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The Anthropology of Money Bill Maurer Department of Anthropology, University of California, Irvine, California 92697–5100; email: [email protected]

Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2006. 35:15–36

First published online as a Review in Advance on July 6, 2006

The Annual Review of Anthropology is online at anthro.annualreviews.org

This article’s doi: 10.1146/annurev.anthro.35.081705.123127

Copyright c© 2006 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved

0084-6570/06/1021-0015$20.00

Key Words

abstraction, commensuration, currency, finance, number, quantification

Abstract This review surveys anthropological and other social research on money and finance. It emphasizes money’s social roles and meanings as well as its pragmatics in different modalities of exchange and circu- lation. It reviews scholarly emphasis on modern money’s distinctive qualities of commensuration, abstraction, quantification, and reifi- cation. It also addresses recent work that seeks to understand the social, semiotic, and performative dimensions of finance. Although anthropology has contributed finely grained, historicized accounts of the impact of modern money, it too often repeats the same story of the “great transformation” from socially embedded to disembedded and abstracted economic forms. This review speculates about why money’s fictions continue to surprise.

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INTRODUCTION: THE COIN’S MANY SIDES

A special difficulty arises when reviewing the anthropology of money. It concerns the form of the review itself. Review articles gather di- verse exemplars and perspectives to provide an ordered and, at least momentarily, stable account of the topic at hand. They are sup- posed to provide a unifying framework and a rubric against which to calibrate and evalu- ate specific works in relation to wider bod- ies of scholarship. By definition they oscil- late between the general and the specific to generate intellectual value. In so doing, re- view articles function something like mod- ern money, and something like anthropology. Modern money, at least as it is described in the classical accounts of Marx, Weber, and Simmel, provides a universal yardstick against which to measure and evaluate the uni- verse of objects, relations, services, and per- sons. It “commensurates incommensurabili- ties” (Carruthers & Espeland 1998, p. 1400) and “makes impossibilities fraternize” (Marx 1844, p. 110) by bringing things under a common rubric. Anthropology, at least as it has been practiced since the disciplinary sta- bilization of academic knowledge, provides generalizations about social and cultural life using detailed descriptions of particular in- commensurate worlds. It makes the strange familiar. This, like money, is a fantastical en- deavor (see Strathern 2005, p. vii). The chap- ter before you, therefore, necessarily operates as if in a hall of mirrors because the terms it would bring under the prescriptions of the re- view format exist in an awkward relationship of doubling with each other and with the re- view form. In assessing the classical account of money against recent scholarship in the hu- man sciences, this review finds considerable openness and paradox, and it does not work to “solve” so much as to prod and to irritate. In this it may thus be more true to the charac- ter of modern money (and contemporary an- thropology) than the classical accounts would have it.

The difficulty in reviewing the anthropol- ogy of money is compounded by the reliance of much anthropological research on theories of meaning and symbol that derived analyt- ical precision through monetary metaphors. Thus, Saussure’s structuralist semiotics, on the notion of linguistic value as a function of relations of difference, borrowed from Swiss colleague Vilfredo Pareto’s marginalist eco- nomics of price (see Maurer 2005b, pp. 159– 60):

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, e.g., bread; and (2) that it can be com- pared with a similar value of the same system, e.g., a one-franc piece, or with coins of an- other system (a dollar, etc.). In the same way a word can be exchanged for something dis- similar, an idea; besides, it can be compared with something of the same nature, another word. (Saussure 1966, p. 115)

Goux (1973) sees in Saussurian linguistics an isomorphism and psychic homology be- tween economic exchange and linguistic ex- change, both animated by the lack of a tran- scendental signified (the general equivalent in Marx, the murdered father in Freud, the phal- lus in Lacan). “Between money and language,” he writes, “one finds in the history of West- ern philosophy the insistence of a compari- son that is not exterior. . .but is the local, frag- mentary perception of a real, historical-social coherence” (Goux 1973, p. 183; see Maurer 2005b, p. 162). If the language is interior to the money form, and vice versa, it is difficult to say anything meaningful about money at all that is not immediately and already part of money itself (Sohn-Rethel 1978). And this review could end here.

I am not particularly taken by the logic of interiors and exteriors, and as this review should make evident, I am much more con- cerned with money’s pragmatics than its semi- otics, at least in the structuralist sense. I am

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also, however, deeply interested in anthropol- ogy’s pragmatic contribution to money and scholarly discussions about it. The emerging social studies of finance literature that brings together scholars from anthropology, geog- raphy, sociology, international political econ- omy, and science studies has spotlighted aca- demic theories’ constitutive relationships to their objects of study (de Goede 2005a). Given the wide dissemination of older anthropo- logical assessments of money, value, and ex- change, it would be surprising not to find an- thropology’s performative effects on money itself, if only we would look.

In a recent review, Gilbert (2005) argues persuasively for “drawing out the paradoxes of money as always a symbolic referent, a so- cial system, and a material practice” (p. 361, emphasis in original). None of these three characteristics, she asserts, can be separated from the others. The anthropology of money occupies a familiar place in her review. First, it provides a narrative foil: the anthropology of money reinforces the conventional evolu- tionary account of the transition from barter to special purpose, socially embedded moneys to general purpose, disembedded, and deper- sonalized moneys (Weatherford 1998), which Gilbert rightly criticizes (and which recent anthropological research on the “return” of barter in postsocialist states seriously chal- lenges) (Humphrey 2002). Second, anthro- pology contributes methodological rigor and empirical specificity. It provides ethnographic studies of monetary practices on the ground, which, in demonstrating the social embedded- ness of nonmodern money, provides method- ological suggestions for investigating the em- beddedness of modern money, too.

Yet why is the anthropology of money still so often a retelling of the “great transforma- tion” postulated by Polanyi (1944), a com- pendium of exotica coupled with a morality tale about the world that “we” have lost? In part, at least, this is a fault of our fidelity. One might just as well ask why we keep teaching Mauss (1954), Bohannan (1959), and Taussig (1980). We are remarkably faithful to that

which we still claim as our unique contribu- tion to knowledge: “the ethnographic record,” and the manner in which it makes us “think different” about our own situation.

I do not want to deny the great transfor- mation: It is a good story, and it works ped- agogical wonders in our classrooms and can still stop some economists and sociologists in their tracks. Still, anthropologists and other social scientists have been remarkably adept at reinventing the wheel where the study of money is concerned. We have also been good at containing our more exciting insights about money (conveyed in several exemplary edited collections, e.g., Akin & Robbins 1999, Guyer 1995b, Parry & Bloch 1989), while present- ing to the outside world the comforting plot- line we are always expected to relate, about the impact of money on “traditional” soci- eties and the dehumanizing and homogeniz- ing effects of monetary incursion on all as- pects of life in our own society. We do this even as we rediscover the moral, embedded, and special-purpose functions of our “own” money and the calculative and rational di- mensions of nonmodern money (Appadurai 1986). I wonder whether the repetition com- pulsion to circle back to the classical account of the invention and impact of modern money is a crucial component of that money form it- self. Social inquiry provides both an analysis and a folk theory about money in the capi- talist West. And that folk theory has effects: The telling of the tale and the criticisms of the tale—for neglecting the embeddedness of the economy (Granovetter 1985), for over- looking money’s earmarking for special pur- poses (Zelizer 1994), for obviating the diverse and multiple monetary repertoires with which people engage and create spaces and times of value (Guyer 2004)—may in fact constitute money today, its indeterminacy, its openness.

This is not to put wholly to one side the claim that the state of anthropological and indeed broader social scientific discus- sion about money is at an impasse. The no- tion of spheres of exchange continues to be reformed (Hutchinson 1992, Piot 1991,

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Strathern & Stewart 1999). The relative weight of money’s different “functions” con- tinues to be debated, with some scholars emphasizing its function as a means of ex- change (Robbins & Akin 1999), others stress- ing its function as a unit of account (Ingham 2004, after Grierson 1977), and others re- fining the Marxist tradition on money as the ur-commodity (Lapavitsas 2005; compare LiPuma 1999). One could easily argue that not much has happened since Bloch & Parry’s (1989) signal intervention, which sought to unseat the old distinctions between primi- tive and modern, special-purpose and general- purpose moneys by redirecting analytical attention to the different time scales accord- ing to which transactions take place (discussed further below). And even Bloch & Parry’s con- tribution has not been fully absorbed (but see Gamburd 2004, Znoj 1998).

Recent years have seen new attention to money, however, even more than in the hey- day of the debate in economic anthropology between the formalists and substantivists. Per- haps this is because the past three decades have witnessed the advent of what Gregory (1997) calls “savage money”: money increasingly de- tached from political control as well as from the material goods and labor that supposedly provide its backing. In the early 1970s, the in- ternational monetary regime created through the Bretton Woods agreements ended. In 1971, U.S. President Richard Nixon “closed the gold window,” halting the U.S. dollar’s fixed relationship to that precious metal and ushering in an era of flexible exchange rates. Deregulation in banking and finance permit- ted an explosion of new financial products and relationships; post-Fordist, just-in-time, and flexible production strategies required speedy movements of capital and new extensions of credit and debt to the point at which credit, ex- change, and circulation displaced production, at least in the social imaginary (and in cul- tural theory) (Spivak 1988). Offshore finance blossomed (Hampton & Christensen 2002; Hudson 2000; Maurer 2001; Palan 2003; Rawlings 2005a,b; Roberts 1994). Financial

derivatives hit the headlines, mainly in scandal (Pryke & Allen 2000, Tickell 2000), and schol- ars started paying serious attention to the new culture of risk in financial markets (Garsten & Hasselström 2003, Green 2000). A vast literature exists in geography and interna- tional political economy on the rise and fall of Bretton Woods (see Cohen 1998, Corbridge & Thrift 1994, Helleiner 1994, Leyshon & Thrift 1997, Strange 1998, Tickell 2003).

Perhaps anthropologists are now fasci- nated again with money because it is their new exotic. Most living anthropologists today have grown up and were trained during or immedi- ately after the Bretton Woods era. The end of that era has made a direct impact on our lives as academic employees and citizens of nation- states. We are increasingly called on to “enter- prise up” our contributions to knowledge and demonstrate the value-added of anthropolog- ical research in the corporatizing university (Poovey 2001, Strathern 2004). And we are increasingly made responsible not only for accounts-keeping at work but also for port- folio management at home, as the possibility of retirement hinges on our financial invest- ments, not our affective attachments to a life- time employer or a national welfare state.

If in his Malinowski lecture Hart (1986) could put forward an analysis of money’s two sides—heads, the creation of value by state fiat, and tails, the marking of value to the market—the world today seems ever more determined by markets outside the control of any state or, indeed, any human agents at all. Finance’s formulae, once un- leashed in distributed calculative networks of human and technological agents (Callon & Muniesa 2005), seem to work all by them- selves and rework the world. The fictions of finance, the “economy of appearances” (Tsing 2000), the “cultures of circulation” (LiPuma & Lee 2004; compare Eiss 2002), wizard worlds at once abstract, distant and mesmerizing. Ethnographic inquiry founders when it attempts to capture these fantas- tic fictions; our attachment to certain forms of empiricism encourages skepticism (Moore

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1999). Yet ethnography meanwhile discovers traces of these financial confabulations in the worldwide resurgence of occult economies of witchcraft (Geschiere 1997), zombie stories, and the interplay of transparency and con- spiracy (Comaroff & Comaroff 1999, 2000; West & Sanders 2003). Where anthropology once contributed reports of special-purpose moneys that were grounded in social rela- tions of rank and prestige, it now records the responses of people on the ground to the abstractions of finance circulating over their heads. In both sets of accounts, however, money and the violence of its abstractions erode the sociability subtending human ex- istence, and the very idea of society itself. Money’s baaaaaaaaaad.

It was precisely this emphasis on the amoral or actively immoral aspects of mod- ern money that Bloch & Parry (1989) sought to correct. They attempted to refocus an- thropological attention away from Western folk theories of monetary transformation (the root of all evil, the camel through the eye of the needle. . .) embodied in influential ac- counts from Aristotle to Marx, Weber, and Simmel. Instead of money changing every- thing, they suggested, existing world views give “rise to particular ways of representing money” (p. 19). This was not, strictly speak- ing, a relativizing gesture: Once the focus is shifted to “whole transactional systems” Bloch & Parry found “significant regularities which strongly qualify the highly relativistic conclu- sions” brought about by a consideration of money’s meanings in isolation (p. 23). These regularities concern the time scale of mon- etary transactions: Short-term gain is gener- ally morally permissible so long as it does not interfere with the long-term stability of an “enduring social and cosmic order” (p. 28). Money determines the morality of exchange only insofar as previously existing moral or- ders maintain, in the long run, their dura- bility in the face of short-term individual competition.

Hart’s (1999) “memory bank” of the his- tory of monetary ideas and practices contains

within it a certain hope for a new money that would reground economic exchange and value creation and storage in moral and so- cial relationships and nurture a long-term cos- mological order based on trust and justice. I am not interested in the normative, pre- scriptive aspects of Hart’s work except in so far as they serve as an exemplar of discus- sions about socially embedded and embedding moneys in other domains. It is no coincidence that alternative currencies and local exchange and trading systems (LETS) have emerged— and sparked intense intellectual interest—in the same historical moment as the rise of high finance and the increasing mathematical abstraction and complexity of international monetary transactions. Attention to dominant forms of money had led to a neglect of “sub- alternate” moneys (Gregory 1997). But why is it seen as an unqualified good that money should be regrounded in sociality, community, and regard? What can such moral moneys like LETS (see Helleiner 2000, Karatani 2003, Lee 1996, North 1999) tell us about the state of money itself as well as the state of the aca- demic and popular imagination about money? Bloch & Parry (1989) identified money’s de- personalizing effects as a Western folk theory of money; money’s role in commensuration, abstraction, and quantification is also a West- ern folk theory, even if it is instantiated (per- formed, if you will) in monetary practices.

GREAT TRANSFORMATIONS? ABSTRACTION AND COMMENSURATION

In Simmel’s (1907) account, money’s ab- straction and anonymity liberated humans from age-old distinctions of status and fos- tered a double-edged egalitarianism: Money freed people from corporate statuses but left them with nothing but money itself with which to evaluate and judge the social and natural worlds around them (Turner 1986). It is cause and consequence of the trans- formation from gemeinschaft to gesellschaft (Keister 2002, p. 40), the disembedding of the

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economy from society that sparked the “great transformation.”

It was from Polanyi that Bohannan (1959) introduced to anthropology the concepts of general-purpose and special-purpose money. General-purpose money serves three (or four, or five, depending on who is consulted) functions: means of exchange, method of payment, standard of value (and store of wealth, and unit of account). Special-purpose moneys serve only one or two of these functions, and, in Bohannan’s exposition of the Tiv economy, only within specific spheres of exchange. Morally neutral “conveyances” occurred within the spheres of exchange and morally charged “conversions” occurred between them (p. 496). With the introduc- tion of Western, general-purpose money, the brass rods used in the prestige sphere increas- ingly came to assume the other functions. General-purpose money allowed conversions between the spheres. The increasing access to and circulation of general-purpose money sparked inflationary pressure on bridewealth because the amount of general- purpose money increased while the number of marriageable women remained constant (p. 502; see Strathern 2005, p. 124). Those with access to general-purpose money could thus thwart the older distinctions of rank. Such inflation has been widely reported in the anthropological literature on the inter- action between special-purpose moneys like wampum, cowries and coppers, and colonial currencies (Dalton 1965, pp. 60–61; Graeber 2001; Hogendorn & Johnson 1986; Law 1995; see also the contributions to Guyer 1995b), even as colonial and postcolonial peoples often actively resisted the adoption of colonial currencies (Saul 2004). Mean- while, what came to be called the currency revolution in Africa was variously taken up (Hopkins 1966, Ofonagoro 1979) and criticized for being insufficiently attentive to history and regional trading networks (Dalton 1999, Dorward 1976, Guyer 1995a, Guyer 2004). Those brass rods, after all, were imported from Europe.

The Polanyist position was carried for- ward by substantivist economic anthropol- ogists like Dalton (1965). Dalton faulted Malinowski and Firth for basing their models of money on their own general-purpose kind. They therefore found that the Trobrianders and others lacked money because their tokens of wealth and strings of shell disks did not serve all the functions of money. Dalton ar- gued that because our own economy uses the same stuff for commercial and noncommer- cial exchanges, Malinowski and Firth did not understand “primitive” special-purpose mon- eys used for noncommercial exchanges to be “money.” For Dalton, the key variable in un- derstanding “primitive money” is the degree of a society’s integration into the commer- cial market. This places some moneys in a new light: Dalton’s reanalysis of Rossel Island shell money hinged on the fact that the shells were not media of commercial exchange, but were ranked into a hierarchy for the purposes of noncommercial exchange. They thus did not have to possess some of the qualities gen- erally associated with money, such as divis- ibility and portability. Now, when Western moneys started being used for noncommercial payments like bridewealth, Dalton argued, they constituted a “structural link. . .between spheres of exchange” with “inevitable reper- cussions on traditional social organization and practice” (Dalton 1965, p. 61).

Classic anthropological accounts of money thus stressed its peculiarity among exchange- able objects, a peculiarity brought into sharp relief when modern, capitalist, state-backed moneys began to circulate in the nonmone- tized economies of so-called primitive soci- eties. According to Marx, Simmel, and Weber, capitalist moneys render everything quantifi- able according to one scale of value and permit previously unthinkable comparisons among objects, persons, and activities. Uniscalar val- uation (Kelly 1992) and universal commodifi- cation (Taussig 1980) were seen as the hall- marks of modern, capitalist money, and as eroding other societies’ systems of value, flat- tening the dense and complex networks of

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value formation that had previously been built on distinctions of gender, rank, age, and status. Money makes inanimate things reproduce and confounds categories among human, spirit, and natural worlds, and so “primitive” and peasant societies encountering money in the colonial transformation of labor experienced it as Aristotle did at the time of the ascendance of the Greek democratic polis against the symposia of hierarchical elites (Kurke 1999, Taussig 1980).

As anthropologists delved more deeply into the impact of money on subsistence economies, and as the societies’ anthropol- ogists studied themselves transformed under the impact of capitalist money, scholars be- came less certain that money’s homogeniz- ing effects were as complete as once be- lieved. Melanesianists and Africanists provide important correctives to Bohannan’s model. They note its emphasis on objects as “things in themselves” (Hutchinson 1996, p. 90) as opposed to social relationships (Piot 1991; Robbins & Akin 1999, p. 9). They also have insisted on identifying different modalities of exchange, including, in Melanesia, the ex- change of “exact equivalents” (Robbins & Akin 1999, p. 9), as well as more familiar modalities of sharing, buying, and delayed- return exchange. In certain cases introduced moneys become associated with the foreign, but money can be either feared or, contra Simmel, incorporated, encompassed, and re- localized (Rutherford 2001) or sacralized (Eiss 2002). In some cases, introduced moneys be- come associated with exploitation (through wage labor or trade in imported goods, for ex- ample) while local moneys are taken anew to index “culture” or heritage (Akin 1999). Arno (2005) provides an interesting ethnography of “cultural currencies”—“performative expen- ditures,” not money per se—that are deployed in the service of sentiment.

In an ample number of documented cases the introduction of modern money is met with a shrug, or at least with little of the anxiety the great transformation narrative would predict;

modern moneys are often simply welcomed because they are, well, “modern” (Robbins 1999). Purportedly distinctive aspects of com- modity exchange, such as the individualist concern with getting ahead at the expense of others, sometimes “resonates with aspects of the indigenous social system” (Brison 1999, p. 153). In “societies where individuals are preadapted to wanting to expand their mate- rial base in order to gain influence,” such sup- posedly capitalist orientations to material gain can “catch on” quite quickly (Brison 1999, p. 152; Foster 1995a). In such situations, peo- ple are less likely to be concerned with the medium of exchange so much as with the dynamics of its blockage and flow (Foster 1999). Shifting the optic from exchange to flow or circulation also returns the objects of exchange to “the space and time of their genesis” (Eiss 2002, p. 293; Gilbert 2005; Keane 2001), revealing relationships missed by the reification of subjects and objects that is sometimes presumed by the analytical cate- gory of exchange. Anthropologists found that although money is powerful, its introduction is met with appreciation, fear, and even ennui [note that Robbins & Akin’s (1999, p. 35) com- ment that “bitter money” (Shipton 1989) has “made few appearances in Melanesia”]. It has not always and everywhere displaced tradi- tional currencies. It does not always gather to itself exclusively the functions social scientists have ascribed to it, as a means of exchange, store of wealth, measure of value, method of payment, or unit of account.

Similarly, in complicating the picture of the great transformation in the capitalist West, sociologists found instances during which money and finance seemed more de- pendent on their re-embedding in social rela- tions than on their depersonalized abstraction (Keister 2002). It is not clear that money al- ways flattens social relations, rather than cre- ating new ones just as complex. Extensions and reformulations of the classic accounts of money’s effects revolved around the reach of money’s abstractions and the social dynamics

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of commensuration itself (Espeland & Stevens 1998). Sociologists note that modern money can be just as socially embedded and special purpose as so-called primitive money (Zelizer 1994, 1998).

None of this should be news, however. Writing in American Anthropologist, Melitz (1970) challenged the Polanyist paradigm by pointing out the ways in which general- purpose money is often rejected for some pur- poses (we do not indiscriminately accept just anyone’s checks; we shun the receipt of pock- etfuls of coin). He also noted that we engage in “baby-sitter exchanges, car pools, trade-ins, exchanges of free services within professions” and hold nonmonetized relationships of “al- legiance, and good-will” that are convertible into goods without the intervention of money (Melitz 1970, p. 72). Although Melitz con- cluded with an economist’s analysis of money as reducing transaction costs, he pointed to the social significance and differentiation of modern money and the fuzzy boundary be- tween “primitive” and “modern,” long before Appadurai stressed the calculative dimension of gift societies and the moral dimension of commodity societies or Zelizer drew atten- tion to the social meanings and uses of modern money.

Part of the problem, as Bloch & Parry (1989) noted, is that monetary meanings and uses were often treated in isolation from wider transactional orders. Guyer’s brilliant refor- mulation of Bohannan is based precisely on the wider view, both spatially and temporally. “One can simply lift off the boundedness of the model [of spheres of exchange] and con- nect each sphere to its regional trading net- works,” she writes (2004, p. 28). One then sees “not barriers [between spheres] but institu- tions that facilitated asymmetrical exchanges across value registers” (p. 28). A further diffi- culty arises, however, when we are confronted with “societies” in which the very question of “the larger social order. . .is itself highly and openly contested” (Robbins & Akin 1999, p. 35). Robbins & Akin (1999) are referring

to Melanesia, but we might just as well con- sider postwelfare state Euro-American worlds in which, as Margaret Thatcher put it, there is no such thing as society, only individual men and women, and families. How are re- lationships objectified, indigenously and ana- lytically, and what should the anthropologist do when indigenous and analytical objectifi- cations converge (Riles 2000)?

Another part of the problem is we are dazzled by the act of commensuration that seems so central to modern money and the process of abstraction on which it depends. Popular and scholarly accounts of commen- suration and abstraction express a fascination with boundary objects whose commodifica- tion and entry into the monetary calculus is often morally fraught, such as children, body parts, sex, ideas, and so-called cultural prop- erties. How can such things be placed on one scale of value, the same scale of value as sub- sistence, labor, luxuries, or anything else? As Strathern argued, and I have discussed else- where in a different context (Maurer 2003), comparison demands the creation of numer- ical ratios between different goods to com- mensurate differences in value. Other opera- tions, such as the exact substitution involved in some Melanesian exchange, create analogies rather than ratios. Thus finding equivalen- cies between objects in the exchange of gifts “will always (can only) appear as a matching of units” understood as analogues of one another (Strathern 1992, p. 171), not as a comparison of ratios. So, gift exchange does not depend on “how many ones make up 20 or 30” in an exchange of pig for sago, but “how many ones make up the right one” (p. 187, parentheses omitted). If we are dazzled by the counting in gift exchange, we are utterly blinded by the mathematics of monetary commensuration in “modern” societies, for we persist in view- ing money as the “most quantifiable expres- sion of the commodity,” as the “expression, index, and measure of. . .commensurability” (LiPuma 1999, p. 198). It is, and it isn’t. This paradox deserves scrutiny.

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NUMBER AND QUANTIFICATION

Closely related to the question of commen- suration and abstraction is the problem of money’s mathematics—the kinds of calcula- tion and equivalence it encourages. Helen Codere (1968) created a classification of money systems and monetary semiotics based on the extent and magnitude of the numbers involved. Her account interested Melitz be- cause it seemed to “contrast abstract numer- ical manipulation with practical numerical application” (Melitz 1970, p. 1035). It was no- table for its attempt to categorize moneys on the basis of the interrelationships among sym- bol, number, and use. Although earlier work such as this found a direct relationship be- tween quantification, commensuration, and the “great transformation,” money does not always divide up the world into quantifiable bits without remainder. Money may render everything calculable, but the systems of cal- culation and quantification on which it de- pends are not always as straightforwardly al- gebraic as one might imagine. Number, like money, is representationally complex (Foster 1999). Numbers do not always point to enu- merable objects in the world (Rotman 1997) but can, for example, also signify the divine, the transcendent, the ineffable (Maurer 2002). And even where calculation seems dominant, it can be put to new uses and effects, as when people use the mathematics of money out- side the sphere of the economy proper, to make sense of their lives, loves, and longings in other domains (Miyazaki 2003).

Consider Crump’s (1978) analysis of money, number, and market relations in the state of Chiapas in southern Mexico in the 1970s. Market transactions using money, he argued, introduced notions of number and classification that were alien to Tzotzil count- ing and linguistic classifier systems. Money and number were thus the leading edge of lin- guistic conversion and cultural assimilation. As he put it, “the equivalence property of money. . .converts two unlike things into each

other, and so money, in its own terms, effaces the distinctions inherent in any system of clas- sification, so you can mix chalk with cheese” (p. 507). This echoes the common idea in the sociology of money, via Marx and Sim- mel, that money commensurates, flattens, and homogenizes.

A number of other case studies reach sim- ilar conclusions. Ferreira’s study of count- ing among some Brazilian indigenous groups finds that monetized market transactions re- shape number so that money and number together become the chief means of quanti- tative comparison, measurement, and evalu- ation and create a “conflict with other value systems” (Ferreira 1997, p. 135). Hutchinson’s study of the Nuer demonstrates how money’s commensuration of values increasingly flat- tens relationships and simultaneously invests personal possessions with deeper importance and meaning.

If modern man is free—free because he can sell everything, and free because he can buy everything—then he now seeks. . .in the ob- jects themselves that vigor, stability, and in- ner unity which he has lost because of the changed money-conditioned relationships that he has with them. (Simmel, quoted in Hutchinson 1992, p. 294).

When monetary exchange is anonymous and anonymizing, the social identities of transacting parties are irrelevant to the value of the objects mediated by money (Graeber 1996, p. 6), and so the things take on the pow- ers of the fetish described by Marx and the ob- ject of desire discussed by Lacan, Žižek, and others.

This does not mean that numbers always do what we think they do, or that numbers really are abstract and disembodied entities from a realm of pure form (Rotman 1997). We should aim to develop richer vocabular- ies of numerical scale and quantification tech- niques and procedures, even borrowing such vocabularies from the realm of statistics and

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mathematics themselves. We should also ex- amine the interaction of the different scales, for example, of time and money in wage labor and the new disciplines of loan repayments in colonial and postcolonial contexts (Berry 1995; Elyachar 2002; Falola 1995; Stiansen & Guyer 1999, p. 10). And we might want to leave Marx to one side while we do this. As Guyer writes in the conclusion to her study of monetary repertoires in West Africa, “we need to increasingly incorporate atten- tion to thought [i.e., processes of abstraction and analysis common to economic practice and to social description and explanation] and calculation. . . . [O]ne needs to ‘think other’ precisely about number, measurement, and money in the awkward and dangerous present because they are such powerful constructions in a quantified and insurgently commercial world” (Guyer 2004, pp. 174–75).

I part with Guyer only on the last phrase. Here Guyer, like many others, indicates a con- cern that the quantitative function of money “downplays, or even ignores those aspects of value that cannot be reduced to a single num- ber” (Carruthers & Espeland 1998, p. 1401). We should not fear numbers simply because they are numbers and we think we know what numbers do, always and everywhere. I have written elsewhere that the anxiety about num- ber is based on a bringing together of the equivalence function of modern money with the Simmelian money-as-acid hypothesis, and the folk theory that presumes that whenever we see numbers and math we see something that counts, calculates, equates, desacralizes, and rationalizes (Maurer 2005). The anthro- pology of number and counting belies the common sense of calculation (Mimica 1988, Urton 1997, Verran 2001). Does number ac- tually always permit “a generalized abstrac- tion of value across otherwise incommensu- rable domains” (Maurer 2005b, p. 104)? This is a research question. When does it do so, and when does it do something else?

In numerous instances, quantification and money, together, resacralize exchanges and conversions, although this is rarely drawn

out in the literature with the detail one would like: with the dead, for example, in the burning of ghost moneys (which have taken on special significance in the wake of economic transition in China and Vietnam; see Jones 2003; Kwon 2006; Yang 2000; see also Feuchtwang 1992), in prosperity cults (Jackson 1999), in rotating credit associa- tions (Kurtz & Showman 1978), and in a host of other religious practices (Belk & Wallendorf 1990, Werner & Bell 2004). One suspects that moral assessments of certain adjectivally marked moneys—dirty money, hot money (Znoj 1998), bitter money (Shipton 1989), money that burns like oil (Gamburd 2004), “liquid” money (literally, Rogers 2005; and figuratively, Ho 2005)— derive from those moneys’ positions as hinges between short-term and long-term transac- tional orders (Bloch & Parry 1989). Guyer provides an analytical vocabulary that can help anthropologists begin to flesh out their analyses of the relationship between morally marked moneys, transactional orders, and different numerical scales. Even specifying whether we are dealing with nominal, ordinal, interval, or ratio scales when we see money’s numbers in specific exchange modalities would go far toward moving the discussion of calculation away from the money-as-acid hypothesis (see Guyer 2004, p. 49).

What interests me most about anxiety about quantification is the way the folk theory works. It is exemplified in the title of Crump’s (1978) essay, “Money and Number: The Trojan Horse of Language.” Counting money, an abstract scale for measuring value, spills over into other domains of enumeration because money itself brings ever more objects, entities, or activities from those domains into its calculus. The use of the sign of money out- side the domain of the limited market for sub- sistence goods—in Crump’s case—feeds back to warrant the whole sign-game of the econ- omy itself.

The problem here concerns the theory of the sign. Guyer (2004) and Munn (1986) can help us see that the assumption that

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money enforces a kind of colonizing quan- tification misses that quantity is simultane- ously a quality of things. Guyer argues that, in “Atlantic Africa,” “number and kind were both scales, among others; none were an- chored in a foundational invariant; all were at play” (2004, p. 12). Furthermore, the set of scales did “not constitute a cognitive map” but rather a “repertoire, the elements pegged to each other in performance” (p. 60). Guyer thus adopts a performative and pragmatic ap- proach to number that has far-reaching impli- cations for assessing the relationship between numeration and money.

In her deconstruction of cognitivist ac- counts of mathematics via Californians’ com- parisons of quantity and value in the super- market, Lave argued that anthropologists and psychologists held a functionalist theory of knowledge. Knowledge was presumed to be “context-free, value-free, body-free and fac- tual” (Lave 1988, p. 88); and cultural knowl- edge mirrored the academic “(professional) mind” in arranging knowledge in discrete and hierarchically nested domains (Lave 1988, p. 88). Her point was not simply that one needed to add the contexts and the bod- ies to come to a better appreciation of the facts. More centrally, she argued that prob- lem solving is not a cognitive operation but an ongoing activity involving “other kinds of concerns” beyond the math problem per se; “relations of quantity are merged (or submerged) into ongoing activity” (p. 120). “What motivates problem-solving activity in everyday situations appears to be dilemmas that require resolution,” not problems requir- ing definitive solutions (p. 139).

MATERIALITY AND THE FICTIONS OF FINANCE

Renewed attention is being given to quantifi- cation because of the highly complex and ab- stract mathematical operations of modern fi- nance in the post–Bretton Woods world. The contrast between Crump on the one hand and Guyer and Lave on the other hand is repli-

cated in the finance literature in the con- trast between, say, LiPuma & Lee (2004), and Callon (1998) and MacKenzie (2001). LiPuma & Lee (2004) suggest that the as- cendance of specific quantitative principles in contemporary capitalism is ipso facto trans- forming social imaginaries. “[N]ew financial instruments assume that particular forms of risk. . .can be aggregated as an abstract form, determinable by mathematical calculation” (p. 208). Taking to a new level the social statis- tics of nineteenth-century forms of knowl- edge and power—beyond the nation-bound form of such statistics and toward a vision of a global totality—the “contemporary objecti- fication, calculation, and distribution of risk rely on larger and more accurate data sets and increased computer power, all driven by com- petition among mathematically sophisticated quantitative experts” (LiPuma & Lee 2004, p. 209).

Similarly, Poovey (2001) explicitly con- trasts quantification with humanism, arguing in the case of university financing that the penetration of market values “erodes” human- ity by disallowing “goods that are goods in themselves—that defy market evaluation be- cause they are not quantifiable, thus not sub- ject to commodification” (pp. 11–12). In mak- ing this contrast Poovey echoes Simmel, of course. In taking as its content only “the most objective practices, the most logical, purely mathematical norms,” money also bequeaths “the absolute freedom from everything per- sonal” (Simmel 1907, p. 128). This is a tale of the infinite extendibility of calculative ab- straction. As with the Trojan horse of language and the transformation of the social imaginary caused by the extension of abstract quantifi- cation, that extendibility is presumed to just happen. Once the calculative agencies are un- leashed, they cover the world and make all meanings of the same species, from sign to meaning to matter. There can be no going back.

Now, as Callon & Muniesa (2005) write, “economic calculation is not an anthropolog- ical fiction”; it is out there in the world and

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demands critical attention. But it is not the preserve of a set of technical experts bent on world domination. Rather, it is “distributed among human actors and material devices,” and because of its distributed character across human and nonhuman agents, there are al- ways “several ways of calculating values and reaching compromises” (p. 1254). This de- mands attention to how calculative agencies produce their effects, without assuming in ad- vance what those effects might be. The ap- proach is less semiotic and more pragmatic or performative; it stresses feedback loops be- tween the worlds modeled and instantiated by finance theory. MacKenzie (2001) shows how even the activities of those who disbelieve the efficient markets hypothesis help make the market more efficient by seeking out and clos- ing off arbitrage opportunities (p. 129), creat- ing a world in the image of the mathemat- ical models of finance (see also MacKenzie & Millo 2003). Over time, the effect has been to make “the typical assumptions of finance theory. . .empirically more realistic” (p. 132). Such feedback loops are “performa- tive” and depend on their enactments and it- erations rather than on their meanings (but see Miller 2002, Neiburg 2006; see also de Goede 2005a). There is surprisingly little re- search, however, on the impact of anthropo- logical theories on their objects of study, al- though the recent turn toward ethnography among some financial and other profession- als outside of academia may begin to generate anthropological interest (Holmes & Marcus 2005).

As Miyazaki (2005) points out, the perfor- mative approach derived from Callon (1998) holds fast to the assumption that quantifi- cation materializes an economy, rather than being open to the possibility that quantifi- cation makes other effects. He and Zaloom (2003) both demonstrate how the numbers and the calculations do not always refer to the commodities and contracts behind them, and they are not undertaken solely for the pur- poses of financial risk management or profit making. Zaloom finds among Chicago and

London futures traders a corporeal invest- ment in numbers, not just rational calculation. She documents the bodily practices traders develop around their work with numbers and how they develop affective relationships or a feel for them rather than seeing them en- tirely as a rational calculus. Indeed, for some, “the first step” of becoming a successful trader “is learning not to calculate” (Zaloom 2003, p. 264; see also Knorr-Cetina & Bruegger 2002). Miyazaki finds that among Japanese arbitrageurs, who exploit and in the process close off temporal gaps in global prices, the multiple and incongruous temporalities with which traders are involved also constitute their life trajectories; the numbers redound into their self-perceptions. Arbitrageurs come to view not only their careers but also their life course itself as a process of arbitrage and even plot out other domains of their lives on the model of the numerical spreadsheet (Miyazaki 2003). Here is a case in which the mathemat- ical models of economics and finance create not only “the economy” but also traders’ per- sonal biographies.

I have reviewed the anthropology of fi- nance at length elsewhere and do not repeat that work here (Maurer 2005a). However, new social scientific research on finance, such as Miyazaki’s (2005) and Riles’s (2004), is redi- recting attention away from the obvious fic- tions of finance and toward its material in- stantiations in lives, documents, and worlds. The financialization of the world economy since the 1970s and the end of Bretton Woods era have made even professionals— bankers, financiers, lawyers—acutely aware of money’s fictional qualities, its imagina- tive economies, and its ability to literalize its metaphorical possibilities. The anthropology of finance is illuminating the worlds of the stock market trading floors and of the finan- cial engineers who seek to create new prod- ucts, and new moneys, for a changing world (Garsten & Hasselström 2003, Hertz 1998, Ho 2005, Miyazaki 2003, Riles 2004, Zaloom 2003). It is doing so in conversation with sociologists (Knorr Cetina & Preda 2005),

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geographers (Clark Thrift & Tickell 2004), international political economy (de Goede 2005b), and scholars working in science and technology studies (MacKenzie and Millo 2003). Although there are some distinct disci- plinary differences here (see de Goede 2005a; Maurer 2005a) the cross-fertilization between fields has been quite generative.

Money’s materiality—the stuff of which it is made—has always been a source of fascina- tion for those exposed to it anew and for so- cial theorists. Against Plato’s contention that money was a mere token, Aristotle and Locke argued that money had to possess certain sub- stantive attributes (durability, transportability, as well as inherent value; compare Robbins & Akin 1999) to become a medium of exchange and payment. The history of these contend- ing viewpoints is, in many respects, the his- tory of the development of Western moneys themselves, from specie to specie marked with the stamp of the sovereign to specie-backed paper to notional ledger-ticks, electronic or otherwise. Between the electrum of ancient Lydian coins to the electronic currencies of the present day, money has been a metaphor for and exemplar of the problem of the rela- tionship between sign and substance, thought and matter, abstract value and its instantia- tion in physical and mental labors and prod- ucts (Shell 1982, 1995). This problem is at the center of much of the recent work on finance.

Anthropologists and other social theorists have long queried money’s relation to polit- ical entities and to markets, the “two sides of the coin” around which Hart (1986) re- oriented much discussion of money in the 1980s—a token backed by the state, com- modity set in motion by the market. On the one hand, Hart’s intervention directed anthropologists to the relationship between “market-mediated and state-regulated” mon- etary transactions (Guyer 1999, p. 245). The state side of the coin reflected hierarchical re- lationships of political authority; the market side reflected the putatively equal and hori- zontal relationships of the parties to market exchange. Hart postulated a historical pro-

cess of oscillation between the two. As Guyer (1999) points out, Africanist studies of mone- tary transformations tended to take their lead from Hart, rather than from Bloch & Parry (1989). This may be because the emphasis on the state and political economy fit better with West African histories of social payments among unequals and the imposition of colo- nial currencies through state payments such as taxes as well as the oscillation between state payments and wider regional market networks.

The two sides of Hart’s coin—state/market or token/commodity—map neatly onto the word/substance distinction central to long- standing Western monetary imaginaries (Shell 1982), if states create value by the strength of their word and markets create value through substantial exchange. Stud- ies of monetary iconography (Gilbert 1998; Hewitt 1994, 1995) and money’s symbolism have sought to understand how money comes to signify national identity, or how money is used in national projects to stitch together national sentiment and solidarity (Helleiner 1998, 1999, 2003).

Just as it is not news to anthropology that money is a social relation, a symbolic system, and a material reality, so too it is not news to other scholars of money that people freak out when the apparent hegemony of money’s fictionality and abstraction is newly revealed. There are strong resonances between the con- temporary discussions of money’s increasing abstraction and finance’s fantasies and that of postbellum arguments in the United States among Greenbackers, goldbugs, and bimet- allists. Sociologists Carruthers & Babb (1996) argue that the contemporary discussion of money is far more muted than that of the nine- teenth century—“family values,” they write, “loom larger in the political consciousness than specie values” (p. 1582). Given all the attention to finance in the past ten years, the East Asian and Argentine currency crises, Enron, Barings Bank, the Orange County bankruptcy, the emerging U.S. pension crisis, etc., I am not so sure. Regardless, Carruthers

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& Babb argue that when money’s value be- comes uncertain and exchange more difficult, its social construction is no longer hidden, its “naturalness” can no longer be taken for granted, and the “potential for a radical re- construction becomes greater” (p. 1580; see Dominguez 1988 and Pedersen 2002).

Besides redefining the nature of the repub- lic, Reconstruction aimed to redefine the na- ture of money. The debate over money culmi- nated in the antimonopolist movement and the popularization of what was then termed the movement for free coinage of silver. This movement grew from farmer discontent in the American midwest with the coming of the railroads, which charged exorbitant rates for the transport of farm produce (Ritter 1997). Historian O’Malley (1994) argues that no- tions of natural kinds animated by the Dar- winian species concept interdigitated with debates over monetary specie. The money question was “viewed in light of anxieties about value and identity in Victorian Ameri- can male culture” brought to the fore in Amer- ican racial formation after Emancipation (p. 395). This was at a time when seemingly insubstantial paper money, printed to fund the war effort, circulated just as the newly eman- cipated slaves entered the labor market. This populist movement culminated in William Jennings Bryan’s run for the presidency in 1896. The latter third of the nineteenth cen- tury, thus, witnessed intense debate among the rank and file about the nature of money, the signifier of race, the value of (free) labor, the power of conglomerates, and the Ameri- can financial system. L. Frank Baum, one of Bryan’s compatriots, imagined a city where ev- eryone wears green-tinted glasses and, as the Wizard tells Dorothy, “everyone must pay for everything he gets” (Baum 1900, p. 130). A little girl from Kansas, the populist midwest, unmasks the Wizard’s deceptions, skipping in silver slippers down a road paved with gold, a symbol of bimetallism that any contemporary reader would have recognized.

Late Victorians and early twentieth- century modernists certainly thought that

modern money, freed from the constraints of rank, reputation, and material reality in specie, was destroying social solidarity and epistemological certainty. Literary critics and historians have long noted that the mone- tary allegories of figures like Poe, Gide, and Baudelaire revolved around questions of iden- tity, trust, and faith in the stability of that which is evident to the senses, questions raised by a money seemingly backed by nothing at all (Derrida 1992, Goux 1984, Michaels 1987, Shell 1978). And even earlier than the nine- teenth century, Ingrassia (1998) documents the historical coemergence in the seventeenth century of finance and fiction writing and the gendering of each activity as female. Only women and feminized stock-jobbers could be seen as credulous enough to believe in the structurally similar and sociologically inter- connected speculative follies of finance and fiction writing. If fictional accounts of riches in Argentina could spur frenzied trading, writ- ten stories about nonexistent people could generate income for authors in the new genre. The argument bears on the interconnected fictions of state: Brantlinger (1996) examines the literary, historical, and political history of the relationship between public credit and state authority from the late seventeenth cen- tury to the twentieth.

How should one think about this history repeating itself? Carruthers & Babb’s (1996) argument would seem to hold: These are all moments when the link between the represen- tation and reality of money and finance break down, denaturalizing the taken-for-granted monetary order, and place value in question. This idea certainly resonates with some of the Melanesian literature in which money’s value derives not from its publicity but from its hid- den qualities, where money reflects forms of social power like magic and sorcery (Graeber 1996; Mosko 1999; Robbins & Akin 1999, p. 28). When the not-seen is suddenly thrust into light, the agencies animating value can receive new social scrutiny.

On the one hand, anthropology and social studies of finance have been

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contributing needed research on the socio- technical arrangements that produce financial representations and their effects, on the trad- ing floor and through new communications and visualization technologies (Buenza & Muniesa 2005; Buenza & Stark 2004; Knorr Cetina & Bruegger 2002, 2000; Zaloom 2003). On the other hand, however, there is risk that documenting the relationship between the techniques of representation in markets and the social imaginaries of money will result in either “the bottomless problem of the ontological status of particular practices or concepts” (Roitman 2005, p. 8) or in the replication of evolutionary sto- ries of transition in the form of “a series of representations of the foundations of wealth that have been replaced, over time, by novel or radically transformed ones” (Roitman 2005, p. 202), as Roitman has argued regarding emergent forms of value and regulation in Cameroon and more generally.

“Seeing” may be a deconstructive, denat- uralizing move (remember Dorothy, Toto, and the man behind the curtain), but see- ing also depends on the relative stability of the empiricist gesture to know based on the evidence of the senses. Buenza & Muniesa (2005) discuss the crisis of figurative finance that has been taking place in financial do- mains and in social studies of finance, which have shifted from an emphasis on informal networks and gossip to the traders’ and an- alysts’ visual representations of financial mar- kets. Those visual representations, however, are themselves the product of mathematical abstractions such as market indexes and do not unproblematically refer to anything back- ing them. So, although we “see” something in the spread plot, we are also engaging in a nonempirical modality of knowledge founded in “tricks of transparency” (p. 633). Still, that nonempirical modality is an effort for finan- cial actors themselves to “see” and to shape value. Making visible does not denaturalize but contributes to a “staging [of] one of the more ferocious crises of representation since

Shakespearian times: that of what things are worth” (p. 633).

CONCLUSION

Whether we look to the emergence of mod- ern stock markets in northwestern Europe in the seventeenth century, or to postbel- lum greenbacks, or to the closing of the gold window in 1971 and the breakdown of the Bretton Woods agreements that lent an aura of stability to money through the middle of the twentieth century, we find similar de- bates about the relationship between “real” economic value and “insubstantial” fictions of fiat currencies and finance and a concern about the effects of the transition from “true” money to the promissory kind on the fabric of society itself. Anthropologists found the same sort of debates in the colonial imposi- tion of capitalist currencies through wage la- bor, taxes, land rents, and commodity mar- kets. One could argue that the differences among the assessments of money and finance in the seventeenth, nineteenth, and twenty- first centuries lie in their specific manifesta- tions: from feminized, passionate frenzy, to the irreality of a world untethered from com- fortable essentialisms of species and specie, to occult economies and conspiracies of abstrac- tion. I would suggest that the new anthro- pology of money is taking a different tack. The continual “discovery” and then subse- quent decomposition of money’s supposedly unique attributes are themselves integral to money, to its own analytical abstractions, and to those social scientists trying to catch up behind it.

We will, however, continue to run in cir- cles if we do not at least momentarily abandon the semiotic ideology that founds much of the history of reflection on money. This is the no- tion of the sign that posits that “signification offers the subject an escape from materiality” (Keane 2001, p. 87) and that denies an escape from “the ontological division of the world into ‘spirit’ and ‘matter’” (Keane 2003, p. 409), or, one could add, word and substance, (state)

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fiat and (market) commodity, etc. Money can, after all, retain “indexical links to its sources and owners” (Keane 2001, p. 77), and not just in places like Sumba. After surveying the nineteenth-century American monetary de- bate, Foster concludes that Melanesians re- ceive new national moneys in a manner that “exceeds the limits” of representation and ab- straction, for “money can never represent or stand for anything else ‘truly,’ that is, fully and finally. . . .[T]he issue is no longer one of rep- resentation’s arbitrariness, but rather its ul- timate failure. In other words, money is al- ways representationally flawed” (Foster 1999,

pp. 230–31). Keane, Foster, Roitman, and Guyer help reorient the anthropology of money from meanings to repertoires, prag- matics, and indexicality.

Representational flaw does not mean rep- resentational failure, either for money or for anthropological accounts of it. Money “works” because of its failures. Analytically, this suggests a fidelity to the gaps between rep- resentation and reality and sign and substance, and their “unresolved antagonisms” (Žižek 2004, p. 134, writing on Karatani 2003). It is this kind of fidelity the anthropology of money is getting good at.

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Annual Review of Anthropology

Volume 35, 2006

Contents

Prefatory Chapter

On the Resilience of Anthropological Archaeology Kent V. Flannery � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 1

Archaeology

Archaeology of Overshoot and Collapse Joseph A. Tainter � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �59

Archaeology and Texts: Subservience or Enlightenment John Moreland � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 135

Alcohol: Anthropological/Archaeological Perspectives Michael Dietler � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 229

Early Mainland Southeast Asian Landscapes in the First Millennium a.d. Miriam T. Stark � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 407

The Maya Codices Gabrielle Vail � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 497

Biological Anthropology

What Cultural Primatology Can Tell Anthropologists about the Evolution of Culture Susan E. Perry � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 171

Diet in Early Homo: A Review of the Evidence and a New Model of Adaptive Versatility Peter S. Ungar, Frederick E. Grine, and Mark F. Teaford � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 209

Obesity in Biocultural Perspective Stanley J. Ulijaszek and Hayley Lofink � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 337

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Evolution of the Size and Functional Areas of the Human Brain P. Thomas Schoenemann � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 379

Linguistics and Communicative Practices

Mayan Historical Linguistics and Epigraphy: A New Synthesis Søren Wichmann � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 279

Environmental Discourses Peter Mühlhäusler and Adrian Peace � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 457

Old Wine, New Ethnographic Lexicography Michael Silverstein � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 481

International Anthropology and Regional Studies

The Ethnography of Finland Jukka Siikala � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 153

Sociocultural Anthropology

The Anthropology of Money Bill Maurer � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �15

Food and Globalization Lynne Phillips � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �37

The Research Program of Historical Ecology William Balée � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �75

Anthropology and International Law Sally Engle Merry � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �99

Institutional Failure in Resource Management James M. Acheson � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 117

Indigenous People and Environmental Politics Michael R. Dove � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 191

Parks and Peoples: The Social Impact of Protected Areas Paige West, James Igoe, and Dan Brockington � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 251

Sovereignty Revisited Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 295

Local Knowledge and Memory in Biodiversity Conservation Virginia D. Nazarea � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 317

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Food and Memory Jon D. Holtzman � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 361

Creolization and Its Discontents Stephan Palmié � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 433

Persistent Hunger: Perspectives on Vulnerability, Famine, and Food Security in Sub-Saharan Africa Mamadou Baro and Tara F. Deubel � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 521

Theme 1: Environmental Conservation

Archaeology of Overshoot and Collapse Joseph A. Tainter � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �59

The Research Program of Historical Ecology William Balée � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �75

Institutional Failure in Resource Management James M. Acheson � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 117

Indigenous People and Environmental Politics Michael R. Dove � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 191

Parks and Peoples: The Social Impact of Protected Areas Paige West, James Igoe, and Dan Brockington � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 251

Local Knowledge and Memory in Biodiversity Conservation Virginia D. Nazarea � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 317

Environmental Discourses Peter Mühlhäusler and Adrian Peace � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 457

Theme 2: Food

Food and Globalization Lynne Phillips � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �37

Diet in Early Homo: A Review of the Evidence and a New Model of Adaptive Versatility Peter S. Ungar, Frederick E. Grine, and Mark F. Teaford � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 209

Alcohol: Anthropological/Archaeological Perspectives Michael Dietler � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 229

Obesity in Biocultural Perspective Stanley J. Ulijaszek and Hayley Lofink � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 337

Food and Memory Jon D. Holtzman � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 361

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Old Wine, New Ethnographic Lexicography Michael Silverstein � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 481

Persistent Hunger: Perspectives on Vulnerability, Famine, and Food Security in Sub-Saharan Africa Mamadou Baro and Tara F. Deubel � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 521

Indexes

Subject Index � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 539 Cumulative Index of Contributing Authors, Volumes 27–35 � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 553 Cumulative Index of Chapter Titles, Volumes 27–35 � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 556 Errata

An online log of corrections to Annual Review of Anthropology chapters (if any, 1997 to the present) may be found at http://anthro.annualreviews.org/errata.shtml

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