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Offshore Ontologies: Global Capital As Substance, Simulation, And The Supernatural, Samuel Weeks

College of Humanities and Sciences Faculty Papers

In this article, I bring ontological anthropology into a register that is recognizably political and critical in orientation. My intention is to apply the powerful conceptual approach of the “ontological turn” in order to address a contemporary politico-economic problem of acute importance: offshore finance. Drawing from archival and ethnographic data collected in Luxembourg, I argue that officials from this country’s offshore financial center have employed ontology in particular ways in the service of a drastically imbalanced global capitalist system. In doing so, I contend that anthropologists are not the only people at present engaged in an “ontological turn”; so too …