Douglas Holmes Other Academic Appointments
2011- Senior Fellow, Meridian 180. Cornell University Law School.
2009- Member of the Tobin Project. Working group on Financial Regulation. Cambridge, MA.
dholmes@binghamton.edu
607-777-2100
Science 1, Room 233
Douglas Holmes' current research focuses on the emergence of a new monetary regime — a regime impelled by a series of communicative experiments — that he has defined in relationship to the concept of a "public currency." At the heart of this regime is a far-reaching premise: the public broadly must be recruited to collaborate with central banks in achieving the ends of monetary policy, namely "stable prices and confidence in the currency." He has explored these experiments from the vantage points of the European Central Bank, the Deutsch Bundesbank, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, the Swedish Riksbank and the Bank of England.
The key theoretical issues at stake in this research revolve around the operation of an "economy of words," that is, the process by which economic phenomena are modeled linguistically and communicatively. He has recently completed a book encompassing this research titled, Economy of words: Communicative imperatives in Central banks (Chicago).
Holme's first book, Cultural Disenchantments: Worker Peasantries in Northeast Italy (Princeton), examined the cultural struggles of rural populations in the Friuli region of Italy. In that project, he analyzed the predicaments that arise at the historical confluence of agrarian and industrial political economies and how they defined the lives of rural folk and the dynamics of rural society.
His second book, Integral Europe: Fast-capitalism, Multiculturalism, Neo-fascism (Princeton), investigated distinctive configurations of radicalism — fusing extreme left and right wing agendas — incited by European integration.
He is involved in an ongoing collaboration with George E. Marcus, University of California at Irvine, concerned with the re-functioning of ethnographic method for the exploration of cultures of expertise and is also in the early stages of designing a new project with Xingzhong Yu, Cornell University, on political exigencies of local autonomy in China.
Introduction to Social Anthropology
Political Anthropology
Ethnographic Analysis
Cultures of Expertise
2013. Economy of words: Communicative imperatives in central banks.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press (available fall 2013).
2000. Integral Europe: Fast-Capitalism, Multiculturalism, Neofascism.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
1989. Cultural Disenchantments: Worker Peasantries in Northeast Italy.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
2013. "Communicative Nature of Money." In Organisational Anthropology:
Doing Ethnography In and Among Complex Organisations.
Christina Garsten and Anette Nyqvist (Eds.), London: Pluto Press.
2011. (with George E. Marcus) "Prelude to a Re-functioned Ethnography."
In Ethnographic Practice in the Present.
Marit Melhuus, Jon P. Mitchell, Helena Wulff (eds.) pp.176-81. Oxford: Berghahn.
2010a. "Uncertain About Risk," ARC Anthropological Research on the Contemporary.
Episode 2: Systemic Risk. http://anthropos-lab.net/studio/episode/02/
2010c. "Emergent Anthropologies,"
Focaal — European Journal of Anthropology. No. 56 (Spring 2010).
2010d. Comment on ""Collateral Expertise: Legal Knowledge in the Global Financial Markets,"
by Annelise Riles. Current Anthropology Vol. 51, No. 6 (December 2010), pp. 795-818.
2009a. "Economy of Words," Cultural Anthropology. 24 (3): 381-419.
2009b. "Experimental Identities (After Maastricht)," in European Identity.
Peter Katzenstein and Jeffery Checkel (eds.) pp. 52-80,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
2008a. (with George E. Marcus). "Collaboration Today and the Re-Imagination of the
Classic Scene of Fieldwork Encounter," Collaborative Anthropologies 1:136-70.
2008b. "Futurity" European Studies Forum: The Journal of the Council for European Studies 38 (2).
2008c. "Nationalism and Xenophobia as Research Topics in Russia and Eastern Europe," Antropologicheskij forum,
(Russian Academy of Sciences and the European University) 8:128-34.
2006a. (with George E. Marcus) "Fast Capitalism: Para-Ethnography and the Rise of the Symbolic Analyst,"
in Melissa S. Fisher and Greg Downey (eds.), Frontiers of Capital. Durham: Duke University Press.
2006b. (with George E. Marcus, & David A. Westbrook) "Intellectual Vocations in the City of Gold."
Political and Legal Anthropology Review 29(1): 154-79.
2006c. "Nationalism-Integralism-Supranationalism: A Schemata for the 21st Century,"
In Handbook of Nations and Nationalism. Delanty, Gerard and Krishan Kumar (eds.).
London: Sage Publications.
2006d. Comment on "When the 'logic of capital is the real which lurks in the background':
Programme and practice in European 'regional economies'" by Gavin Smith.
Current Anthropology, vol. 47, No. 4, pages 621-639.
2005a. (with George E. Marcus) "Cultures of Expertise and the Management of Globalization:
Toward the Re-functioning of Ethnography." In Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics,
and Ethics as Anthropological Problems, eds. Aihwa Ong and Stephen J. Collier, pp. 235-52.
Oxford: Blackwell.
2005b. (with George E. Marcus) "Refunctioning Ethnography: the Challenge of an Anthropology
of the Contemporary." In Handbook of Qualitative Research, 3rd ed., ed. Norman Denzin
and Yvonna Lincoln, pp. 1099-113. Thousand Oaks: Sage.
2003. (with George E. Marcus) "La 'Crypto-Ethnographie' de la nouvelle économie,"
Anthropolis, Vol. 1, N° 2, pp. 9-22.
