Water as frontier of financialization

Andrea Muehlebach

Chapter 7 in Elgar Encyclopedia of Economic Anthropology, 2025, pp 39-43 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: The anthropological study of finance broke new ground in its emphasis on financial actors, practices, and institutions – banks, traders, market analysts. More recently, and inspired by an emphasis on the processual – financialization – anthropologists have asked how financial logics are taken up or contested and shaped by households, public institutions, or through the lived reality of speculative practice. This entry outlines the ways in which people understand and respond to the financialization of water utilities across locations and scales – through bills, pricing, meters, or the lack of institutional transparency. They experience finance not primarily as a set of abstract economic institutions but as an intimate social formation that comes with obscure practices and illegitimate effects; a ‘sedimented financialization’ that propels seemingly distant processes into the everyday life of households with accelerated speed, anxiety-inducing intensity, and polarizing class effects.

Keywords: Water; Infrastructure; Financialization; Household; Frontier (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781035312566
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