Monsters of finance

Abstract

An anthropology of horror can serve as a vernacular critique of financial speculation. Drawing on fieldwork in San Pedro, Paraguay, I track horror across three registers: pombero tricksters; plata yvyguy (buried money) as a founding myth of postwar finance; and obligations binding sesame farmers to monsters, patrones , and creditors. Horror—a critical ontology and distinctive wonder—arises when obligation becomes undecidable: when one cannot tell whether the forces manipulating time and the future are persons who stand in relation, or how far the liability extends. Paraguay has produced this condition twice, first under the Stroessner dictatorship (1954–89), with its network of civilian informants, and later under climate finance running through the same clientelist orders. As Martha Blache's 1982 study of Guarani folklore helps us understand, finance bears rather than subsumes the moral arrangements of prestation, and horror is a native theorization of speculation rather than a response to an external capitalist threat.