Collapsed Mythologies: a Geofinancial Lexicon, by Eline Benjaminsen & Dayna Casey.
Excerpt from the introduction:
The realm of finance has its own eco-logics. Hectocorns offer behemoths poison pills and whales take fledglings to the moon. Bulls hide behind long hedges, while bears disappear into dark pools and form fraudulent daisy chains with one another.
This book delves into the sphere of finance through the slang terms and jargon used by traders and other financial professionals. It is heavily indebted to The Geofinancial Lexicon, edited by Jack Clarke and Sami Hammana, who collect terms that allude to the materiality of finance, what they call geofinance, all deriving from the online glossary of the Financial Times.
This publication expands Clarke and Hammana’s initial lexicon . Terms have been added from multiple sources, including financial glossaries (such as Investopedia), and conversations with financial workers and people active in the cryptoverse. Our collaboration began with the observation that this vernacular language projects a landscape both real and uncanny, occult, and weird. All of these financial terms have their own intricate, mysterious, and often chaotic interrelations: so an ecology was emerging. Although the functionality of this ecosystem seemed comprehensively weird to us, the strategic and imaginary efforts of this system—the creation stories of market fundamentalism if you will—became increasingly apparent.
Dead cats bounce on the global market, lame ducks lack liquidity while roaming scorched earths, and rainmakers blood-let with their diamond hands. Between what these terms mean and the ecological world they refer to lie deeply mythological histories, heavy with colonial and extractive violence.
It has often been said that the reason that financial jargon is obscure is that it intends to ward off any public interest and that language is one of finance’s many hiding mechanisms. This book studies a vernacular language used by a secretive group, discovering folk tales, morals, and costumes in the decoding of its etymologies. We ask: how does finance see itself? In a broader sense, we make an effort to build and, at the same time, collapse a world. Even though finance is often already imagined as a separate, outside entity—an inaccessible space successfully cloaked in a veil of abstraction—we attempt to mold it to a detectable landscape, clayed with its own fantasy references.
Published by Spector Books and Page Not Found (2025)
ISN nummer: 978-3-95905-849-0
Sideantall: 344
Opplag: 1 400
