Abstract
The invitation to review anthropological studies of money offers an opportunity not only to revisit the history of anthropologists’ investigations into money’s objects, meanings, and uses but also to reflect on the intersections of such work with recent psychological research. In this review essay, we survey the primary findings of the anthropology of money and the central challenges anthropological work has posed to assumptions about money’s power to abstract, commensurate, dissolve social ties, and erase difference. We summarize anthropologists’ historical concern with cultural difference and recent work on money’s materialities, meanings, and complex uses. We emphasize the pragmatics of money—from earmarking practices and the use of multiple moneys to the politics of liquidity and fungibility. In the final section of the paper, we find inspiration in recent psychological studies of money to indicate new trajectories for inquiry. Specifically, we point to three potentially fruitful areas for research: money use as a tool and infrastructure; the politics of revealing and concealing money; and money’s origins and futures as a memory device. We end with a brief reflection on ongoing monetary experiments and innovations.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Guyer adds, usefully:
The borders that we focus on are social and between communities of currency users. The thresholds are conceptual and institutional between distinctive capacities of different moneys, often implicating different moral economies of fairness (in the short run) and transcendence (in the long run). The historical shifts are moments when combinations of attributes are brought into open question and submitted to deliberate reconfiguration. (2011, p. 1).
- 3.
We will be unable to provide a comprehensive survey. Maurer (2006) provides a similar review, although we include citations to work published since then. See also Hart’s (2012) review. We do not address literature in anthropology on gifting, nor do we range into growing bodies of work on finance and debt (on finance, see Footnote 16; on debt, see Peebles, 2010; Han, 2012; Schuster, 2010, and the articles in the November 2012 special issue of Social Anthropology).
- 4.
Indeed, for Dalton, the key variable in characterizing non-Western economies was the degree to which they were integrated with Western market society.
- 5.
One of us has described this conventional account as the “money-as-acid hypothesis” (Maurer, 2006, p. 14).
- 6.
- 7.
While much of this research is contemporary, some of it draws on histories of money that have often been overlooked, and so we include select works from the ethnographic and archaeological record.
- 8.
- 9.
Zelizer’s work has provoked a debate within sociology, which focuses on the personalization of money by its users vs. money’s capacity to commensurate, especially as a sign of larger structural systems, such as finance capitalism or the state. See Dodd (2005), Fine and Lapavitsas (2000), Ingham (2001), Polillo (2011), Zelizer (2000).
- 10.
Pickles’ findings reinforce the comments made by Strathern (1999) on the capacities of money in highland Papua New Guinea. Strathern’s interlocutors in Hagen juxtapose the capacity of money to be divided (and thus to serve multiple potential uses, which necessitates choosing among them) and the singularity and non-divisibility of shell valuables. For Hageners, Strathern writes, money “did not have an individuating effect. Money was always too suggestible of alternatives. So in handing only some of it over, one was not resolving conflicting intentions in the single act, but rather activating the mind’s divisions” (p. 97).
- 11.
These studies build on anthropological work that highlights how money’s material forms provide platforms for making and remaking meaning and for innovative repurposing of money’s uses. They are also complemented by research in psychology (and economics) on the complex dynamics of denomination. Di Muro and Noseworthy (2013), for instance, show that both currency denomination and the physical appearance of money can influence spending behavior.
- 12.
Such self-sufficiency can be both desirable and undesirable:
Compared to neutral conditions, when the construct of money was activated, participants behaved in ways that were both more desirable (persistence on challenging tasks; taking on more work for oneself) and more undesirable (reduced helpfulness; placing more distance between the self and others)—in short, a mixed bag that echoes people’s ambivalence toward money and the divergent findings observed in extant research. (Vohs et al., 2008, pp. 210–211).
That is, while it is easy to associate the results of such research with narratives about how money engenders selfishness and greed, it is unclear that this is always the case. We emphasize as well that the behaviors and reactions displayed by research participants primed with money might not always lead to individualism or self-interested calculation. Anthropologists, as we have shown, have long documented the ways that money can be used to promote family, community, and social interaction—even national identity.
- 13.
On the links between money and political authority, see also Graeber (2011) and below.
- 14.
It is worthwhile to note here the emergence in studies of law and society of a legal approach to money and monetary history, much of it also inspired by this heterodox state/credit tradition. Kreitner (2012, p. 424) writes in review of this emergent literature that instead of recording the legal aspects or implications of money, this approach emphasizes the law as constitutive of money and especially of “money as a project collectively engineered and orchestrated to create liquidity.” For these scholars, money is thus a constitutional project. See especially the important work of Desan (2005, 2006, 2008, 2010).
- 15.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Jane Guyer, Smoki Musaraj, and Ivan Small for their comments, and Erik Bijleveld and Henk Aarts for their invitation to contribute to this volume and for their enthusiasm, support, and careful reading of earlier drafts of this essay.
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Nelms, T.C., Maurer, B. (2014). Materiality, Symbol, and Complexity in the Anthropology of Money. In: Bijleveld, E., Aarts, H. (eds) The Psychological Science of Money. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-0959-9_3
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