Bill Maurer bio & publications

Associate Professor of Anthropology
Department of Anthropology
wmmaurer@uci.edu

Professor Maurer's research interrogates deeply-held beliefs about the nature of law and economy. Studies of globalization have sparked heated, and, by now, familiar debate over whether the free movement of money has eroded state sovereignty. The ethereal character of modern money makes it seem more intangible at the same time that the adage that money makes the world go around may be truer than ever. But the distinction between state and market remains relatively untouched. Maurer's research queries narratives of globalization's effects by looking into its fabrication, through the entanglements of subjects and objects of law, property and value that make it up. His first book, on the colonial transformation of the British Virgin Islands from a backwater of small scale farmers and traders to a booming offshore financial services center, led him to question the cultural ramifications of finance capital, the legal creation of objects of property held to “move” in new transnational circuits, and the conceptions of mobility animating contemporary financial forms. Maurer is interested in the impact of financial globalization on places like the British Virgin Islands which are so intimately caught up in it. He has been looking at the way Caribbean tax havens market themselves to international investors—wizarding up images more reminiscent of the British Empire than of Club Med—and asking questions about how those images rebound into people's self-perceptions.

In his recent work, Maurer has been analyzing the cultural forms of money and finance more broadly, via research into “alternatives.” This research explores on-the-ground, everyday understandings of money among people who are forging their own forms of finance, through Islamic and offshore banking, and non-state currencies. Maurer's research demonstrates that contemporary efforts to redefine modern money bring to the fore the questions of value(s), substance and standardization that inform money's creation and acceptability across a range of economic transactions. These questions inform the apparatus of social science, as well, as it is founded on modern oppositions between fact and value, description and explanation, and so on which rely on the same kinds of commensuration, standardization and enumeration as modern money. The alternatives examined in Maurer's research lead him not only to question money's universal reach, then, but to implicate it in (moral) arguments about the nature of community, justice, belief, and knowledge. For these alternatives are not just a matter of earmarking some money for special uses, but a matter of the very form of money itself, and how it is conjured in messily-interpenetrating legal, economic and religious fields that obviate the neat parceling of the world into 'interacting' domains (the economy, the polity, religion, etc.). Acknowledging that play of recombination and reconfiguration demands an acknowledgment that the manner in which the analytical impulse to specify and thereby purify “alternative” and “conventional” finance is itself the work of framing, equipping and formatting the space of value. Regardless of whether Islamic banking or local currencies are “viable” in the long-term, they highlight the intertwining of value and values in the putatively secular and standardized dominant forms of money and dominant forms of social inquiry globally in circulation.

Professor Maurer's research has been supported by the National Science Foundation (1999-2002) and the Russell Sage Foundation (2003-2004). He was awarded the Distinguished Assistant Professor Award for Teaching by the UCI Academic Senate in 2000. In 1998 he was awarded the Distinguished Assistant Professor Award for Research. He was a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University from July-Nov, 2001 and a Visiting Associate Professor in the Dept. of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University from Jan-June 2002.

Selected Publications:
Recharting the Caribbean: Land, Law and Citizenship in the British Virgin Islands.
Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1997.

Edited Volumes
Globalization Under Construction: Governmentality, Law and Identity. Eds. Richard W. Perry and Bill Maurer. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P. In press,2003.
Gender Matters: Re-Reading Michelle Z. Rosaldo. Eds. Alejandro Lugo and Bill Maurer. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2000.
Common Land in the Caribbean and Mesoamerica. Spec. Issue of Plantation Society in the Americas 4.2-3 (1997).
Citizenship and Difference. Spec. issue of PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 19.1 (1996).
Sanctioned Identities. Eds. Jane Collier and Bill Maurer. Spec. issue of Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 2.1-2 (1995).

Recent Articles
“Implementing Empirical Knowledge in Anthropology and Islamic Accountancy.” Eds. Aihwa Ong and Stephen Collier. Global Anthropology: Technology Governmentality, Ethics. Oxford: Blackwell, forthcoming.
“On Divine Markets and the Problem of Justice: Empire as Theodicy.” Eds. Paul Passavant and Jodi Dean. Empire's New Clothes. New York: Routledge, forthcoming.
“Uncanny Exchanges: The Possibilities and Failures of 'Making Change' with Alternative Monetary Forms.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, forthcoming, 2003.
“Cyberspatial Properties: Taxing Questions about Proprietary Regimes.” In C. Humphrey and K. Verdery, eds. Property in Question. Berg, forthcoming, 2003.
“In the Mirror: The Legitimation Work of Globalization.” Co-authored with Susan Coutin and Barbara Yngvesson. Law and Social Inquiry. 27(4) forthcoming.
“Anthropological and Accounting Knowledge in Islamic Banking and Finance: Rethinking Critical Accounts.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, n.s., in press.
“Fact and Fetish in Creolization Studies: Herskovits and the Problem of Induction, or, Guinea Coast, 1593.” New West Indian Guide/Nieuwe West-Indisches Gids 76 (1/2): 5-22.
“ Chrysography: Substance and Effect.” The Asia-Pacific Journal of Anthropology (formerly Canberra Anthropology) 3 (1): 49-74.
“Repressed Futures: Financial Derivatives' Theological Unconscious.” Economy and Society 31(1): 15-36.
“Visions of Fact, Languages of Evidence: History, Memory and the Trauma of Legal Research.” Law and Social Inquiry 26(4): 893-909.
“Islands in the Net: Re-writing Technological and Financial circuits in the 'Offshore' Caribbean.” Comparative Studies in Society and History. Summer 2001.
“Engineering an Islamic Future: Speculations on Islamic Financial Alternatives.” Anthropology Today 17.1 (2001): 8-11.
“A Fish Story: Rethinking Globalization on Virgin Gorda.” American Ethnologist 27.3 (2000): 670-701.