Heads and Tails Revisited

Chris Vasantkumar HEADS AND TAILS REVISITED abstract This research report revisits Keith Hart’s work on the mutual implication of token and commodity theories of money, focusing on his classic Malinowski lecture on the coin’s two sides. Hart associates ‘heads’ with political authority and token theories and ‘tails’ with quantitative value, market exchange and commodity theories. Yet, even as he argues for the necessity of a rapprochement between the intellectual approaches delimited by the coin’s two sides, the coin conceit as he elaborates it is unprepared to deal with the quotidian intermixing of ‘heads’ and ‘tails’ one encounters in actual rather than theoretical coinage. Starting from the problems posed by actual coins to the apparent clarities of Hart’s coin, this essay argues that on a material, micro-level the relationships between state power and market exchange on the one hand and ‘heads’ and ‘tails’ on the other are rather more contingent in practice than in theory. On this level, actually-existing forms of Western money are only poorly parsed by the ‘sidedness’ of the coin conceit. The a priori divisions between power and quantification, symbols and amounts, as well as their topological mapping onto discretely divided material surfaces freighted in the virtualism of ‘heads’ and ‘tails’ are a poor fit with complex amalgams of numbers, power, states, symbols and exchange we may read off the surfaces of particular coins. Keywords: anthropology of money, coinage, token and commodity theories, Keith Hart hirty years ago, in a now classic Malinowski persons in society, a token perhaps. The Lecture on the anthropology of money, other reveals the coin as a thing, capable of TKeith Hart memorably exhorted his listeners to entering into definite relations with other things, as a quantitative ratio independent Look at a coin from your pocket. On one of the persons engaged in any particular side is ‘heads’—the symbol of the political transaction. In this latter respect money is authority which minted the coin; on the like a commodity and its logic is that of other side is ‘tails’—the precise specification anonymous markets. Heads and tails stand of the amount the coin is worth as for social organisation from the top down payment in exchange. One side reminds and from the bottom up, epitomised in us that states underwrite currencies and modern theory by the state and the market that money is originally a relation between respectively. (Hart 1986: 638) suomen antropologi | volume 41 issue 1 spring 2016 26 Chris Vasantkumar Hart uses this analysis of the Janus-faced- (cf. Dodd 2014: 21). I deal with the contents of ness of money to argue for the rapprochement other pockets in my larger project.1 between token and commodity theories of Instead, starting from the problems posed money in anthropological analysis of economic by actual coins to the apparent clarities of Hart’s formations in the contemporary West. Where coin conceit, this essay argues that on a material, ‘relations between persons and things are micro-level the relationships between state typically fetishized as two contradictory camps, power and market exchange on the one hand thought of as states and markets, abstract actors and ‘heads’ and ‘tails’ on the other are rather in a Manichean universe of good and evil which more contingent in practice than in theory. On only has room for one side of the coin at any this level, I argue, the actually-existing forms time’, Hart argues by contrast, that, ‘it is surely of Western money are only poorly parsed by the case that the coin has two sides and that the ‘sidedness’ of the coin conceit. The a priori what matters is their relationship, the mutual divisions between power and quantification, constitution of politics and markets in a moving symbols and amounts, as well as their social whole’ (ibid.: 647). topological mapping onto discretely divided While Hart’s lecture is justly famous and material surfaces freighted in the virtualism has been profoundly generative for my own of ‘heads’ and ‘tails’ are a poor fit with complex work, it is the contention of this essay, that amalgams of numbers, power, states, symbols at a certain point, its contribution is diluted and exchange we may read off the surfaces of by an overemphasis on what one might call particular coins. This is true both to the degree ‘sidedness’, by which I mean an overly presentist that the regalia of state power and quantification and Eurocentrist focus on the coin conceit may be found both on obverse and reverse and itself. One sort of critique of this metaphor to the extent that one can never quite keep the immediately suggests itself—not all monies, two apart in the first place, except via particular Western or otherwise, are or have been coin sorts of modernist practices of purification. shaped (cf. Webb 1982: 455–456). Yet, while One might suggest that I am being cogent, this caveat is not the primary focus of willfully obtuse in insisting on taking Hart this essay. Here, I’m less concerned about the literally, that the usefulness of the coin conceit economic realms elided by, left out of, or roughly and its sidedness lies not in its correspondence translated into the idiom of the coin—the non- to some sort of preexisting reality but in its coins in other realms (the transactions carried heuristic power. There may well be something to out ‘without benefit of states or merchants’ [Hart this line of thinking but its validity, I suggest, is 1986: 649]) than I am about the ways in which ultimately outweighed by the instructiveness of the coin conceit misses certain fundamental particular divergences from the ideal type. For aspects of Western money itself—not least, the Hart’s coin has, arguably, taken on a kind of latter’s own cultural and historical specificity. virtualist authority—wherein in per Carrier and This essay thus does not take up the challenge Miller (1998), theory takes on a kind of power to posed by non-coined monies (whether in the reshape the real it purportedly describes. Actual form of manillas [Bohannan’s famous ‘brass coinage here might be profitably imagined as rods’], cowries, fishhooks or sycee) to received akin to Candea’s (2007: 179–180) notion of the Western notions of money as a utopian ideal ‘arbitrary location’ which he glosses as a heuristic of fungibility, liquidity or interexchangeability device intended as ‘the symmetrical inversion suomen antropologi | volume 41 issue 1 spring 2016 27 Chris Vasantkumar of the “ideal type”’. In Candea’s formulation, literally’ (ibid.: 371). Desan’s account of coin’s the arbitrary location ‘is the actually existing (re-)creation in medieval England highlights, instance, whose messiness, contingency, and in Hart’s terms, the signal role of heads in the lack of an overarching coherence… serve as a production of tails. “control” for a broader abstract object of study’ Where Desan’s account of how the penny (ibid.: 180). The parallels between the contrast came to be made of silver foregrounds the heads between ideal type and arbitrary location, and in tails, as it were, the vicissitudes of the Carolus that between the apparent nowheres of money peso (or Spanish Piece of Eight) in the Jiangnan and the market and the hard surfaces of actual region of China in the late eighteenth and coins are worthy of some reflection. Exploring nineteenth centuries highlights one potential particular situated divergences from the ideal configuration of the tails in heads. As Hart type of sidedness—wherein power and exchange reminds, heads is commonly taken to symbolize chase each other round the spinning coin in ‘the political authority which minted the coin’ flight like lovers pursuing each other across and as such it ‘stands for social organisation the surfaces of a Grecian urn—is a particularly from the top down’—in a word ‘the state’. Yet, powerful way of revealing the limits of an the closer one looks at the Carolus peso, the important constituent part of contemporary more contingent such relationships appear. approaches to money. Moreover, the particularly close connection Attending to the heads in tails and the between state authority and the production tails in heads highlights the limitations of the of currency that characterizes much of the coin as metaphor by historicizing the mythic contemporary world is revealed to be a recent narratives in which the latter is grounded. In and historically specific phenomenon. For, while this intervention, I take particular inspiration the Carolus peso of 1772 and after does indeed from the work of legal scholar, Christine Desan, bear the sizable proboscis of the Charles the who in a 2010 essay, ‘Coin Reconsidered: the Third of Spain (prior to 1772, it bore not the Political Alchemy of Commodity Money’, image of the monarch but that of the Pillars highlights the crucial, constitutive role of state of Hercules that later migrated to the reverse), power in making precious metals into apparently there was nothing transparent or obvious about ‘natural’ media for exchange. Coin, she suggests, how to read this face for the Chinese merchants was originally ‘a constitutional medium, one amongst whom it circulated (along with slightly that related the government to its participants earlier and slightly later issues) as a de facto and thus helped to configure the world it standard currency. appeared to merely measure’ (Desan 2010: 361). That Spanish coins could serve as local As Desan describes it, the process by which tender in central China is not as unusual or metal came to measure the world was anything unexpected as it might seem to contemporary but natural or inevitable.

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