ABSTRACT
Howhas culture constituted political economic practices historically? This chapter addresses this question with reference to one of the more enduring aspects of North-South economic relations over the past century: the extension of international financial advisory missions to poorer countries. Most scholarly literature on these missions has examined the activities of foreign ‘money doctors’ with conventional political economy questions in mind, e.g. what were their economic and political goals, and whose interests were served (e.g. Drake 1989, 1994; Flandreau 2003; Woods 2006)? A recent exception, however, can be found in Emily Rosenberg’s (2003) important study of US financial advisors in Latin America in the 1900-30 period: Financial Missionaries to the World. One of the central themes in her work is that the activities of US money doctors in this era cannot be fully understood without examining how they were culturally constituted. One influence was that of the ‘mass culture’ of American society as a whole at the time. Equally if not more important, however, was the significance of the more specific culture of experts involved in financial advising; a culture that embodied the kinds of socially acquired dispositions that is perhaps closer to Bourdieu’s (1977) concept of ‘habitus.’2
