ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses writings by Saskia Sassen and Arjun Appadurai, prominent figures in scholarship on "globalization" in the 1990s and early 2000s who have deepened their focus on financial markets in recent years. It also discusses David Graeber, an influential theorist of money and debt. Herderian theory assumes that a "culture" is animated by a singular spirit. But in money-as-competing-culture theories, the sphere of money, finance, and commerce constitutes a separate culture of its own, however strange and parasitical. An unfortunate result has been theorizations of finance that neglect the substance of finance. Appadurai has been especially attentive to the Sombartian theme that finance is an alien logic, too hard for ordinary people to understand. Global capital in its contemporary form is characterised by strategies of predatory mobility that have vastly compromised the capacities of actors in single locations even to understand, much less to anticipate or resist, these strategies.
