Annelise Riles' Collateral Knowledge: Legal Reasoning in the Global Financial Markets is a fascinating book that deserves a wide readership in STS. As an anthropologist, Riles takes us close to the work of global finance, not, as is often the case, by focusing on the action of stock trading or high-level policy discussions but by con centrating on back-office efforts to keep financial transactions on track. From an ethnographic location within the offices of the Bank of Japan, she demonstrates the centrality of mundane backstage efforts to make the finance machine work. She also shows the mutual entanglements between such work and high-level legal, economic, and political theorizing.
