Evaluation Cultures? On Invoking ‘Culture’ in the Analysis of Behaviour in Financial Markets

In recent decades, the concept of ‘culture’ has had a strangely bifurcated history. 1 The critique implicit in Said’s questions has been deeply influential, especially in social anthropology, for which ‘culture’ was the single most central concept. By 1996, an encyclopaedia of the discipline talked of the possibility of ‘abandon[ing] talk of different “cultures” altogether, because of its taint of essentialism’ (Barnard & Spencer 1996, p.142), in other words because of its connection to the simplistic idea that a culture was a kind of ‘package’ that was ‘coherent inside and different from what is elsewhere’ (Mol 2002, p.80). Simultaneously, however, invocation of ‘culture’ has increased sharply in areas in which it had not been hugely salient previously, for example in the social studies of science in the form of the ‘local scientific cultures’ of Barnes, Bloor & Henry (1996), the ‘experimental cultures’ of Rheinberger (1997), ‘epistemic cultures’ of Knorr Cetina (1999), ‘epistemological