws, create markets and build trust.
So financiers started to invest in crude “anthropological” research. “The social sciences that came to be used and valued were influenced and commandeered by the stock exchange,” writes Marc Flandreau, an economic historian, in his 2016 book Anthropologists in the Stock Exchange. “It was because the west had capital markets and because imperial conquest raised problems of value and valuation that British anthropology took the form it took.”
It is a curious tale, and not just because, in an echo of history, western investors are (yet again) confronting a spate of defaults in places such as Venezuela. These days, if you mention the Cannibal Club to modern social scientists, many will squeal in horror. No wonder. The original group’s founding members were a bunch of sexists and racists who assumed that “primitives” were inferior to Europeans. Some even tacitly supported slavery (although another anthropology club at the time, the Ethnological Society of London, was campaigning for its abolition).
Today, anthropologists see their discipline as a champion of human rights and one that’s in the vanguard against racism and sexism. The Cannibal Club is such a source of shame that its existence has been airbrushed from most university courses. And many social scientists would blanch at the idea of working for private companies or the military, particularly if they suspected their research would be used to exploit or manipulate people in other countries.
This week, for instance, the American Anthropological Association is holding its annual meeting in Washington DC, with some 6,000 people attending. Though companies are increasingly hiring anthropologists, this will be played down by many at the AAA gathering. Most academic anthropologists dislike capitalism so deeply that they would never dream of working for a hedge fund or bank. Even suggesting it at an AAA meeting could be tantamount to heresy.
The prejudice is entirely mutual. To many bankers (and economists), the concept of anthropology seems irritatingly hippy, or irrelevant, since it revolves around “soft” cultural analysis, rather than “hard” numbers.
Writing as someone who first trained as an anthropologist before entering financial journalism, it is a pity this tribalism exists, and, for that matter, that the Cannibal Club has disappeared from view. Yes, the racism and sexism of the Victorian era was repugnant but on one point at least, the club had it right: you can’t really understand culture, or practise cultural studies, by ignoring financial flows.
Similarly, you can’t understand global markets without thinking about culture. Money is not an incontrovertible force, like gravity. All aspects of finance — be that bitcoin, bonds, computing systems or anything else — emerge from webs of social relations.
Only a minority of modern financiers appear to understand this. But the next time that Venezuela hits the headlines for its umpteenth default, it is worth thinking about this oft-ignored historical link between capital markets and culture — and between finance and social sciences.
Nobody wants to see a new form of imperialism emerge. But it would be nice if modern securities holders were to mix with more anthropologists. After all, modern academics need funding — and the financial world badly needs more cultural insight, not just about its investments but its own internal practices. Maybe it is time, in other words, for a new type of “Cannibal Club” — but this time, instead of looking at strangers, the financiers should turn the lens on themselves.
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Illustration by Shonagh Rae
Letter in response to this article:
Modern financial theory has been built on a conceit / From Aron Miodownik, Cambrian Consulting, New York, NY, US
Challengers learn how to ‘game’ the rules / From Tom Kadala, New York, NY, US
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