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The Anthropology of Money ANRV287-AN35-02 ARI 13 August 2006 6:41 The Anthropology of Money Bill Maurer Department of Anthropology, University of California, Irvine, California 92697–5100; email: [email protected] Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2006. 35:15–36 Key Words First published online as a Review in abstraction, commensuration, currency, finance, number, Advance on July 6, 2006 quantification The Annual Review of Anthropology is by University of California - Irvine on 09/21/06. For personal use only. online at anthro.annualreviews.org Abstract This article’s doi: This review surveys anthropological and other social research on Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2006.35:15-36. Downloaded from arjournals.annualreviews.org 10.1146/annurev.anthro.35.081705.123127 money and finance. It emphasizes money’s social roles and meanings Copyright c 2006 by Annual Reviews. as well as its pragmatics in different modalities of exchange and circu- All rights reserved lation. It reviews scholarly emphasis on modern money’s distinctive 0084-6570/06/1021-0015$20.00 qualities of commensuration, abstraction, quantification, and reifi- cation. It also addresses recent work that seeks to understand the social, semiotic, and performative dimensions of finance. Although anthropology has contributed finely grained, historicized accounts of the impact of modern money, it too often repeats the same story of the “great transformation” from socially embedded to disembedded and abstracted economic forms. This review speculates about why money’s fictions continue to surprise. 15 ANRV287-AN35-02 ARI 13 August 2006 6:41 INTRODUCTION: THE COIN’S The difficulty in reviewing the anthropol- MANY SIDES ogy of money is compounded by the reliance of much anthropological research on theories A special difficulty arises when reviewing the of meaning and symbol that derived analyt- anthropology of money. It concerns the form ical precision through monetary metaphors. of the review itself. Review articles gather di- Thus, Saussure’s structuralist semiotics, on verse exemplars and perspectives to provide the notion of linguistic value as a function of an ordered and, at least momentarily, stable relations of difference, borrowed from Swiss account of the topic at hand. They are sup- colleague Vilfredo Pareto’s marginalist eco- posed to provide a unifying framework and a nomics of price (see Maurer 2005b, pp. 159– rubric against which to calibrate and evalu- 60): ate specific works in relation to wider bod- ies of scholarship. By definition they oscil- late between the general and the specific to Todetermine what a five-franc piece is worth generate intellectual value. In so doing, re- one must therefore know: (1) that it can be view articles function something like mod- exchanged for a fixed quantity of a different ern money, and something like anthropology. thing, e.g., bread; and (2) that it can be com- Modern money, at least as it is described pared with a similar value of the same system, in the classical accounts of Marx, Weber, e.g., a one-franc piece, or with coins of an- and Simmel, provides a universal yardstick other system (a dollar, etc.). In the same way against which to measure and evaluate the uni- a word can be exchanged for something dis- verse of objects, relations, services, and per- similar, an idea; besides, it can be compared sons. It “commensurates incommensurabili- with something of the same nature, another ties” (Carruthers & Espeland 1998, p. 1400) word. (Saussure 1966, p. 115) and “makes impossibilities fraternize” (Marx 1844, p. 110) by bringing things under a Goux (1973) sees in Saussurian linguistics common rubric. Anthropology, at least as it an isomorphism and psychic homology be- has been practiced since the disciplinary sta- tween economic exchange and linguistic ex- bilization of academic knowledge, provides change, both animated by the lack of a tran- generalizations about social and cultural life scendental signified (the general equivalent in using detailed descriptions of particular in- Marx, the murdered father in Freud, the phal- commensurate worlds. It makes the strange lus in Lacan). “Between money and language,” familiar. This, like money, is a fantastical en- he writes, “one finds in the history of West- deavor (see Strathern 2005, p. vii). The chap- ern philosophy the insistence of a compari- by University of California - Irvine on 09/21/06. For personal use only. ter before you, therefore, necessarily operates son that is not exterior...but is the local, frag- as if in a hall of mirrors because the terms it mentary perception of a real, historical-social Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2006.35:15-36. Downloaded from arjournals.annualreviews.org would bring under the prescriptions of the re- coherence” (Goux 1973, p. 183; see Maurer view format exist in an awkward relationship 2005b, p. 162). If the language is interior to of doubling with each other and with the re- the money form, and vice versa, it is difficult view form. In assessing the classical account of to say anything meaningful about money at money against recent scholarship in the hu- all that is not immediately and already part man sciences, this review finds considerable of money itself (Sohn-Rethel 1978). And this openness and paradox, and it does not work review could end here. to “solve” so much as to prod and to irritate. I am not particularly taken by the logic In this it may thus be more true to the charac- of interiors and exteriors, and as this review ter of modern money (and contemporary an- should make evident, I am much more con- thropology) than the classical accounts would cerned with money’s pragmatics than its semi- have it. otics, at least in the structuralist sense. I am 16 Maurer ANRV287-AN35-02 ARI 13 August 2006 6:41 also, however, deeply interested in anthropol- which we still claim as our unique contribu- ogy’s pragmatic contribution to money and tion to knowledge: “the ethnographic record,” scholarly discussions about it. The emerging and the manner in which it makes us “think social studies of finance literature that brings different” about our own situation. together scholars from anthropology, geog- I do not want to deny the great transfor- raphy, sociology, international political econ- mation: It is a good story, and it works ped- omy, and science studies has spotlighted aca- agogical wonders in our classrooms and can demic theories’ constitutive relationships to still stop some economists and sociologists in their objects of study (de Goede 2005a). Given their tracks. Still, anthropologists and other the wide dissemination of older anthropo- social scientists have been remarkably adept logical assessments of money, value, and ex- at reinventing the wheel where the study of change, it would be surprising not to find an- money is concerned. We have also been good thropology’s performative effects on money at containing our more exciting insights about itself, if only we would look. money (conveyed in several exemplary edited In a recent review, Gilbert (2005) argues collections, e.g., Akin & Robbins 1999, Guyer persuasively for “drawing out the paradoxes 1995b, Parry & Bloch 1989), while present- of money as always a symbolic referent, a so- ing to the outside world the comforting plot- cial system, and a material practice” (p. 361, line we are always expected to relate, about emphasis in original). None of these three the impact of money on “traditional” soci- characteristics, she asserts, can be separated eties and the dehumanizing and homogeniz- from the others. The anthropology of money ing effects of monetary incursion on all as- occupies a familiar place in her review. First, pects of life in our own society. We do this it provides a narrative foil: the anthropology even as we rediscover the moral, embedded, of money reinforces the conventional evolu- and special-purpose functions of our “own” tionary account of the transition from barter money and the calculative and rational di- to special purpose, socially embedded moneys mensions of nonmodern money (Appadurai to general purpose, disembedded, and deper- 1986). I wonder whether the repetition com- sonalized moneys (Weatherford 1998), which pulsion to circle back to the classical account Gilbert rightly criticizes (and which recent of the invention and impact of modern money anthropological research on the “return” of is a crucial component of that money form it- barter in postsocialist states seriously chal- self. Social inquiry provides both an analysis lenges) (Humphrey 2002). Second, anthro- and a folk theory about money in the capi- pology contributes methodological rigor and talist West. And that folk theory has effects: by University of California - Irvine on 09/21/06. For personal use only. empirical specificity. It provides ethnographic The telling of the tale and the criticisms of studies of monetary practices on the ground, the tale—for neglecting the embeddedness of Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2006.35:15-36. Downloaded from arjournals.annualreviews.org which, in demonstrating the social embedded- the economy (Granovetter 1985), for over- ness of nonmodern money, provides method- looking money’s earmarking for special pur- ological suggestions for investigating the em- poses (Zelizer 1994), for obviating the diverse beddedness of modern money, too. and multiple monetary repertoires with which Yet why is the anthropology of money still people engage and create spaces and times of so often a retelling of the “great transforma- value (Guyer 2004)—may in fact constitute tion” postulated by Polanyi (1944), a com- money today, its indeterminacy, its openness. pendium of exotica coupled with a morality This is not to put wholly to one side tale about the world that “we” have lost? In the claim that the state of anthropological part, at least, this is a fault of our fidelity. One and indeed broader social scientific discus- might just as well ask why we keep teaching sion about money is at an impasse.
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