The Meaning of Money in China and the United States: the 1986 Lewis
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THE MEANING OF MONEY IN CHINA AND THE UNITED STATES Hau BOOKS E xecutive Editor Giovanni da Col Managing Editor Sean M. Dowdy Editorial Board Anne-Christine Taylor Carlos Fausto Danilyn Rutherford Ilana Gershon Jason Throop Joel Robbins Jonathan Parry Michael Lempert Stephan Palmié www.haubooks.com THE MEANING OF MONEY IN CHINA AND THE UNITED STATES TE H 1986 LEWIS HENRY MOrgaN LECTUres Emily Martin Foreword by Eleana J. Kim Afterword by Jane I. Guyer and Sidney Mintz Hau Books Chicago © 2015 Hau Books and Emily Martin. Published as part of the Hau-Morgan Lectures Initiative in collaboration with the Department of Anthropology at the University of Rochester. Cover and layout design: Sheehan Moore Typesetting: Prepress Plus (www.prepressplus.in) ISBN: 978-0-9905050-2-0 LCCN: 2014953507 Hau Books Chicago Distribution Center 11030 S. Langley Chicago, IL 60628 www.haubooks.com Hau Books is marketed and distributed by The University of Chicago Press. www.press.uchicago.edu Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper. Contents Foreword by Eleana J. Kim vii Acknowledgments ix List of Figures xi Introduction 1 1. MONEY AND VALUE IN ChiNA 9 2. Spirits AND CUrreNCY IN ChiNA 59 3. MONEY AND VALUE IN THE UNited States 83 4. SPIRIT AND PROSPERITY IN THE UNited States 109 Afterword by Jane I. Guyer and Sidney Mintz 131 References 141 Index 155 Foreword The Lewis Henry Morgan lectures at the University of Rochester were inaugurated in 1962 and have been presented annually ever since. The lectures commemorate not only Morgan’s contributions to the found- ing of the University of Rochester and his support for the founding of a women’s college, but also his legacy in anthropology, as reflected in the topics of the first three lectures, which focused on kinship (Meyer Fortes, 1963), native North Americans (Fred Eggan, 1964), and technology and social evolution (Robert M. Adams, 1965). As the oldest and longest-running such lecture series in North America, the Morgan Lectures have produced some of the most influ- ential texts in modern anthropology, to name but a few: Victor Turner’s The Ritual Process, Marilyn Strathern’s After Nature, and Nancy Munn’s The Fame of Gawa. A view of the lectures after more than fifty years illus- trates the ways that anthropologists have moved well beyond Morgan’s Enlightenment roots, and also how they have expanded upon the topics that preoccupied him: kinship and social organization, political econo- my, indigenous peoples, and cross-cultural comparison. Many of the lectures have culminated in the publication of an origi- nal monograph. Some of them that have not yet appeared in print will now enjoy a second life online and in new print editions, thanks to a new collaboration with Hau, which will bring past, unpublished lectures to a wider audience. In addition, more recent lectures will be available in streaming video format on Hau’s website. viii THE MEANING OF MONEY IN CHINA AND THE UNITED STATES We are delighted to present Emily Martin’s public lectures, The mean- ing of money in China and the United States, which were first delivered in 1986 and are presented here for the first time in their entirety. These four lectures combine ethnographic richness, conceptual brilliance, and cultural critique, connecting with Morgan’s interest in property and his comparative approach. They offer an illuminating analysis of money, val- ue, and morality through the lenses of rural Taiwanese social life and the pursuits of prosperity among a Methodist sect in urban Baltimore. With the passage of time, they have remained lucid and fascinating. Moreover, they have proven to be prescient, as debt, money, currency, and finance capital would become objects of renewed ethnographic attention espe- cially at the turn of the millennium. We extend heartfelt thanks to Emily for her graciousness and enthu- siasm for this project. We also thank Giovanni da Col and Sean Dowdy for their energetic investment in this collaboration, and are grateful to their colleagues at Hau for their careful attention throughout the pro- duction process. Eleana J. Kim Rochester, April 2014 Acknowledgments I would like to thank the faculty of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Rochester, who invited me to give these lectures in 1986. I am especially grateful to Anthony Carter, who was warmly encouraging and consistently helpful before, during, and after my visit. In 2014 Eleana Kim continued this tradition of care and attention, and I thank her. I am grateful to the editorial staff of Hau for making the preparation of the manuscript orderly and efficient. In particular, I thank Sheehan Moore for the cover design and editing of figures, Giovanni da Col and Robert Foster for organizing the publication and inaugurating the Hau-Morgan Lectures Initiative, and Jane Guyer and Sidney Mintz for their new afterword. Justin Dyer’s conscientious and skillful editing was essential, and Sean Dowdy’s organized management made the pro- cess flow smoothly. I thank my family—Richard, Jenny, and Ariel—for their patience during the preparation of these lectures in 1986 and in again in 2015. Emily Martin New York City, February 2015 List of Figures Figure 1. Blaxton, The English Usurer. Title page illustration. Figure 2. The movements of money. Figure 3. Chinese coins. Photo by the author. Figure 4. Market in the early Han dynasty (206 bce–220 ce). Figure 5. Paper money from the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). Figure 6. Nineteenth-century vendors and craftsmen from Kiangsi province. Figure 7. Nineteenth-century Hong Kong physician selling his wares. Figure 8. Itinerant pepper grinder in Shanghai in the 1980s. Photo by the author. Figure 9. Nineteenth-century scholars. Figure 10. Sieving rice in Taiwan. Photo by the author. Figure 11. Nineteenth-century shoemaker and blacksmith. xii THE MEANING OF MONEY IN CHINA AND THE UNITED STATES Figure 12. Nineteenth-century tea dealers. Figure 13. Nineteenth-century individual cells for the governmental examinations. Figure 14. Merchants wearing furs and silk. Figure 15. Aerial view of terraced rice fields. Figure 16. Nineteenth-century silk reelers. Figure 17. Nineteenth-century embroiderers. Figure 18. The five grains in a rice measure in Taiwan. Photo by the author. Figure 19. The eldest son holding the rice measure in Taiwan. Photo by the author. Figure 20. Kitchen god behind the stove in Fukien province. Photo by the author. Figure 21. Close-up of image of kitchen god in Fukien province. Photo by the author. Figure 22. New Year’s house cleaning in Taiwan. Photo by the author. Figure 23. Rice harvesting in Taiwan. Photo by the author. Figure 24. Gifts being brought to the bride in Taiwan. Photo by the author. Figure 25. Gifts to the bride in Taiwan. Photo by the author. Figure 26. A bride with gifts arranged behind her in Taiwan. Photo by the author. LIST OF FIGURES xiii Figure 27. Village earth god temple in Taiwan. Photo by the author. Figure 28. Large temple in Taiwan. Photo by the author. Figure 29. Ancestral hall in Taiwan. Photo by the author. Figure 30. Collecting the ancestral bones in an urn in Taiwan. Photo by the author. Figure 31. Cleaning the ancestral bones in Taiwan. Photo by the author. Figure 32. Decorated “Honorable Pigs” in Taiwan. Photo by the author. Figure 33. Display of “Honorable Pigs” in Taiwan. Photo by the author. Figure 34. Paper spirit house from twentieth-century Hong Kong. Introduction WORKING UP TO THE 1986 MORGAN LECTURES When I wrote the 1986 Morgan Lectures, I was working in the early days of the anthropology department at Johns Hopkins University. They were written as part and parcel of my own intellectual path, but that path was strongly influenced by the department’s environment. My immediate colleagues included Sidney Mintz, Katherine Verdery, Gillian Feeley-Harnik, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Ashraf Ghani, Beatriz Lavandera, and Richard and Sally Price. So close that they might well have been in the department were David Harvey, Erica Schoenberger (geographers), and David Cohen (historian). Sidney Mintz set about leav- ening the mix by adding various luminaries for short visits or semester long residencies: Claude Lévi-Strauss, Raymond Firth, Edmund Leach, Maurice Bloch, Fredrik Barth, and Arturo Warman. Encountering and conversing with these scholars in the flesh was immensely rewarding, for they stayed with us long enough to burst the bounds of our rather parochial American obsessions. We learned the long story of their early, middle, and late research projects, their different academic homes, and the different ways they engaged with anthropological theory over the decades. We were confronted deeply with different national styles of anthropology, attached of course to different colonial histories: French anthropology, British an- thropology from the London School of Economics to Cambridge Uni- versity, Mexican anthropology, and Norwegian anthropology. 2 THE MEANING OF MONEY IN CHINA AND THE UNITED STATES The most remarkable feature of that environment was its lack of dog- ma. At the beginning of the department’s founding, we emerged as a group from a fractious atmosphere in anthropology. At the time the sub- topics within the field erew fairly well defined: economic anthropology, symbolic anthropology, linguistic anthropology, political anthropology, anthropology of religion, and so on. Students had to work within these boxes and faculty were expected to identify themselves in terms of them. At the time, anthropologists were exercised over who would win the bat- tle between materialist or symbolic accounts of human cultures. The au- thors of articles in the Annual Review of Anthropology in those years say it all: on the one hand Richard Salisbury (1973), Carol A. Smith (1974), and Harold K. Schneider (1975), and on the other Victor Turner (1975), and Abner Cohen (1979).