Capitalization: a Cultural Guide

What does it mean to turn something into capital  ? What does considering things as assets entail  ?
What does the prevalence of an investor's viewpoint require  ? What is this culture of valuation that
asks that we capitalize on everything  ? How can we make sense of the traits, necessities and upshots
of this pervasive cultural condition  ?This book takes the reader to an ethnographic stroll down the trail of capitalization. Start-up companies,
research centers, consulting firms, state enterprises, investment banks, public administrations : the
territory can certainly prove strange and disorienting at first sight, with its blurred boundaries between
private appropriation and public interest, economic sanity and moral breakdown, the literal and the
metaphorical, the practical and the ideological. The traveler certainly requires a resolutely pragmatist
attitude, and a taste for the meanders of signification. But in all the sites in which we set foot in this
inquiry we recognize a recurring semiotic complex : a scenario of valuation in which things signify by
virtue of their capacity to become assets in the eye of an imagined investor.A ground-breaking anthropological investigation on the culture of contemporary capitalism, this work
directs attention to the largely unexplored problem of capitalization and offers a critical resource for
current debates on neoliberalism and financialization.