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Matereality, Symbol and Complexity in the Anthropology of

 

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E. Bijleveld and H. Aarts (eds.), The Psychological Science of Money ,
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4939-0959-9_3, © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014
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 anthropological challenges
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, mean-
ings, 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 devices. We end with a brief reflection on ongoing monetary experiments
and innovations.
Money has long been a topic of anthropological interest. From the giant Yap rai
stones to the global diffusion of cowrie shells for use in trade to the creation of
elaborate transactional archives in clay, string, and paper in places where physical
money-stuff did not circulate, the ethnographic and archival record is rich with a
diversity of money-objects: all manner of shells, beads, feathers, beans and
grains, textiles, clay tablets, metal artifacts (wire, blades, axes, bars, rods, rings,
and open bracelets called manillas), livestock, and much more—including, of
Chapter 3
Materiality, Symbol, and Complexity
in the Anthropology of Money
Taylor C. Nelms and Bill Maurer
TC Nelms ( * ) • B. Maurer
Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion, University of California, Irvine,
3151 Social Sciences Plaza, Irvine, CA 92697-5100, USA
38
course, coins, paper, and plastic, as well as unwritten, mental accounts-keeping.
Anthropologists and archaeologists have documented a similarly diverse set of
meanings and uses of money, exceeding and complicating the typical functions
conventionally attributed to money, from Aristotle to modern-day economics
textbooks: medium of exchange, store of value, unit of account or standard of
value, and method of payment.
Some of the earliest ethnological compendia record the use of a variety of media
for exchanges and payments. Such surveys invite a certain wonder at the expansion of
the historical and ethnographic records. In the Preface to her 1949 Survey of
Primitive Money , Quiggin ( 1949 ) mentions broad scholarly interest in the “obsolete
currencies of different countries, especially about those of the ancient civilizations
of the Orient, where money has been in use for hundreds if not thousands of years”
(p. ix). The book offers a survey of “primitive money” by continent and region or
country, with a separate chapter for “cowries and beads,” which, she says, “cannot
be confined within these [geographical] limits” (p. 25). 1
Cowries offer, in fact, an important case for the anthropology of money. Harvested
primarily from the waters of the Indian Ocean, these shells came to be a predomi-
later form of payment from China to Africa, circulating transnationally beginning as
early as the eleventh century through Indian Ocean and Mediterranean commercial
networks and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Billions of shells were imported to
Asia, Africa, and Europe and used in conjunction with a variety of local money-
objects, including colonial currencies, in complex patterns of exchange (Hogendorn
& Johnson, 1986 ). In the nineteenth century, cowries were accepted in some colo-
nial jurisdictions for the payment of taxes, even as colonial officials attempted to
demonetize the shells, continuing imports produced hyperinflation and devaluation,
and local peoples in some circumstances refused to use the government-imposed
money (Gregory, 1996 ). The cowrie's historical importance exerts an influence even
today: The Ghanaian currency, for instance, is named the cedi , the Akan word for
cowrie (Dzokoto, Young, & Mensah, 2010 ; Dzokoto, Mensah, & Opare-Henaku,
2011), and in some parts of West Africa, people still use cowries in rituals, offer-
ings, and alms (Şaul, 2004 ).
This history of the cowrie's varied use as money speaks to recent approaches to
the study of money in anthropology. The earliest surveys of what was called “primi-
tive money” assumed a unilineal evolutionary trajectory in the development of
money-objects and their functions (from, as we will explain below, “special-” to
"general purpose"). Particular money-objects were linked to particular peoples and
culturally specific circumstances for payment—say, the exchange of shell valuables
for pigs, or cattle for wives. The global circulation of cowrie shells, however, dem-
onstrates that the use of certain objects in transactions extended well beyond the
assumed boundaries of cultural difference or function. It points to the internal diver-
sity of the category of things we call money, as well as its temporal dynamism. Such
diversity and dynamism directs analytical attention to, as Guyer ( 2011 , p. 1) puts it
1 See also Einzig ( 1948), Ridgeway ( 1892), and Stearn ( 1889 ).
TC Nelms and B. Maurer
39
in a recent review, “[b]orders, thresholds, and historical shifts,” especially those
emerging from colonial encounters. 2 As Guyer ( 1995 , 2004) has consistently played-
tained, the complexity of such interfaces makes it difficult to sustain, notions of
boundedness, simple functionalism, and historical or ethnocentric approaches to
understanding the currency of money-objects.
Anthropological research on money—its forms, functions, meanings, and
uses—now assumes such diversity and complexity, while continuing to investigate
both the materiality of money and the symbolism money-forms elicit. In this chapter-
ter, we review key findings in the anthropology of money and trace potential inter-
sections among these findings and recent psychological studies of money. We
suggest that bringing together psychology and anthropology on the question of
money is quite felicitous, as anthropologists have often seen in transformations of
money manifestations of transformations in human consciousness itself, from
changes in memory afforded by external recording devices to various kinds of
abstraction, evaluation, and calculation. We also argue that recent psychological
literature examining the effects of use or exposure to money on people's mental,
emotional, and neurological states dovetails with recent anthropological approaches
to money that foregrounds its pragmatics. This pragmatic approach shifts ques-
tions about what money is towards questions of what money does and the broader
sociocultural processes it indexes and opens up for empirical and analytical
consideration.
In this chapter, we first review, over the course of two sections, the history of
conventional anthropological investigations of money. 3 We then introduce the chal-
lenge posed by recent anthropological work to this conventional story, before turn-
ing to examine, in turn, three central themes: (1) the material stuff of money and the
effects of its materiality; (2) the symbolic meanings attached to money and the use
of money to translate between different realms of meaning, matter, and value; and
(3) the complexity of people's monetary practices (eg, earmarking and sequester-
ing, or the manipulation of diverse scales of value) and the social effects of such
practices. In our final section, we turn to psychological research on money as a kind
of tools; on money and conceptions of power or capacity; and on the place of trans-
actional records in the evolution of money as a memory device. Our goal is to suss
out potential points of intersection between certain trajectories in the psychology of
money and emerging research in anthropology.
2 Guyer adds, usefully: The borders that we focus on are social and between communities of cur-
rency users. The thresholds are conceptual and institutional between distinctive capacities of dif-
ferent 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 ).
3 Materiality, Symbol, and Complexity in the Anthropology of Money
40
Theories of Money, Cultural Difference,
and the Mind in Anthropology
Conventional approaches to money in anthropology were concerned with
definitional questions, especially how to classify the so-called primitive currencies
of non-Western peoples. Debates about how to understand these material objects
frequently stood in for arguments about how to make sense of cultural difference
generally, and these latter discussions often involved assumptions about the minds
of the people being studied.
At the heart of these debates was the question of how to define money, one shared
broadly across the emerging human sciences in the 18th and 19th centuries. The
period itself, not coincidentally, saw profound changes in economic and market
relations, especially the expansion of transoceanic colonial and mercantile networks
and predominantly Euro-American (but also Chinese, Arab, and Indian) global
social formations, which brought more and more peoples—and their moneys and
modes of figuring value—into relation with one another, often hierarchically (Wolf,
1982). Two main strands of Western thinking on money derived from these global
encounters. One, harking back to Aristotle, saw money in functional terms (as a
means of exchange, unit of account, and store of value, as well as standard of value
and methods of payment). This strand tended to posit that money solved the “double
coincidence of wants” (Jevons, 1875 ) problem of a supposed era of primitive barter
by serving as a common means of exchange that could equilibrate the value of dif-
ferent commodities (eg, Menger, 1892 ). It also posited that money fashioned from
precious metals solved a value-storage problem since gold and silver, unlike iron or
perishable commodities like grain, can last generations (and is therefore heritable).
The general version of this monetary tradition is categorized as the commodity the-
ory of money and the more specific version (embracing gold and silver) as metal-
lism (Schumpeter, 2006 /1954; see also Bell, 2001 ; Desan, 2005 ; Wray, 2010 ).
The other main strand of thinking on money tends to emphasize the role of
social relations and conventions in the creation of money, focusing on interper-
personal trust and credibility among market participants, as well as the credibility and
authority of the state in warranting—and backing up by force—contracts settled in
terms of its coin, as argued by the so-called chartalists (Innes, 1913 , 1914 ; Knapp,
, 1924 /1905; Wray, 2004 ; see also Graeber, 2011). By the early twentieth century,
commodity money proponents were challenged by state money proponents, most
notably John Maynard Keynes (eg, 1930 ). With the rise of a post-World War II
economic order, however, the resurgence of classical liberal and neoliberal eco-
nomic theory (and, by century's end, apparent global market dominance) tended to
favor versions of commodity money theory. These located money's origins in bar-
ter and emphasizing its functions as medium of exchange (in theory) and store of
value (in policy). Such orthodoxies have incorporated the end of the gold standard
and the emergence of fiat money and central banking.
TC Nelms and B. Maurer
41
Yet the early twenty-first century is also witnessing renewed interest in the nature
of money. Contemporary conversations often recapitulate previous debates, with
commodity proponents sounding like latter-day Goldbugs from the postbellum
United States (Carruthers & Babb, 1996 ; O'Malley, 2012). Other times, new con-
figurations emerge, such as when alternative currency practitioners echo credit the-
orists, historically aligned with chartalism, while imagining moneys without a state,
based on interpersonal trust and shared values ​​(North, 2010 ) or even cryptographic
code and decentralized digital networks (Maurer, Nelms, & Swartz, 2013 ). We will
return briefly to this recent intensification of interest in money at the end of this
chapter, when we point to the proliferation of such experiments with money,
exchanges, and payments.
The anthropological record is routinely called on to adjudicate contending claims
on the origin and nature of money. At issue are whether and how one can specify
presumed human cultural universals—a core problem of anthropology, given its incis-
tension on both the “psychic unity of mankind” (as Adolph Bastian famously put it) and
sometimes incommensurable, untranslatable cultural difference. Classic anthropo-
logical investigations of money reflect this tension. In the final chapter to Argonauts
of the Western Pacific , Malinowski ( 1984 /1922, p. 510) declared that the “tokens of
wealth” circulating in the Trobriand Islands through the system of ritual inter-island
exchange called the kula “are neither used nor regarded as money or currency.”
Although both shell money and money “represent condensed wealth,” the circulation
of shell valuables is “subject to all sorts of strict rules and regulations,” and must
therefore “conform to a definite code” (p. 511). That code is not, Malinowski insists,
that of the market; “the transaction is not a bargain,” and since the exchange of shell
valuables is not motivated or governed by the logic of market exchange, they are not,
according to Malinowski, money.
Kula valuables should instead provoke us, Malinowski argued, to reconsider the
application of such categories and the “crude, rationalistic conceptions of primitive
mankind” they imply to non-Western peoples. If anything, “the kula shows us that
the whole conception of primitive value; the very incorrect habit of calling all
objects of value 'money' or 'currency'; the current ideas of primitive trade and
primitive ownership—all these have to be revised in the light of our institution”
(p. 516). If we want to understand “the native's point of view” (p. 25), we cannot
rely on analytical categories that reduce that point of view to simplistic models of
“enlightened self-interest” borrowed from “current economic textbooks” (p. 60).
Firth, who turned to anthropology from economics after meeting Malinowski,
arrived at a similar conclusion, arguing that “[i]n any economic system, however
primitive, an article can only be regarded as true money when it acts as a definite
and common medium of exchange, as a convenient stepping stone in obtaining one
type of goods for another” (Firth, 1929 , p. 880; in Dominguez, 1990 , p. 20). money,
Firth suggests, is meant primarily to facilitate exchange, although he notes that the
other functions inevitably follow; while there might be some overlap in the func-
tions of money from one society to the next, for non-Western societies, tokens of
value entails much more than rational economic decision-making under conditions
3 Materiality, Symbol, and Complexity in the Anthropology of Money
42
of scarcity. Money, according to Malinowski and Firth, is a notion taken from the
Euro-American conceptual repertoire and so limits our understanding of other peo-
ple's economic lives.
The views expressed by Malinowski and Firth—and in particular, the importance
they give to understanding the limits of the generalizing categories of social
science—represent one important line of thinking in anthropology about money,
one that recites orthodox Western economic models of money even as it challenges
the suitability of such models for other peoples and practices. For these anthropologists-
gists, the use of money in its strictest sense implied a mental disposition, indeed a
particular psychology—that of the calculating homo economicus , which should be
juxtaposed with, in Malinowski's words, “a fundamental fact of native usage and
psychology: the love of give and take for its own sake; the active enjoyment in pos-
session of wealth, through handling it over” ( 1984 /1922, p. 173). This us–them
juxtaposition—between the economizing or profit-maximizing tendencies of users
of “modern money” and the “social” character and uses of non-Western money—
echoes throughout the history of the anthropology of money (as it does in anthropol-
ogy generally). That distinction, for instance, has often been figured as one between
the logics of “commodity” and “gift” exchange (Gregory, 1982 ; see also Godelier,
1999), even as anthropologists attempt to complicate that gift-commodity binary
(Appadurai, 1986 ; Strathern, 1988 ; Thomas, 1991 ).
Indeed, some of the earliest anthropologists to consider money undermined
such distinctions even as they relied upon them. As Hart ( 1986 ) has pointed out,
Mauss ( 1990/1950, p. 100, n. 29) criticizes Malinowski in a lengthy footnote in
The Gift for using the term “money” in “a restricted sense” and arbitrarily bound-
ing its meaning: “[T]he question posed in this way concerns only the arbitrary limit
that must be placed on the use of the word. In my view, one only defines in this way
a second type of money—our own.” Mauss proposes that since so-called primitive
currencies “have purchasing power, and [that] this power has a figure set on it”—
that is, since non-Western peoples calculate what they can obtain in exchange for
certain generally circulating objects—“these precious objects have the same func-
tion as money in our societies and accordingly deserve at least to be placed in the
same category” (p. 101).
The us–them, commodity-gift, “modern”-“primitive” dualisms, then, could be
subsumed to another level of analytical juxtaposition, between using such layered
divisions and collapsing them. Malinowski's own distinctions, in fact, fell apart,
despite his arguments about the misapplication of economic models to non-Western
social forms. He famously compared, for instance, the kula valuables—those he
should not be categorized as “money”—to England's Crown Jewels
( 1984 /1922, pp. 88–89).
In the mid-twentieth century, anthropologists building on the work of Polanyi
(and echoing Mauss) critiqued the “formalist” positions of some of their colleagues
for drawing the lines too narrowly around what kinds of objects and practices should
count as “money.” Those working in this so-called substantivist tradition, such as
George Dalton ( 1965 , p. 45; see also Polanyi, 1968), argued that anthropologists
cannot “judge whether or not money-like stuff in primitive economies is really
TC Nelms and B. Maurer
43
money by how closely the uses of the primitive stuff resembles our own,” but instead
that “money” must be defined within the context of its use. Yet the basic division
between “their” money and “ours” remains and would continue to prove central to
social scientific understandings of money until the present day: While the money of
non-Western peoples was plural, confined to particular circuits of exchange, and
deeply embedded in complex social relationships that made it impossible to agree
rate from kinship, politics, religion, and so on, the money of Western colonial power-
ers was more abstract, less tangible, less social, more impersonal, and marked by
functional unification, such that one money-object could serve all the functions
required of it by economists (Guyer, 1995 ). Polanyi ( 1957) called the former “spe-
cial purpose” money and the latter “general purpose.” When the two came into
contact, general-purpose money was thought to overwhelm, replace, and transform
special-purpose money. 4
Joining Polanyi, Dalton, and other substantivists, Bohannan provided the proto-
type for the interaction between special- and general-purpose money: In a series of
essays about his fieldwork among the Tiv in colonial West Africa, Bohannan ( 1955 ,
1959; see also Bohannan & Bohannan, 1968) juxtaposed the Western “unicentric”
market economy with the Tiv “multicentric” economic system. For the Tiv, not all
goods were equally exchangeable, but circulated, according to Bohannan, within
distinct “spheres of exchange.” Even if a certain commodity took on the status of
universal equivalent within a particular domain, there was no “common denomination-
tor among all the spheres” ( 1959 , p. 500). The imposition of a colonial currency by
the British administration, however—introducing coinage, demanding that taxes be
paid in that medium, expanding trade with the Tiv—provided just such a general
purpose money. Colonial efforts to promote European currency also in the
inflation of local money-objects, debasing them and making them less attractive
alternatives. Bohannan emphasized that for the Tiv, the introduction of general-
purpose money allowed traditionally illicit conversions between spheres, permitting
those with access to it to circumvent status distinctions. Since “[i]t is in the nature
of a general purpose money that it standardizes the exchangeability value of every
item to a common scale,” the “impact of money” is specifically to expense differ-
ence by Replacing “special-purpose” money with general-purpose money. Modern
money, Bohannan ( 1959 , p. 135) wrote, “creates its own revolution.”
Money, Modernity, and Anthropology's “Savage Slot”
Anthropologists of money today reject such straightforward stories of encounter
and change for reasons we will elucidate below. But it is important to understand the
basic structure of such arguments, centrally because it reiterates in many ways a
familiar narrative in the social sciences and beyond about money and its effects on,
in Simmel's ( 2004 /1907, p. 52) words, the “inner world[s]” of individuals and the
4 Indeed, for Dalton, the key variable in characterizing non-Western economies was the degree to
which they were integrated with Western market society.
3 Materiality, Symbol, and Complexity in the Anthropology of Money
44
"culture" of modern life. Recounted in detail elsewhere (by, for instance, Zelizer,
1989, 1997/1994, 1998), this conventional story portrays money as concomitant to
and catalyst of a general transition to a modern world marked by the alienation of
human beings from the fruits of their labor and the breakdown of established, often
hierarchical social structures and traditional attachments to community. As a university-
sal and internally uniform measure that “commensurates incommensurabilities”
(Carruthers & Espeland, 1998 , p. 1400) and permits the “fraternization of impossi-
bilities” [in Marx's famous words ( 1964 /1844, p. 169)], money is said to allow the
erasure of qualitative difference in favor of a single numerical scale; the imposition
of impersonal, rational, instrumental, calculative modes of thought and comparison;
the detachment of human beings from the world of things; and the “hollowing out”
and weakening of social relations and promotion of individualism (Gilbert, 2005 ,
p. 379). Hence Simmel's ( 1950 , p. 412) famous characterization of money as
“transform[ing] the world into an arithmetic problem”—a typical depiction of the
psychological changes said to accompany the use of money. In this almost mythical
story, money is linked not only to the dissolution of ties among persons and com-
munities but also the imposition of novel mental dispositions oriented towards the
formal, quantitative means-ends calculation of self-interest. 5
This transformative narrative reinforces assumptions about quantification and
number as well. Crump, documenting language change among the Maya of south-
ern Mexico, argued that it was the introduction of market relationships, and in par-
ticular the use of modern money, that shifted indigenous ways of counting. Tzotzil,
like many other languages, employed a system of noun classification. Modes of
enumeration were tied to specific noun classes: “Tzotzil numbers,” Crump ( 1978 ,
p. 505) writes “are incomplete without one of five possible suffixes which depend
upon an implicit semantic classification of all nouns.” The word for the number
“four” changes depending on whether it refers to “years,” “dogs,” “houses,” “men,”
or “ears of corn.” With greater incorporation into the wider national and global mar-
Note, Tzotzil-speaking Maya gradually came to adopt one standard (Spanish) system
of counting and did so through specific interactions with Ladinos—in open-air mar-
sneakers characterized by haggling over prices and quantities. Money thus comes in
first, followed by abstract enumeration not linked to other forms of classification,
such that the “three” in “three cows” is no different from the “three” in “three
pesos,” chickens, persons, or any other enumerable entity.
It is important to note that, as with this example, anthropology occupies a consis-
tent role in the oft-told story of the impact of modern money, filling what Trouillot
( 2003 ) calls “the savage slot.” Anthropological accounts provide the other side to
the “revolution” that Bohannan argued money created—that is, descriptions of the
specific, socially embedded money-objects (or ways of counting, calculating, or
reasoning) of non-Western people. This too-simplistic equation—the story of the
social and the particular displaced by the universalizing, formalizing, and individuals
alizing—remains with us, especially the assumption that in its capacity to flatten
5 One of us has described this conventional account as the “money-as-acid hypothesis” (Maurer,
2006 , p. 14).
TC Nelms and B. Maurer
45
social differences, money institutes a temporal rupture between the modern world
of alienation, individualism, and commodity exchange and the non-modern world
of solidarity, reciprocity, and social embeddedness.
Here, money serves to discursively reproduce the modern, which is marked by
the development of a particular kind of general-purpose money: an abstracted,
homogenizing, multifunctional medium of exchange capable of initiating profound
social transformations by virtue of its abstract power to make all the world equiva-
lent to it. Modern money is supposedly detached from its social meanings and ori-
gins and becomes capable of liberating both persons and things from the specific
sociocultural webs of meaning and use in which they were embedded. Accounts of
money's evolution and progressive dematerialization—purporting to trace the his-
tory of money from barter to socially embedded, special-purpose money to general-
purpose money, which itself is said to evolve from coin to paper notes to, finally, the
digital form of money today—reinforce such false distinctions and yet continue to
circulate (eg, Ferguson, 2008 ; Surowiecki, 2012; Weatherford, 1998). In what fol-
lows, we show how anthropological approaches to the study of money challenge
this narrative and show up its erroneous assumptions.
First, however, we want to briefly explore the theoretical frameworks offered by
Marx, Weber, and Simmel since our received story of money and modernization has
roots in these classic sociological accounts. We emphasize, however, that the work
of these three authors is rich and nuanced enough to provide provocations for
anthropologists working on money today. (We can offer here only a superficial
take). For Marx, commodity money—primarily gold and silver—occupies a central
role in mediating capitalist relations of production and exchange. For Marx, all
commodities become reducible in the abstract to money, which “extinguishes all
distinctions” among them ( 1976 , p. 229). But this does not erase the commodity
character of money; Marx called money the “privileged commodity,” at once a
commodity like all others and yet set apart from them to serve as general measure
of their exchange value ( 1976 , p. 187). Money is thus paradigmatic of Marx's cen-
neutral analytical object: industrial capitalism generally. In money, Marx suggested,
one can find “the riddle of the commodity fetish, now become visible and dazzling
to our eyes” ( 1976 , p. 187). Or again: “All commodities are perishable money,”
Marx ( 1973 /1939, p. 149) writes in the Grundrisse , but “money is the imperishable
commodities.”
Like Marx, Weber and Simmel understood money to be at the heart of social and
economic transformations ongoing throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. Unlike Marx, Weber stressed the importance of the state in the creation of
money and of bureaucratic agents in regulating its circulation. But like Marx, Weber
emphasized how money can act as an abstract measure through which the values ​​of
other things can be compared and commensurated; with money, Weber ( 1978 , p. 81,
emphasis in original) wrote, came the possibility of “monetary calculation ; that is,
the possibility of assigning money values ​​to all goods and services which in any way
might enter into transactions of purchase and sale.” Weber thus saw money as part
of the increasing rationalization of modern life, since, according to Weber, “expres-
sion in money term yields the highest degree of formal calculability” ( 1978 , p. 85).
3 Materiality, Symbol, and Complexity in the Anthropology of Money
46
Simmel's approach also foregrounds the role of money in social transformation.
But Simmel describes the ambiguity of this process and shows how the emergence
of the kind of universal-equivalent money discussed by Marx and Weber has both
liberating and homogenizing effects. Money—by virtue of its fungibility, “its
unconditional interchangeability, the internal uniformity that makes each piece
exchangeable for another, according to quantitative measures”—parttakes of a pro-
gressive process through which our relationship to the material world becomes
more and more abstract, until finally, “through money, man is no longer enslaved in
things” (2004, p. 407). This progressive distancing of the human subject from the
world of objects is accompanied, within a money economy, by a loosening of peo-
ple's social ties to others and to traditional hierarchical categories. Thus, for all
three of these emblematic social thinkers, money is linked to the emergence of a
modernity marked by the dissolution of a prior world of rigid social attachments
and communities. For Simmel, money's capacity to emancipate people from the
restrictions imposed by heritable corporate status paradoxically produces an egali-
danceism that erases ascribed rank, such that money becomes the central tool medi-
ating social relations. As we will see, the effects of such mediation cannot inevitably
be predicted.
Challenging the Received Narrative
And yet, despite the typical “modernizing” story of money, the world's diverse
monetary ecologies have not been simply overwhelmed by a progressive homo-
enization, quantification, dematerialization, dissolution of social ties, and so on.
The classic narrative of socioeconomic transformation in Africa and around the
world, for instance, has been challenged by accounts that point to resistance to the
imposition of colonial currencies (Şaul, 2004 ), alternative causes of local currency
inflation (Gregory, 1996 ), and the long historical experience of many societies
with multiple currency systems and regional trading networks, which preexisted
colonial economies and then coexisted alongside them (Guyer, 1995 , 2004 ). 6 aces
Robbins and Akin ( 1999 , p. 1) explain for Melanesia (but which could easily
apply elsewhere),
Widespread social scientific expectations that global capitalist expansion would quickly
overwhelm traditional Melanesian economies have been confounded by the latter's dyna-
mism and resilience. Indeed, many local systems of exchange appear to have flourished
rather than withered from linkage with the world economy, and state currencies and
imported goods mingle within formal exchange systems fundamental to social reproduction.
6 On the coexistence of multiple currencies, see also the classic chapter by Mintz (19 1964) on
Gresham's Law in Jamaica in the eighteenth century and the groundbreaking work of historian
Kuroda ( 2008 ).
TC Nelms and B. Maurer
47
Far from the advent of money having consigned indigenous currencies to irrelevance, the
two instruments of exchange are clearly in dialogue throughout Melanesia.
Anthropologists today therefore continue to explore the intersections of money
and social change, but in ways that do not presuppose the direction or completeness
of such changes. Roitman ( 2005 ) offers a reconsideration of the imposition of colo-
nial currency through taxation as a political technology of state and subject forma-
tion, locating money and tax at the heart of political obligation. Ewart ( 2013 ), on the
other hand, describes the complex relationship between the Panará (an indigenous
people living in Brazil), Brazilian currency, and the manufactured goods to which
such currency provides access, arguing that the Panará's interest in money and
goods does not reflect growing “dependence,” but long-standing, pre-existing orient-
tations toward outsider-others, including the state. And Guyer ( 1995 , 2011 ) sug-
gests that the “currency interface” between ostensibly modern and primitive money
has been re-invented in the late-twentieth century in the distinction between “hard”
national currencies like the US dollar, which are used internationally as reserve cur-
rencies, and “soft” national currencies and other money-like coupons used primarily
in their cash form. Other anthropologists have explored the link between money and
modernity in local or indigenous idioms and highlight, as we review below, the
multiplicity of money—local, national, and transnational (Cole, 2004 ; Hutchinson,
1992; Shipton, 1989 ; Taussig, 1980 ). Rutherford ( 2001 ) shows, for instance, how in
parts of Indonesia, money signifies foreignness, but is used in the service of both
social intimacy and alienation.
Bloch and Parry's ( 1989 ) signature contribution is in some ways representative
of much of this work. They point up the diversity of meanings and forms money can
assume in different places and in different times but also suggest commonalities in
the way monetary exchanges are conceptualized depending on whether transactions
guided by a short-term profit motives interfere with or threaten the long-term capac-
ity of a social group to reproduce itself and its value system. Bloch and Parry thus
attempt to redirect attention away from popular Western ideologies about money—
such as those outlined above—and toward the timescales that frame particular trans-
actional categories, whether monetary or nonmonetary. Guyer ( 2011 ) similarly
proposes that greater attention should be paid to the temporalities of using different
monetary forms and converting among them.
Such research displays a marked departure from the questions that have convention
nationally occupied anthropologists when studying money. Instead of definitional
inquiries into what money “is” or what makes “their” money different from “ours,”
anthropologists today are concerned to document empirically the pragmatics of
money—that is, its material forms, meanings, and uses in practice. 7
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
records.
3 Materiality, Symbol, and Complexity in the Anthropology of Money
48
Money and Materiality
Often, all that is available in the archaeological and ethnographic record on
pre- modern or nonwestern forms of exchange are the material objects used in such
exchanges. This, in part, accounts for the focus on the stuff of money in anthropol-
ogy. Even when that stuff consists of familiar objects like metal coins, however, it
can be tricky to interpret. Were silver coins used in market exchanges in the ancient
eastern Mediterranean, for example? Or were they sumptuary or ritual offerings,
distributed almost like souvenirs at fairs, given as medals to honor soldiers, or
meant to announce the name of the local sovereign? When it comes to the objects
that numismatists classify under the heading “Odd and Curious Money,” the metal
rings, iron rods, carved shells, bone, and other materials, the interpretation gets
even trickier. 8
Part of the problem is that the people using such “odd” moneys rarely imagined
these objects could be used as a general standard of value for all other goods and
services, or that objects given in exchange for a good or service somehow reflected
its “value” (understood to be a ranking on an abstract, external, transcendental and
potentially universally applicable scale). The very logic of the transaction led in
other directions. In parts of Papua New Guinea, for instance, a shell or packet of
sago flour was not exchanged for a pig so much as it substituted for the pig in the
pig's position in a series of social relationships forged through marriage. Not any
shell could stand in for such a pig; it had to be a specific shell, with its own social
history, substituting for a specific pig. Rather than a calculation involving ratios
(how many shells or how much sago makes up one pig?), this is an operation of
substitution (how many make up the “right one”? Strathern, 1992 , p. 187). similarly,
the metal artifacts used in some African societies rarely took on all of the Aristotelian
functions of money at the same time (Guyer, 2004 ), and even where they appeared
to be used as such—in exchange for, say, a cow or a wife—what mattered was how
the object stood in for a set of social relations newly created, sundered, or reconfig-
ured (Graeber, 2001 ).
Strathern's insights offer a starting point for thinking about money's materiali-
ties. In work on the role of money in Cuban Ifá cults, Holbraad ( 2005 , p. 232)
writes, for instance, that money's “trademark quality” is its multiplicity or “pliable
partibility." Counterintuitively, however, Holbraad argues that money's quantity
does not necessarily imply abstraction and commensuration; the moment of expen-
diture or consumption, for instance, “eclipses the purview of possible worlds with a
concrete exchange” (p. 244). (Indeed, according to Hart [ 2009 , p. 140], money's
“persuasiveness” follows from “the fluency of its mediation between infinite potential-
tial and finite determination.”) Quantity as a quality of money also shapes the prag-
matics of its handling, counting, storage, and movement, as well as the possibilities
8 On the archaeology of money and the origins of coinage, see Eagleton and Williams ( 2007),
Grierson ( 1977 ), Haselgrove and Krmnicek ( 2012), Smith ( 2004 ), von Reden ( 1997 ), and several
of the contributions to Wray ( 2004 ).
TC Nelms and B. Maurer
49
for its social concealment and revelation (Guyer personal communication; see also
Pickles, 2013b , Strathern, 1999). “[A]ll currencies objectify quantitative measures
in concrete forms,” writes Weiss ( 1997 , p. 352).
Money's materiality is also important because of its role in the debates between
commodity and credit or state money proponents. Cases where people use nonpre-
cious metals or objects as money confound commodity theories and lend weight to
alternative accounts emphasizing the role of money in signifying trust, credibility
and social connections. On the other hand, proponents of commodity money often
the material qualities of precious metals (and other money objects)–their
durability or malleability, for instance–and this remains true today, notwithstanding
the widespread use of fiat currency: Witness the rise of contemporary commodities-
money supporters, who call for an end to the US Federal Reserve and fractional
reserve banking generally and for a return to the gold standard. Some have argued
that such stances have historically reflected deep-seated commitments to reinforc-
ing hierarchies of race and class since gold-standard theories imply a world in which
value corresponds perfectly to substance and wealth to merit—with regards to peo-
ple as well as things (O'Malley, 2012 ). Money's substance is thought to stand in for,
and shore up, a social formation.
Money's material qualities turn up in anthropological accounts where other
properties or social phenomena are analogized to a people's or country's particular
money-stuff. “Not all cash is alike,” notes Lemon ( 1998 , p. 22) in a study of the
aesthetic and affective relationship Russians after the Soviet period held toward US
dollars. There, “hard” currency was imagined to link people to more solid and
secure futures. In the same way, anthropologists have explored money's role in sym-
bolizing the nation and post-nation in a unifying Europe (Peebles, 2011 ) and other
emerging post-Socialist contexts (Truitt, 2013 ). In El Salvador, in contrast, the
imagination of a wealthy but turbulent future fostered by flows of remittances in US
dollars gets concretized in the designation of Washington, DC—the source of
migrants' remittances—as “ la mina de oro (the gold mine)”, but Intipuca, one
remittance destination village, as “ el pueblo de los ladrones (the town of thieves)”
(Pedersen, 2002 , p. 433). Other analogical extensions are possible, too, including to
the spiritual world: Kwon ( 2007 ) describes the various meanings elicited by replica
money burned as a ritual offering to gods, ancestors and ghosts in Vietnam and how,
as it becomes more common to use replica US dollars, such “Do La” money can
become either a token of authority challenging traditional spiritual hierarchies or a
token of emancipation and a sign of the democratization of the spiritual world.
Finally, Chu ( 2010 , p. 5) describes a variety of mundane and ritual tools, such as
replica US $100, issued and underwritten by the Bank of Heaven and Hell and lit-
tering the streets after a funeral procession, which mediate the “pragmatics of
desire” of rural Chinese preparing to migrate to the USA.
These studies show how the specific material qualities of money can become
fodder for varied meaning-making practices. In work in Indonesia, Strassler ( 2009 ,
p. 70) points to how a large-denomination Indonesian bill displaying the face of the
dictator Suharto became “visual shorthand” for corruption and the abuse of state
power after his resignation. The abstract exchange value or purchasing power of any
3 Materiality, Symbol, and Complexity in the Anthropology of Money
50
given money-object, she insists, does not “account for the ways that money is necessary-
sarily concretized,” nor how its material form furnishes possibilities for resignifica-
tion and refunctioning (p. 71). Indeed, Keane ( 2001 , p. 69; cf. Keane, 2008 ) has
argued persuasively that money's “irreducible materiality” leads to its “semiotic
underdetermination,” making money vulnerable to slippage and thus forever open
to reinterpretation. “The matter of money—the way that no money exists entirely in
the abstract, but must always find material expression in cash, coin, the “odd and
curious,” or the electronic infrastructure of digital accounting—provides a foundation-
tion for symbolic innovation.
Money and Symbol
This consideration of money's materialities has thus also involved a reconsideration
of money's meanings. Focusing on money-stuff instead of monetary abstraction and
commensuration reopens anthropological and linguistic debates over the nature of
language itself, even as it draws on a long-standing trope comparing money and
language (Derrida, 1992 ; Shell, 1978 , 1982 , 1995 ). Anthropologists have long been
influenced by Saussurean structuralist understandings of the arbitrary connection
between the signifier and the signified. Saussure's own model of the relationship
between signifier and signified and among signifiers as a system of values ​​was
expressed via a money metaphor:
To determine what a five-franc piece is worth one must therefore know: (1) that it
can be exchanged for a fixed quantity of a different thing, eg, bread; and (2) that
it can be compared with a similar value of the same system, eg, a one-franc piece,
or with coins of another system (a dollar, etc.). In the same way a word can be
exchanged for something dissimilar, an idea; besides, it can be compared with some-
thing of the same nature, another word (Saussure, 1966 , p. 115; see Maurer, 2006).
Some anthropological work on money upholds the Saussurean understanding of
the sign (in this case, the money sign) as a product of convention and as arbitrary in
its relation to that for which it stands (bread, commodities, abstract value) and in
relation to other kinds of its type (dollars, francs, pesos, etc.). some anthropologists,
for instance, have begun to ask what happens to money in moments of crisis, when
hyperinflation or devaluation threatens money's representational capacity to stand
for values. Argentine social scientists, for instance, have documented the effects of
the collapse of the country's currency regime in the early 2000s, including the pro-
liferation of local currencies (Luzzi, 2010 ; Ould-Ahmed, 2010 ). Neiburg ( 2010) , pp.
98–99) suggests that Brazilians and Argentines have learned to live with “sick cur-
rencies” and monetary instability in part by learning how to use numerical devices
like “index numbers” (for example, indicators of price changes) to protect them-
selves from inflation and depreciation. Nonetheless, even if people become accus-
tomed to monetary instability and adept at negotiating multiple currencies, questions
about the “real value” of money or the tangible ground of the relationship between
money and value often persist (Dominguez, 1990 ). Here money becomes a vehicle
TC Nelms and B. Maurer
51
for concerns about representation per se. Examples of situations like these—of
money in crisis or of the manipulation of multiple currencies and money-objects at
once—abound, but anthropological research in this area continues to develop. (See
Guyer, 2011 for a call to action.)
As we have already seen, the introduction of Western-style money frequently
provides occasion not just for anthropologists but also for their interlocutors to reflect
on money and symbolic processes. Again, the record from Papua New Guinea is
instructive, probably because of the long assessment of material things not as stable
objects, but as (the product of) variegated, multiple flows of energy, blood, kinship,
and/or spirits. Money for Melanesians embodies “the paradox of social reproduction,”
how the social and cosmic order endures despite the “transient individual lives that
animate it” (Foster, 1999 , p. 229). Where some nineteenth century Americans railed
against paper currency because they felt it to be representationally inadequate to
abstract value money is supposed to signify, Melanesians take paper money as “the
skin of the state—the site where [they] might look for news about relationships to the
powerful forces brought by contact with white people and their institutions” (p. 230).
For Foster, the representational dilemmas posed by money (especially to Westerners)
are perhaps irresolvable. “Doubts,” he says, “persistently” (p. 226).
On the other hand, anthropological research on other cultures' money- stuff and
other people's understandings of value and modes of evaluation has often discov-
ered that money signs are non-arbitrary and motivated (or linked to their referent),
directing anthropologists to other accounts of semiotic processes. In addition, the
process of abstracting and equilibrating presumed in the Saussurean account bor-
ders on the mystical for many non-Western peoples; it is not surprising, therefore,
to find in the introduction of Western-style currency around the world indigenous
discourses that associate it with magic, religious conversion, and a transmutation of
the material into the spiritual and back again (Taussig, 1980 ).
In recent work, the question has shifted from one about what money signifies—
which invites these questions about the representational adequacy of any monetary
form to its value—to how money signifies. This leads back to the empirical invest-
gation of the entailments and implications of money's many forms and uses,
although with revised understandings of how signification can work. Drawing on
Peirce, a significant group of anthropologists working on money and value have
drawn attention to how material qualities of things (such as heft or texture), when
experienced as being possessed by different objects, serve as a sign linking those
objects to one another. This creates a chain of relationships across objects (heavy
objects, rough objects) not divorced from their materiality (Munn, 1992 ). Moneys
and other objects of value are exemplary when their material qualities link them to
other entities. Keane ( 2001 .) , p. 77) writes of the Indonesian island of Sumba that
“money […] does not always fully possess the properties of fluidity, impersonality,
or abstraction." Drawing on the Peircean concept of the indexical sign—a non-arbi-
Trary sign that points toward its genesis (eg, a bullet hole signifying a bullet, or
smoke fire)—money “often retains some indexical links to its sources and owners”
(p. 77). This is a world in which a representation is never understood as entirely
separate from that which it represents.
3 Materiality, Symbol, and Complexity in the Anthropology of Money
52
Similarly, many have explored how, in contrast with a prevailing narrative about
the progressive dematerialization of fiat and digital currency, most money continues
to wear a “national uniform,” as Marx ( 1976 , p. 222) put it, inscribed and circulated
as legal tender by the state and always pointing back to a political authority. Money-
stuff, Rotman ( 1993 /1987, p. 90) writes, retains a “domestic, national indexicality.”
Studies of money in nation-building have looked at the ways money, as both “physi-
cal object” and “iconographic surface,” can unite national communities by provide
ing a shared experience or communicating shared narratives of national belonging
(Strassler, 2009 , p. 71; see also Gilbert & Helleiner, 1999; Helleiner, 1998 ). Peebles
( 2008 ), for instance, shows how the emergence of national paper money is tied
especially to efforts to convince people to give up their private hoards and instead
invest in the future of a particular territorial nation-state with its own centralized
currency reserves.
In some times and places, even in the West, abstraction may not matter and mate-
reality may matter more—such that money's material capacities to “represent” value
are not the point—in contrast to the focus on abstraction and commensuration
inherited from the Western tradition of monetary exchange. People may try to avoid
the representational conundrums posed by money as an ultimate symbol of abstract
value when this conflicts with, say, theological understandings of the nature of the
divinity. Proponents of contemporary Islamic finance often sidestep the question of
whether money can ever really be representationally adequate to all goods, services,
things, and beings in this world (or the next!) (Maurer, 2005 ). Just as there are dif-
ferent weights given to the qualities of things, so too are there “plural immateriali-
ties” (Miller, 2005 , p. 25), many reasons why tangibility or material form can be
shed, obviated, or made irrelevant. The language of representation is but one.
Money and Complexity 9
The work reviewed so far suggests that in the ethnographic record, money is
revealed as complex along a number of dimensions. First, the record indicates the
need to soften the gift society/market society dichotomy (and the us/them distinc-
tion generally), to appreciate the quantitative and calculative aspects involved in
the gift and the solidarity and contests over honor or prestige involved in the
market (Appadurai, 1986 ). Second, appreciation of the ways in which the material-
ality of money matters in its conceptualization and functioning suggests the inad-
equity of either commodity or token/credit theories of money (Hart, 1986 ;
Maurer, 2005 ). As a signal example of one Western understanding of representa-
tion itself—money-object signifying abstract value, enumerable objects indicat-
ing denomination—money is also the undoing of this model of representation.
9 By “complexity” we want to call attention to the wider sociocultural contexts of money's use
and emphasize the ways that the effects of monetary practice involve multiple vectors and vari-
ables, which rarely line up evenly.
TC Nelms and B. Maurer
53
As any magician knows, tear up the dollar bill, and your audience will gasp—
partly because you have destroyed a token of value, but partly, too, because in so
doing you have revealed that there was nothing there but paper to begin with. In
working your spell, to reconstitute the torrent dollar, you have simultaneously, if
only momentarily, broken the spell of money.
Recent work by anthropologists on money's diverse histories, uses, and meanings
also attempts to break this spell, showing up the deficiencies of the assumptions run-
ning behind the conventional narratives about modern money depersonalizing or de-
socializing relationships. Serious challenges have been posed to such accounts by
recent research on bartering (Ferraro, 2011 ; Humphrey, 2002 ; Humphrey & Hugh-Jones,
1992 ); on the “social” qualities and not strictly “economic” uses of money today,
even in the contemporary West (Wilkis, 2013 ; Zelizer, 2007 ); and the archaeological
origins of money itself (Haselgrove & Krmnicek, 2012 ), as we have discussed above.
At the same time, Bohannan's “spheres of exchange” model has proven important to
contemporary work in the anthropology of money, for this “theory of value in nonex-
change," as Sahlins ( 1972 , p. 277) puts it, can constitute a significant challenge to
assumptions about money's fungibility, liquidity, and universality when applied to
the modern side of the conventional narrative of money.
One of the most productive strands of recent anthropological research on money
builds on these insights about differentiation to highlight how people actively man-
age monetary multiplicity and emphasize the politics and pragmatics of producing
and translating value in complex monetary ecology. Here the sociology of money
has proven to be an important inspiration. Carruthers ( 2010 ) suggests that we make
meaning with money by producing difference in two ways: by separating money
out, segregating it away from other kinds of transactions and interactions, and by
creating distinctions within money, distinguishing between monetary categories, for
instance, on the basis of source or destination. A vast literature has emerged on how
we construct such spheres of exchange or monetary “circuits” (Zelizer, 2004 ),
which allow certain transactions and disallow others. Zelizer ( 1989 , 1996 ,
1997/1994, 2006, 2007) has been at the forefront of this development, writing about
how people “earmark” certain pots of money for specific uses, differentiate between
pots in terms of how they are earned, name distinct uses of singular currencies and
distinct users of money for different kinds of exchange, and continually move back
and forth across the boundary between what are supposed to be private worlds of
emotion and intimacy and the public spheres of economy activity, instrumental rea-
son, and anonymous exchange . 10
This kind of mental and material budgeting has been documented in detail by a
plethora of studies, which show not simply fiscal earmarking at work but also
sacralization, localization, and other kinds of sociocultural, practical, and linguistic
enclaving, channeling, or domaining (eg, Eiss, 2002 ; Piot, 1991 ; Rutherford, 2001 ;
10 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 ).
3 Materiality, Symbol, and Complexity in the Anthropology of Money
54
Shipton, 1989 , 2007 ; Znoj, 1998 ). Indeed, it is therefore also important to pay
attention not only to moments of circulation and exchange but also to what cannot be
exchanged—that is, domains of pricelessness or inalienability (the classic text in
anthropology on this topic is Weiner, 1992 ). Such processes of connection and dis-
connection do not unfold in one direction, but are ongoing and multivariate. Peebles
( 2012 ) shows how common metaphors about “dirty money” or “filthy lucre” can be
imaginatively revised to highlight the ways that money crosses borders and domains;
“when we spot the pronounced claim that money is 'dirty,'” he writes, “we should
see it as a moment in an ongoing process of social boundary construction by inter-
ested parties” (Peebles, 2012 , p. 1249). Hutchinson ( 1992 ) has extended Bohannan's
“spheres of exchange” model to show how among the Nuer of the Sudan, the intro-
duction of money has not led to the dissolution of traditional rules about the exchange-
ability of certain kinds of goods, but has provoked the creative incorporation of
money through the invention of hybrid categories of cattle and wealth.
Many anthropological studies of money-in-practice have focused on what Rogers
( 2005 ) calls the “politics of liquidity” or what Jessica Cattelino ( 2009) has addressed
in terms of money's fungibility. Both authors treat money's ability in particular
to make things equivalent as something circumstances achieved and not given in
advance. Rogers investigates how Russians have used official currency (rubles) and
moonshine as media of exchange and stores of value after the break-up of the Soviet
Union, showing that there are degrees of alienability and asserting that liquidity will
be unevenly distributed among various transactables along lines of social distinction
and inequality. Cattelino ( 2009 ) similarly describes how members of the Seminole
tribe in Florida selectively use dividends from the US government to promote tribal
goals by both reinforcing Seminole distinctiveness and community identity and
facilitating commercial transactions and interpersonal intimacy (foregrounding
money's capacity to “connect and equal things that might seem different” [194]
and build networks of exchange). Cattelino argues that the fungibility of money can
be exploited, “whether to make or to break ties, in ways that reinforce indigenous
political authority and autonomy” (p. 194). The goal, she says, is to trace under
what conditions and for whom fungibility becomes important. In research on pyra-
mid schemes in post-socialist Albania, Musaraj ( 2011 ) similarly emphasizes the
work of translating among multiple regimes of value and wealth, including stacks of
cash and flows of migrant remittances in many different currencies.
Monetary practice and meaning-making is, in short, political—a struggle, in
particular, over who can channel money's fungibility and make connection and
difference works for them. Money can be thus used to create or reinforce relations of
inequality and rank as well. In northern Brazil, for instance, Ansell ( 2010 ) reports
that money spent in fundraising auctions is used both to promote political participation
tion and to reinforce local political hierarchies. In work on the long-distance remit-
tance economies of Vietnam, Small ( 2012 ) argues that money transacted as a gift
can reveal and exacerbate difference (in this case, between the located experience
Vietnamese and an imagined world of wealth and mobility indexed by US dollars).
TC Nelms and B. Maurer
55
This research tends to emphasize the plurality of money's forms, practices, and
meanings—returning, in a way, to anthropology's focus on “special-purpose”
money. Thus, scholarly accounts of currencies “here” and “there,” “then” and
“now” are converging in that recent research finds in money greater variegation and
complexity, not one universal form or function. Guyer observes that as we fill out
the ethnographic record on the special-purpose qualities of “our” money, and the
“formal” or “calculative” aspects of non-Western and historically non-modern mon-
etary practices, we find that so-called special-purpose money has “ more modern
'purposes' and characteristics than was thought in the past, and that twentieth
century monies clearly have fewer ” (Guyer, 1995 , p. 1; emphasis in original). This
recognition opens up new questions for research on money—and new possibilities
for interdisciplinary collaboration.
Emerging Trajectories for Future Research:
The Anthropology of (the Psychology of) Money
In an influential article, Lea and Webley ( 2006 ) proposes that neurobiological pro-
cesses structure people's relationships with money in two distinct ways: as a “tool”
or as a “drug.” The “tool-theory” of money, they argue, would treat money as a
means to (potentially multiple) ends; the “drug-theory” of money, on the other hand,
provides an explanation for moments when money becomes a “functionless motivation-
tor,” mimicking “biological rewards” such that it continues to shape behavior, “but
in an illusory, nonfunctional way” (p. 165). Money, they say, is “neither literally a
tool nor literally a drug,” but that these serve as useful metaphors to summarize the
dual structure of human motivation toward money. Both of these strands of research
suggest, as Burgoyne and Lea ( 2006 , p. 1091) insist and as anthropologists have
long understood, that “money is material.”
Lea and Webley find evidence for their hypothesis across disciplines, from eco-
nomics and psychology to history, sociology, and some of the early anthropologists
we cited at the beginning of this chapter. Chartalism, they suggest, is basically a
tool-theory of money; metallism, however, is a drug theory. Reports from sociolo-
gists and anthropologists about the “restrictions” on the use of money—giving
money as a gift, “sacred” uses of money, taboos on expenditure (such as those
documented by Zelizer), and how “primitive moneys of non-Western societies”
were at times “confined to a particular class of commodities or a particular group of
people” (p. 170)—are offered in support of a drug theory. The role of money in
social status, the tendency of people to privilege the nominal value of money over
its real purchasing power (the so-called “money illusion”), and the resistance new
money forms receive, among other phenomena—these are also best accounted for
via a drug-theory of money. Lea and Webley suggest, then, that while a more-or-
less functionalist tool-theory of money accounts for much of “normal” money practice-
tice, outlying cases call for other explanations: In these cases, “money seems to act
on the human brain in ways that mimic more natural incentives, not just by being
3 Materiality, Symbol, and Complexity in the Anthropology of Money
56
an instrument for access to them” (p. 173). For Lea and Webley, these natural
incentives appear to be first-order motivations while the normative money-as-tool is
a second-order means to an end. They thus recapitulate the longstanding Eurocentric
assumption that non-Western peoples are closer to nature and the old (and no longer
widely accepted) anthropological account of culture as helping the human organ-
ism fulfills its biological needs.
At the same time, however, work that builds on these hypotheses indicates areas
of potential (and potentially surprising) overlap with trends in the anthropology of
money. We do not pretend, nor are we in a position, to evaluate this research. We are
suspicious, however, of theories and experimental findings that lend themselves too
easily to universal generalizations about human biology, behavior, motivation,
decision-making, even morality. Lea and Webley recognize that “[i]t remains pos-
possible that an alternative, completely nonbiological, model could give a more eco-
nomic account of the phenomena” (p. 165), but they prefer the language and
explanatory apparatus of sociobiology:
If we are to fit money motivation into the framework of biological explanation that applies
to other strong human motives, then we must explain how money gets its incentive power
through its action on other instincts. If we cannot do so, we would be faced with a situation
that would be scandalous within the terms of a biological psychology—a powerful human
motivation, perhaps even the most powerful, with no real biological roots. (p. 175)
The argument, of course, is tautological: We assume that human behavior must
have evolutionary, biological foundations; therefore, we find that human behavior
has evolutionary, biological foundations. We contend that even if there are powerful
motivations that have biological roots, their content and form is not given in that
biology. (All humans have the capacity for language, but no human speaks “lan-
guage"; rather, they speak English, Dari, Tok Pisin, etc. And as we have seen, no
one uses “money” as an abstract category, but rather Guatemalan quetzales , manil-
welding, debit cards, etc. The differences matter.)
Thus, as Benedict ( 1934 , p. 9) warned 80 years ago, social science, because of
the inherent limitations of its data, always risks identifying “local attitudes” of its
own time and place with “Human Nature.” We are therefore war of experiments
designed to test ideas and behavioral orientations that are embedded in particular
cultural worldviews and historical traditions in order to locate them in a universal
human psychology. We do not presuppose or take for granted the singularity of “the
human mind” or human agency, motivation, or practice, and we would caution those
who would—especially with regards to money. For if the ethnographic and archaeo-
logical records of money's forms and functions convey any single lesson, it's about
the heterogeneity of those forms and functions: Money objects come in all shapes
and sizes, have been put to an extraordinary diversity of uses, and have elicited an
equally extraordinary variety of meanings.
We note our differences here, however, not to dismiss Lea and Webley's work,
but to situation it as a work of theorization and to delineate areas of agreement and
points of intersection. We are with Lea and Webley up until they locate their positioned
sociobiological explanatory apparatus in biological evolution—and we suspect
TC Nelms and B. Maurer
57
most anthropologists would agree with us. This is one place where disciplinary
differences and history (given anthropology's uncomfortable early alignment with
scientific racism and its encounters with cultural difference) will be consequential
in any conversation between anthropology and psychology. For anthropologists
have long worked to complicated accounts of complex sociocultural phenomena as
simple expressions of biological, genetic, or evolutionary “nature”—and to compli-
cate the very poles of “nature” and “culture” taken for granted in such accounts
(eg, Strathern, 1980 ). Of course, as our editors pointed out to us, linking monetary
practice to the psychology or biology of the human brain does not necessarily dis-
count the complexity of such behavior; indeed, modern biological psychologists
must confront the diversity of brains both within and across cultural contexts. The
trouble is that by locating behavior or culture in biology or evolution or even “human
nature” and describing that relationship in deterministic terms, we provide fodder
for unscientific rationalizations of the world as-it-is (of, for instance, inequality) and
ignore both the diversity and potentiality of human life.
Despite our own disciplinary biases, we are nevertheless struck by the implica-
tions of some psychological research for an anthropology of money that foregrounds
not questions about how to define money, but its pragmatics. If we find inspiration
in the psychology of money, it is as a spur to thinking not about the universal foundation-
dations of human minds, but about the expansiveness of human capacity. that
expansiveness is evident not only in the use and manipulation of money objects but
also, and especially, in ongoing creative repurposings and experimental innovations
with money and payment in the contemporary world.
Money as Tool: From Semiotics to Pragmatics
Citing Lea and Webley's tool-theory hypothesis, Becchio and her colleagues set out
to test the psychological foundations of the tool metaphor. “The tool theory,” they
write, “accepts the metaphorical extension of the idea of ​​tool to money seeing
money as means to an end: As a screwdriver is for screwing, money is for represent-
ing the value of goods and services, and it does this on a precise scale for tracking
and evaluating their exchange” (Becchio et al., 2011 , p. 1). Their neurological image-
ing experiments attempt to demonstrate the validity of this metaphorical extension,
and they report that, when watching video of currency being ripped and torn, images
of research participants' brain activity show activation of the parts of the brain asso-
ciated with tool use. “Violation of social norms associated with money activates a
network associated with tool use, and this network is parametrically modulated by
the value of the money presented” (p. 9). That is, as the face value of the bills
destroyed increased, so too did brain activity.
What does it mean to treat money as a tool? The turn to tool use in psychological
investigations of money parallels in some ways the turn in anthropological consid-
erations of money from semiotics to pragmatics. The latter, however, makes no
assumptions about the primary or proper implementations of money-as-tool, nor
3 Materiality, Symbol, and Complexity in the Anthropology of Money
58
does such work assume a one-to-one relationship between form and function.
If money is a tool, its material forms matter not only in terms of its intended uses,
but also as platforms or infrastructures that allow for unintended employments and
innovative or creative refunctioning.
Here we can only point briefly at emerging research on money's denominations.
Consider again Becchio et al.'s finding about the greater brain activity associated
with the destruction of higher denomination banknotes. In a fascinating dissertation,
Anthony Pickles ( 2013a ) reports a kind of gravity well produced by large denomi-
nation banknotes during gambling games in the highlands of Papua New Guinea.
Men playing cards engage in complicated mental calculations when placing money
into the pot, as they often lack the proper denomination notes for their small-value
batch. Placing a large value note into the pot, but mentally tallying only a portion of
its value as committed to the game, an unlucky player can watch his note slowly get
consumed over the course of the game, as first one fraction of the note is lost to
another player and then he must commit another fraction as his next wager. This sets
off a competition in which each player tries to win the totality of the note, the large
denomination banknote pulling everyone in as they attempt its reconstitution. 11
In Ecuador, where the national currency was abolished after a banking crisis and
the US dollar adopted as the sole legal tender in 2000, the particularities of the dol-
lar's denominations played a similarly important role in Ecuadorians' adaptations to
the new currency. Ethnographic fieldwork conducted by Nelms reveals that when
faced with a lack of fractional currency during and immediately after dollarization,
many Ecuadorian merchants preferred to “round up” to the nearest whole dollar
denomination. Here the dollar denomination served as a tool for making equiva-
lence in market settings. In discussions about the practice, however, rounding up
came to signify cultural and national difference as Ecuadorians accused one another
of being unable to recognize, unlike US users of the dollar, the value of a cent. More
generally, many Ecuadorians' struggled to recognize the dollar's individual denomi-
nations—due to the homogeneous color of dollar bills and the sizes and lack of num-
bers on many of the coins—and these struggles to recognize denominational
differences became linked to the political process of learning to “trust” the dollar
after a serious financial crisis. When the Sacagewea dollar coin began to circulate in
Ecuador, it was quickly and widely adopted, and many associated it with the series
of fractional currency inscribed with Ecuadorian national imagery minted specially
for the Ecuadora government to address the lack of small change. Ecuadorians
saw the woman on the dollar coin—the North American Indian woman Sacagewea,
pictured with a baby on her back—as a particularly “Andean” one. In Ecuador, in
11 Pickles' findings reinforce the comments made by Strathern ( 1999 ) on the capacities of money
in highlands 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
handling only some of it over, one was not resolving conflicting intentions in the single act, but
rather activating the mind's divisions” (p. 97).
TC Nelms and B. Maurer
59
short, the denominational differences of the US dollar became the tool through
which national and cultural difference was delineated and negotiated.
These cases indicate that money is not simply a functional tool the way a screw-
driver is: its tool-like qualities can be used for other purposes than those for which
they were designed. 12 As Pickles and Nelms show, money's denominational capaci-
ties are deployed in social and political struggles, whether small-scale, in the bluffs
and tells of a poker game, or large, in national political economies and the afterlives
of financial crises. Some might align these political processes with “natural incen-
tives” for dominance or hierarchy. But the more one looks at power and money, the
more difficult it is to see first-order incentives in the complexity and overlay of
money's pragmatics and politics.
Money as Power: Ritual and Capacity
Much recent psychological research has also followed in the vein of Lea and
Webley's “drug-theory” of money, investigating the behavioral and psycho-
physiological effects of exposure to money. We would avoid the language of drugs
and toxins, first to neutralize the unnecessary moral overtones that such language
evokes (ie, setting up a moral binary between “normal” and “abnormal” monetary
practices) and second to avoid replaying the old story about money's deleterious
effects on social behavior. While we find that story unconvincing, we find points of
resonance between anthropology and recent psychological work, especially by
Vohs and her colleagues, that have begun to draw out other kinds of symbolic pro-
cesses that foreground money's material power. These remind us of anthropological
work on the ritual dynamics of display and visibility.
Here we focus on the apparent power of money as a material object (rather than
as a sign of relative wealth or socioeconomic distinction) to orient behavior and
even influences physiological response. Vohs and her colleagues have investigated
the capacity of money to shape people's reactions—even to physical pain. In a series
of experiments, they demonstrate that research subjects “primed” with money sys-
thematically worked longer on an impossible task before asking for help; expressed
less willingness to help others; put more physical distance between themselves and
a new acquaintance; preferred leisure activities they could enjoy alone rather than
with family and friends; and even reported less distress to being socially excluded
and less physical pain when placing their hands in hot water (Vohs, 2010 ; Vohs,
Mead, & Goode, 2006 , 2008; Zhou, Vohs, & Baumeister, 2009). They argue that
money appears to activate feelings of strength and desires for “self-sufficiency,” “an
12 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. In Muro and Noseworthy ( 2013 ), for instance, show that both currency denominations-
tion and the physical appearance of money can influence spending behavior.
3 Materiality, Symbol, and Complexity in the Anthropology of Money
60
insulated state where in people put forth effort to attain personal goals and prefer to
be separate from others” (Vohs et al., 2006 , p. 1154). 13
More than the conclusions of this research, its methods are fascinating to us as
anthropologists. In Vohs' studies, a variety of methods is used to prime participants—
that is, to suggest subtly and nonconsciously the physical and mental presence of
money—but they are often heavily visual: scrambled phrases with money-related
terms, play money kept in participants' peripheral vision, screen savers of floating
currency that pop up on computer screens, posters with bills of various denominations-
tions hung innocuously on laboratory walls, counting bills in one's hands, and so
on. The materiality and visuality of the methodology, and the link between such
visuality and the sense of “power” it seems to elicit in research subjects, reminds us
of ritual practice: the use of money in weddings, funerals, graduations, and other life
events, for instance, or in religious ceremonies. In such ritual contexts, money is
deployed as an object of display and sign of abundance and power, especially as
bodily adornment or when hidden away from sight (Haynes, 2012 ; Strathern, 1999 ;
Tassi, 2010 ).
Money is worn on the body around the world; it adorns clothing, newlyweds, the
nuptial bed, and the dead. It is showered and rubbed on babies, brides and grooms
to be, images of saints, gods, and evil spirits alike. It is displayed in restaurants (the
first money received by the new business) and on temple walls (the bills and their
values ​​signifying fidelity in this life and merit in the next). It is piled up to impress.
It is also “hidden”—under the bed or in pockets (Pickles, 2013b )—or in ostenta-
tious ways, such as underneath a cloth hiding the hands of traders as they exchange
precious goods for money, or its presence not shown but still announced in the
Mercedes or the kente cloth, the cement house or the mansion. It is, as we have
noted, the quintessential prop in the magician's act. What is the power of such mon-
etary displays?
Graeber ( 2001 ) argues that money is associated with the potential for future
action, as opposed to its material manifestation—in, say, coin—as a sign of wealth
already realized. This distinction is expressed in a visual idiom: Money signifies
“invisible potential” (p. 114), a hidden capacity for action; wealth, on the other hand,
requires visual display to reinforce social differences and hierarchies. For the Greeks,
Graeber points out, money that remains hidden, kept out of circulation in a private
13 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 calculations. 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.
TC Nelms and B. Maurer
61
hoard, represented unknown power, “something dangerous, subterranean, a threat to
the cohesiveness of the political community” (pp. 102–103). Stamping images of
political authority onto coins was an attempt to render such power visible and public
and thereby to translate money's “generic,” anonymous capacities into political
power through an act of revelation (p. 94). 14
Graeber's argument, and the wealth of ethnographic and theoretical resources on
which he draws, offers important cultural and historical context to the psychological
findings of Vohs and her colleagues. The material and visual presence of money,
Vohs' research suggests, influences not only human behavior, but sense of self, elic-
iting feelings of power and self-reliance. Graeber's work suggests that the link
between money and self has a long social history, informed by the politics of visible-
ity and invisibility. It also suggests that ritualistic uses of money in display—those
identified by Lea and Webley as outliers to money as a tool—are not secondary, but
central to the pragmatics of money—especially money as a sign of wealth, power,
or capacity. The “symbolism” of money and its function as a tool are not distinct
from one another, but continuous aspects of money form and practice.
Money as Memory
In their work on the neurological images elicited through watching money's destructive-
tion, Becchio and her colleagues wonder about the connection between money's
material form and its functionality as a tool. Becchio and her colleagues argue that
since there is no intrinsic connection between the physical form of money and its
use or function, monetary forms and functions are linked by “our social practices”
alone (Becchio et al., 2011 , p. 2). The foundation of money's tool-ness, they suggest-
gest, is memory—that is, “memory-based representations of functionally appropri-
ate tool use” (p. 8).
This suggestion is evocative for anthropologists familiar with Hart's arguments
about money as a “memory bank.” Hart ( 2001 ) argues that the origins and future of
money were to be found in social memory: Money originated as a device for manip-
ulating personal credit and managing social relationships; similarly, as money
becomes more embedded in digital systems of information storage and transfer, its
ability “to help us keep track of those exchanges with others that we choose to cal-
culate” will become more important. Even as its forms continue to diversify in the
wake of a period of nation-state-based fiat currency, money will remain a “cultural
infrastructure” and “a means of remembering.”
Hart's work builds on and contributes to a long history of state and credit theories
of money that highlights money's unit of account function as its originary use and
characterize money in terms of social relationships of credit and credibility (Bell,
2001; Bell and Nell, 2003 ; Ingham, 2004 ; Keynes, 1923 , 1930; Knapp, 1924/1905;
14 On the links between money and political authority, see also Graeber ( 2011 ) and below.
3 Materiality, Symbol, and Complexity in the Anthropology of Money
62
Wray, 1998 , 2004 ). 15 This history has recently emerged again in the wake of the
global financial crisis and the recent surge in debates about money, debt, and val-
ue. 16 Graeber's recent work ( 2011 ) recounts the story told by these state and credit
theorists and echoed in the work of archaeologists, numismatists, and post-Keynes-
ian economists. That story locates money's origins not in barter—as conventional
neoclassical economics would have it—but in centralized registries of debts held
and maintained by ancient Sumerian states. As such, these scholarly accounts fore-
ground money's originary role in keeping such accounts, and foreshadow, we think,
contemporary visions of a coming “cashless” society, where value storage and
exchange will supposedly depend on immaterial record-keeping of social and eco-
nomic obligations (Bátiz-Lazo, Haigh, & Stearns, 2011 ).
Recent research using cross-cultural data posits a link between the historical and
archaeological emergence of transactions records and the growth of social networks
beyond that easily managed by a single human brain. Waymire, Basu, and their col-
leagues (Basu & Waymire, 2006 ; Basu, Kirk, & Waymire, 2009 ) argue that account-
ing and recordkeeping practices emerge in response to the growth and
complexification of social networks, since external records can augment and com-
complement individual memory of social relationships and past encounters. That is, as
tracking the history of exchanges and other kinds of relations becomes difficult for
a single person, sociomaterial forms emerge to provide permanence to such histo-
ries by locating them in material artifacts outside the human brain: in clay tokens
and balls in Mesopotamia and cuneiform tablets in ancient Sumer; in Inca khipu,
knotted textile record-keeping devices (Urton, 2003 ); in tally sticks used all over the
world, including by the British Exchequer in the fifteenth century; and in double-
entry bookkeeping and promissory notes (Poovey, 1998 ). This work dovetails with
the story preferred by state and credit theorists, Hart, Graeber, and others, since
money itself, they argue, emerges from such histories of accounting. These varying
accounts support in general terms, then, money's use as a memory and record-
keeping devices. Indeed, the economist Kocherlakota ( 1996 , pp. 1–2, emphasis in
original) proposes that money is a “ technological innovation” and specifically, “a
primitive forms of memory." As we have seen, however, money's functions as a tool
does not limit its uses or forms, but in fact serve as foundations for further innova-
tion, creative manipulation, and refunctioning. The history of money, its own
“memory bank,” demonstrates that diversity.
15 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 ).
16 For a review of work by anthropologists and others on finance after the crisis, see Ho ( 2010) and
Maurer ( 2012 ).
TC Nelms and B. Maurer
63
We have noted elsewhere (Maurer, 2011 ; Maurer et al., 2013 ; see also Swartz,
2012) that we write in a time of incredible ferment around money. The financial
crisis that began in 2008, together with technological innovation in social media and
mobile computing, have reawakened experiments in money dormant since perhaps
the time of the consolidation of national currencies—whose existence, it bears not-
ing, is a relatively recent phenomenon in human evolutionary terms (going back 300
years if we are liberal in our definitions or half that if we are more conservative). In
the USA, private “wildcat” currencies circulated from 1861 to 1863 and the central-
ization and control of federally issued legal tender was not complete until 1913
(Helleiner, 2003 ; Mihm, 2007). Contemporary experiments echo this history of plug-
ral moneys, ranging from attempts to create new currencies (through, for instance,
local time-banking schemes, reputational record-keeping, or decentralized digital
networks and cryptography, such as with Bitcoin, an online peer-to-peer currency),
to businesses providing financial services via the mobile phone, to projects that
imagine the construction of new infrastructures of payment based on the issuance of
digital tokens by private entities, many of them harnessing mobile computing.
These experiments contribute to the diversity of money and require renewed attention-
tion to money's forms, uses, and meanings.
Recent work in anthropology and related fields on the relationship between eco-
nomic “theory” and economic “realities” has drawn attention to the self-fulfilling
prophesies of economic (and other scientific) theory. Economics, Callon ( 1998 )
famously writes, does not describe a preexisting economy “out there.” In a non-
trivial manner, it formats it, participates in its making. This line of thinking builds
on decades of research into how scientific practice works to generate knowledge
about the world and in so doing remakes the world in its image. It also highlights the
recognition that the ways we think about the economy matter greatly for how the
economy operates and how we, as economic actors, behave. Anthropology and psy-
chology participate in this economy-making, too: anthropological theories of gift
societies and other forms of non-capitalist economy have inspired all manner of
small-scale “alternative economy” experiments, from barter networks to local cur-
rencies to, now, as Nelms has found in recent research in Ecuador, national and
transnational projects to build “social and solidarity economies”. Psychological
research, especially as it comes to inform behavioral economics, is helping reshape
the incentive structures for things like pension plans or health insurance, thereby
remaking the market.
Today, however, self-reflexive experiments in money and money-like coupons
and credits are restaging debates over the origin and nature of money itself.
Anthropologists and psychologists of money, together, will have a lot to learn from
these new experiments as they potentially remake money forms and the complex of
ideas and practices and discourses that surround and shape money and our relations-
ships to it. Such debates are increasing embedded in practical, innovative, mate-
real experiments, projects, and enterprises by a range of state and non-state actors.
In this, they again remind us of the expansiveness of human capacity, the material
forms that enable and express it, and the way that we continuously compose and
recompose worlds of value, with and through our money.
3 Materiality, Symbol, and Complexity in the Anthropology of Money
64
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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