DOUGLAS R. HOLMES

email: dholmes@binghamton.edu
Science 1:221
607 624-4202

Research interests
My current research examines an intellectual regime that informs contemporary practices of central banking. I have aligned my research with a series of technocratic propositions that persuaded these famously secretive institutions—institutions that were in some notable cases committed well into the 1990s to a mystique of secrecy as vital to their function—to experiment with far-reaching communicative practices under the aegis of transparency. These practices—formalized within what is known prosaically as “inflation targeting”—are a means by which central banks seek to influence the evolution of consumer prices over a time horizon of approximately two years.
  
Initially designed and formalized as policy by the Reserve Bank of New Zealand these practices seeks to influence future sensibilities—not just sensibilities about the future but also sensibilities in the future—to shape the expectations that impel the most fundamental dynamic of market economies:  the evolution of prices.  The bridge to the ephemera of expectation is constructed—in part—with language, through the technical mediation of what I refer to as an “economy of words.” I argue that the carefully crafted communications formulated within these institutions are not merely expressing an interpretative account or commentary: they are making the economy itself as a communicative field and as an empirical fact.

The focus of the research is currently on the central banks of New Zealand, Sweden, the United Kingdom, the United States, the European Union, and the German Federal Bank’s role within the European Central Bank.

I continue my work on European identities examining how the EU imparts to its citizens the distinctive challenge and the ambiguous burden to negotiate continually the cognitive meanings and the political exigencies of a pluralist Europe.   I contend that the citizens of the EU are compelled to parse continually the nature of affinity and difference as they participate in the creation of a vast, multiracial and multicultural Europe.

In my collaboration with George Marcus and David Westbrook we have focused on what we think is a foundational question for contemporary ethnography:  How do we design projects within settings where diverse ethnographic exigencies operate, settings within which subjects themselves experiment creatively with the intellectual modalities of ethnography? 

Funding
National Science Foundation & Wenner-Gren Foundation

Significant publications

Books 
Holmes, Douglas R. in preparation.  Public Currency: Communicative imperatives in central banks.

Holmes, Douglas R. 2000. Integral Europe: Fast-Capitalism, Multiculturalism, Neofascism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Holmes, Douglas R. 1989.  Cultural Disenchantments: Worker Peasantries in Northeast Italy.  Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Recent Journal Articles & Book Chapters
Holmes, Douglas R. under review “The Propagation of Anthropologies,” Focaal—European Journal of Anthropology.

Holmes, Douglas R. 2009 “Economy of Words,” Cultural Anthropology. 24 (3): 381-419.

Holmes, Douglas R. 2009. “Experimental Identities (After Maastricht),” in European Identity. Peter Katzenstein and Jeffery Checkel (eds.) pp. 52-80, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Holmes, Douglas R. & George E. Marcus 2008. “Collaboration Today and the Re-Imagination of the Classic Scene of Fieldwork Encounter,” Collaborative Anthropologies 1:136-70.

Holmes, Douglas R. 2008. “Futurity” European Studies Forum: The Journal of the Council for European Studies 38 (2).

Holmes, Douglas R. 2008. “Nationalism and Xenophobia as Research Topics in Russia and Eastern Europe,” Antropologicheskij forum, (Russian Academy of Sciences and the European University) 8:128-34.

 

Spring 2009 Courses: ANTH 380S/PLSC 389D Political Anthropology; ANTH 480P/518 Ethnographic Analysis

 

« BACK