Document Type
Article
Publication Date
8-2004
Keywords
Technocracy, Ethnography, Designated Time system, Real Time system, Japanese banking, Japanese financial institutions
Disciplines
Legal History | Political Science | Political Theory | Social and Cultural Anthropology
Abstract
“The Bank of Japan is our mother,” bankers in Tokyo sometimes said of Japan's central bank. Drawing on this metaphor as an ethnographic resource, and on the example of central bankers who sought to unwind their own technocratic knowledge by replacing it with a real-time machine, I retrace the ethnographic task of unwinding technocratic knowledge from those anthropological knowledge practices that critique technocracy. In so doing, I draw attention to special methodological problems—involving the relationship between ethnography, analysis, and reception—in the representation and critique of contemporary knowledge practices.
Recommended Citation
Riles, Annelise, "Real Time: Unwinding Technocratic and Anthropological Knowledge" (2004). Cornell Law Faculty Publications. 996.
https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/facpub/996
Publication Citation
Published in: American Ethnologist, vol. 31, no. 3 (August 2004).
Included in
Legal History Commons, Political Theory Commons, Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons