Micropolitics of Secrecy: Traders' Enactments of Expertise After the Failed Military Coup in Turkey

ABSTRACT Conducting ethnographic research in financial institutions is challenging because secrecy is pivotal for traders to maintain their expert image. It became more difficult in Turkey after the failed coup in 2016 as Turkish President Erdoğan increasingly weaponized conspiracies that are historically and politically rooted in Turkish society to accuse traders of colluding with international foes and unsettling the economy. I use this highly conspiratorial aftermath of the failed coup as a critical site for analyzing the micropolitics of secrecy in finance, that is, how traders understand and reproduce secrecy on a daily basis. How does the aftermath of the coup attempt reframe the micropolitics of secrecy on which traders build their expert image? As traders also share and circulate conspiratorial thinking, how do conspiracy and secrecy form ethnographic interlocutors with traders? On the basis of my fieldwork in an investment bank in Istanbul in 2018, I track traders' shifting comprehensions of my presence on the trading floor through everyday encounters and discuss how the micropolitics of secrecy shape traders' enactments of expertise. I show that these enactments are not monolithic or static. Rather, they are affective and interactive, interwoven with the power dynamics on the trading floor, and susceptible to outside intervention.