Keith Hart on Wed, 11 Jul 2007 14:18:50 +0200 (CEST)


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<nettime> more about money


The age of money

Ours is an age of money. If human society has any unity at this time it 
is as a world 'market'. There is nothing wrong with people exchanging 
goods and services as equals. Markets are indispensable to the extension 
of society. The problem is that they use money: some people have lots of 
it and most don't have enough. The unequal face of the age of money is 
'capitalism'; and the principal source of that inequality has been a 
machine revolution whose uneven development is only two centuries old. 
The combination of money and machines is the engine pushing humanity 
from the village to the city as our normal habitat. The result is a 
polarized world society that resembles nothing so much as the Old 
Regime, with an isolated elite controlling the destiny of powerless 
human masses to whose fate they are largely indifferent.[1] <#_edn1>

A lot hinges on where in human evolution we imagine the world is today. 
I think of us as being like the first digging-stick operators, 
primitives stumbling into the invention of agriculture. The second half 
of the twentieth century brought the peoples of the world closer 
together as never before. Future generations will be interested in us 
for the single interactive social network we formed then. This has two 
striking features: it is a highly unequal market of buyers and sellers 
fuelled by a money circuit that has become progressively detached from 
production and politics; and it is driven by a digital revolution in 
communications whose symbol is the internet.

Three developments of the last two decades have been decisive: 1. The 
collapse of the Soviet Union, opening up the world to transnational 
capitalism and neo-liberal economic policies. 2. The entry of China's 
and India's two billion people, a third of humanity, into the world 
market as powers in their own right and the globalization of capital 
accumulation, for the first time loosening the grip of the US and Europe 
on the global economy. 3. The shortening of time and distance brought 
about by the communications revolution. The corollary of this revolution 
is a counter-revolution, the reassertion of state power since September 
11^th and the imperialist war for oil in the Middle East. Certainly 
humanity has regressed from the hopes for freedom and equality released 
by the Second World War and the anti-colonial revolution that followed 
it. If society is now caught between national and global forms, 
neo-liberalism has opened up a range of political options -- from 
transnational association via the internet and regional trading blocs to 
new patterns of local enterprise and co-operation.

Anthropology is indispensable to the making of world society: not the 
current academic discipline as such, but rather in Kant's sense of what 
we need to know about humanity as a whole if we want to build a world 
fit for everyone.[2] <#_edn2> This use of 'anthropology' could also be 
embraced by students of history, sociology, political economy, 
philosophy and literature. Ethnography was a revolutionary move a 
century ago. For the first time, professionals left academic seclusion 
to join people where they live in order to find out what they do and 
think. But it will not help us much to understand money and world 
society now.

The mystery of money

The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is 
repelled.

(John Kenneth Galbraith)

The film, Money as Debt seeks to explain where money comes from.[3] 
<#_edn3> All members of capitalist societies live by money, yet there is 
remarkably little curiosity concerning its source. Most people probably 
imagine that the government issues the money they use and that, under 
its surveillance, banks lend amounts that are covered by assets such as 
gold and property or at least by cash deposits. In fact, over 95% of the 
money in circulation is issued by banks whenever they make a loan. The 
'fractional reserve system' traditionally constrained them to lend up to 
nine times the value of deposits with the central bank; but this ratio 
has since increased and in some cases no longer exists. The real basis 
of money is thus our signature whenever we promise to repay a loan. The 
banks create that money by a stroke of the pen and the promise is then 
bought and sold in increasingly complex ways. The total debt incurred by 
government, corporations, small businesses and consumers spirals 
continuously upwards since interest must be paid on it all. The film 
briefly mentions some possible remedies, including local currencies.

This attempt to demystify money is admirable, but it addresses a North 
American audience in terms that never move beyond the assumptions of 
twentieth-century national society. It says nothing about the current 
world economic crisis. This has features that are well enough advertised 
in the media. The huge trade and budget deficits of the US economy are 
financed principally by Japan, China, the Gulf States and Britain (but 
not the US banks). The dollar's slide seems to be limited only by its 
role as the world currency and unit of account for the oil trade and by 
its creditors' desire to retain the value of their Treasury paper. The 
interests at stake in the global energy economy are manifested in the 
war for Middle East oil; the trade imbalances reflect the transfer of 
manufacturing production and many services from the West to Asia.

Moreover, since the invention of money futures in 1975, world money 
markets, fuelled by bets on the future prices of notional assets such as 
stock market indices ('derivatives'), now dwarf the volume of 
international trade and national budgets.[4] <#_edn4> The US housing 
market is a major part of all this paper debt, especially the dodgy 
loans known as 'sub-primes' now suffering massive default; and the faith 
of the British middle classes in consumerism financed by ever rising 
housing prices is another key example. Reference is occasionally made to 
the Great Depression of the 1930s, but rarely to the global slump 
induced by the oil price hikes of the 1970s or to the crash of 1987, the 
Russian default of 1998 and the dot com bust of 2000. We could be 
entering a new stage of capitalism where markets have been rationalized 
and risk is managed efficiently or, more likely, we are heading for a 
liquidation crisis of unprecedented severity.[5] <#_edn5>

Money marks social relations in capitalist societies. We think it makes 
a huge difference if a transaction involves payment or not. But we don't 
ask why this should be so, even less where the power of money comes 
from. With the exception of a few whistle-blowers like Galbraith,[6] 
<#_edn6> the economists prefer to keep us mystified; the media and the 
schools do little to enlighten us either. So we are sustained in our 
ignorance by vague beliefs and assailed with a mass of trivial facts, 
being left to build up our personal defenses against an impersonal 
system we regard as inevitable.

What can anthropology offer?[7] <#_edn7>

Most anthropologists don't like money and don't have much of it. It 
symbolizes the world they have rejected for something more authentic 
elsewhere. This lines them up with the have-nots and against the erosion 
of cultural diversity by globalization. Accordingly, they have long had 
little of interest to say about money. Modern economic anthropology took 
off when Bronislaw Malinowski published his romantic fable, Argonauts of 
the Western Pacific: an Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in 
the Archipelagos of Melanesian New Guinea.[8] <#_edn8> Here a ring of 
islands, the world economy in microcosm, sustained an elaborate trade 
system through exchanging valuables as gifts -- without benefit of 
markets, money, states or capitalists and on the basis of an 
aristocratic ethos of generosity quite unlike the selfishness of homo 
economicus. He contrasted ceremonial giving with lowly barter between 
individuals. This publication encouraged Marcel Mauss in his belief that 
gift-exchange ('potlatch') was endemic to Melanesia and Oceania as well 
as to the American Northwest. His essay on The Gift was the result.[9] 
<#_edn9>

Malinowski was adamant that Trobriand kula valuables were not money in 
that they did not function as a medium of exchange and standard of 
value.[10] <#_edn10> But, in a long footnote, Mauss held out for a 
broader conception:

On this reasoning...there has only been money when precious 
things...have been really made into currency ? namely have been 
inscribed and impersonalized, and detached from any relationship with 
any legal entity, whether collective or individual, other than the state 
that mints them... One only defines in this way a second type of money 
-- our own.[11] <#_edn11>

He suggests that primitive valuables are like money in that they 'have 
purchasing power and this power has a figure set on it'. He also took 
Malinowski to task for reproducing the bourgeois opposition between 
commercial self-interest and the free gift, a dichotomy that many 
Anglophone anthropologists have subsequently attributed to Mauss 
himself.[12] <#_edn12>

There are two prerequisites for being human: we must each learn to be 
self-reliant to a high degree and to belong to others, merging our 
identities in a bewildering variety of social relationships.[13] 
<#_edn13> Much of modern ideology emphasizes how problematic it is to be 
both self-interested and mutual. Yet the two sides are often inseparable 
in practice and some societies, by encouraging private and public 
interests to coincide, have managed to integrate them more effectively 
than ours. Mauss held that the attempt to create a free market for 
private contracts is utopian and just as unrealizable as its antithesis, 
a collective based solely on altruism. Human institutions everywhere are 
founded on the unity of individual and society, freedom and obligation, 
self-interest and concern for others. The pure types of selfish and 
generous economic action obscure the complex interplay between our 
individuality and belonging in subtle ways to others.

Mauss was highly critical of the Bolsheviks' resort to violence and 
especially of their destruction of the market economy along with the 
confidence and good will that sustained it.[14] <#_edn14> He held that 
markets and money are necessary for the extension of human society, but 
their contemporary form is unsustainable. Even so capitalist 
institutions combine self-interest and the gift; sociologists and 
anthropologists should make this more visible. He advocated an 'economic 
movement from below', in the form of syndicalism, co-operation and 
mutual insurance.[15] <#_edn15> His greatest hopes were for a consumer 
democracy driven by the co-operative movement. This was for him a 
secular version of the archaic phenomena described in The Gift. They are 
'total social facts', in that they bring into play the whole of society 
and all its institutions ? legal, economic, religious and aesthetic.

This was the high point of economic anthropology. Ethnographers were 
subsequently content to provide exotic allegories of capitalism and its 
alternatives, but refused to engage with modern world history. Thus a 
collection of essays, Money and the Morality of Exchange,[16] <#_edn16> 
demonstrates that money serves long-term social purposes in 
non-capitalist societies and is not a quasi-autonomous, alienated force 
there. But the authors have nothing to say about contemporary 
capitalism. The age of neo-liberal globalization seems to have changed 
this attitude. Now there is a veritable deluge of anthropological 
writing about capitalism in both the core and the periphery, much of it 
focusing on money and finance.[17] <#_edn17> This work aims to humanize 
the anonymous institutions that govern our lives. Some sociologists too 
have rejected the impersonal model of money and markets offered by 
mainstream economics, among them Viviana Zelizer,[18] <#_edn18> who 
shows that even after the reluctant acceptance of a single currency, 
American commerce still spawned parallel currencies as a way of dividing 
the market through particularistic ties. Moreover, ordinary people 
refused to treat the cash in their possession as an undifferentiated 
thing, choosing rather to 'earmark' it -- reserving some for food bills, 
some as holiday savings and so on. Her examples come from areas that 
remain invisible to the economists' gaze: domestic life, gifts, charities.

People everywhere personalize money, bending it to their own purposes 
through a variety of social instruments. When money and markets are 
understood exclusively through impersonal models, awareness of this 
neglected dimension is surely significant. But the economy exists at 
more inclusive levels than the person, the family, local groups or even 
a stockbroker's office. This is made possible by the impersonality of 
money and markets; and the economists remain unchallenged there. It will 
not do to replace one pole of a dialectical pair with the other. How did 
the relationship between self and society come to be ruptured by 
capitalism and how might their unity be restored?


Impersonal money and its critics[19] <#_edn19>

The modern wage labour system led to an attempt to separate the spheres 
in which paid and unpaid work predominated.[20] <#_edn20> One is ideally 
objective and impersonal, specialized and calculated; the other is 
subjective and personal, diffuse, based on long-term interdependence. 
The first is a zone of infinite scope where things, and increasingly 
human creativity, are bought and sold for money, the market. The second 
is a protected sphere of domestic life, where intimate personal 
relations hold sway, home. The market is unbounded and, in a sense, 
unknowable, whereas the bounds of domestic life are known only too well. 
The result is a heightened sense of division between an outside world 
where our humanity feels swamped and a precarious zone of protected 
personality at home. This duality is the moral and practical foundation 
of capitalist society.[21] <#_edn21>

The economists' insistence on the autonomy of market logic cannot 
disguise the fact that market relations have a personal and social 
component, particularly when human creativity is bought and sold. Human 
work is not an object separable from the person performing it, so people 
must be taught to submit to the impersonal disciplines of the workplace. 
The war to impose these rules has never been completely won. So, just as 
money is intrinsic to the home economy, personality remains intrinsic to 
the workplace; and the cultural effort required to keep the two spheres 
conceptually separate is huge.

Money in capitalist societies consequently stands for alienation, 
detachment, impersonal society, the outside; its origins lie beyond our 
control. Relations marked by the absence of money are the model of 
personal integration and free association, of what we take to be 
familiar, the inside. This institutional division asks too much of us. 
People want to make some meaningful connection between themselves as 
subjects and society as an object. It helps that money, as well as being 
a means of separating public and domestic life, was always the main 
bridge between them. Today it is the source of our vulnerability in 
society and the practical symbol allowing each of us to make an 
impersonal world meaningful. That is why money must be central to any 
attempt to humanize society.

How else may we repair this rupture between self and society? M. K. 
Gandhi believed that the modern state disabled its citizens, subjecting 
mind and body to the control of professional experts when a civilization 
should enhance its members' sense of self-reliance and community.[22] 
<#_edn22> For him, every human being is both a unique personality and 
part of humanity as a whole. Between these extremes lie associations of 
great variety. He devoted much of his philosophy to building up the 
personal resources of individuals. How do we bridge the gap between a 
puny self and a vast, unknowable world? The answer is to scale down the 
world, to scale up the self or a combination of both, so that a 
meaningful relationship might be established between them. Our task is 
to bring this project up to date.

So where did impersonal money and markets come from and how impersonal 
are they? Money was traditionally impersonal so that it could retain its 
value when it moved between people who might not even know each other. 
If you drop a coin or banknote on the floor, whoever picks it up can 
spend it just as easily as you can. Money in this form is an instrument 
detached from the person who uses it. The expansion of trade often 
depended on this objectivity of the medium of exchange and economists 
have long debated whether money's value derives from its being a scarce 
commodity or from the guarantees made by states who issued it.[23] 
<#_edn23> Bank credit has always been more directly personal, being 
linked to the trustworthiness of individuals and, in the case of paper 
instruments like cheques, issued by them. The idea that transactions 
involving money are essentially amoral comes from its objective form; 
but until recently, even in societies using impersonal money, the bulk 
of economic life was carried out by people who knew each other and could 
discriminate between individuals on that basis.

Keynes held that modern money was as old as the invention of cities and 
the state 5,000 years ago, that is, as old as agrarian civilization.[24] 
<#_edn24> Bank money is probably as ancient, but it took on renewed 
significance for western economic history in the Renaissance.[25] 
<#_edn25> Modern national currencies are the result of a merger of state 
and banking systems, leading some authors to stress the importance of 
sovereignty in the making of impersonal money.[26] <#_edn26> This theory 
is very much in a minority today, when the market model holds undisputed 
sway, especially in the English-speaking world. In liberal ideology, 
money is a commodity just like any other; its payment in exchange 
releases buyer and seller from the need for any ongoing relationship, 
allowing both the money and what it buys to be separated from their 
owners as private property. The parties to the exchange are conceived of 
as individuals devoid of social or cultural ties. The origin of such 
markets is said to lie in the 'natural economy' of primitive barter, 
with money appearing later to make good its inefficiencies.[27] 
<#_edn27> The impersonality of money and of associated transactions is 
here derived not from a universal sovereign, but from the anonymity of 
homogeneous individuals meeting in the marketplace, with price resolving 
their superficial differences. This is less an analysis of money and 
markets than an ideological programme for displacing states from their 
central position in the economy.

Mainstream economics has always had its critics, among whom Karl Polanyi 
developed a line of attack on liberal capitalism and the economists that 
is more popular today than ever.[28] <#_edn28> For him, impersonal 
markets and money have only recently displaced more humane institutions 
from the social organization of economy. These were society's way of 
ensuring material provisioning for its members and they subjected 
exchange to moral (personal and social) considerations. The 
self-regulating market dehumanized exchange. This would be bad enough 
when limited to what people make, like hats and shoes; but the market 
principle was extended to the conditions of our collective existence and 
these are not made by human design. Nature, Society (in the form of 
Money) and Humanity were reduced to the 'fictional commodities' of land, 
capital and labour. Impersonal markets thus threaten human survival 
itself and inevitably provoke a social reaction in the form of people's 
attempts to restore a measure of control over their lives.

All agrarian civilizations tried to keep markets and money in check, 
since power came from the landed property of an aristocratic military 
caste who feared that markets might undermine their control over 
society.[29] <#_edn29> This constituted a dialectic of local and global 
economy long before we came to perceive the modern world that way. 
Socialists (and most anthropologists) draw their ideas implicitly from 
the pre-industrial apologists for landed rule whose line was, broadly 
speaking, Aristotle's. Polanyi acknowledged the latter as his master[30] 
<#_edn30> and considered 'the self-regulating market' to have been the 
principal cause of the twentieth-century's horrors. But, if we demonize 
money and markets, we will be unable to grasp their potential for making 
a better world.

Money and the expansion of community

Oswald Spengler emphasized the part played by number and money in 
western history.[31] <#_edn31> He identified a break between classical 
antiquity and the modern period. For the Greeks, number was magnitude, 
the essence of all things perceptible to the senses. Mathematics for 
them was thus concerned with measurement in the here and now. All this 
changed with Descartes whose new number-idea was function ? a world of 
relations between points in abstract space. Now a passionate Faustian 
tendency towards the infinite took hold, married to abstract 
mathematical forms that freed themselves from concrete reality the 
better to control it. In economic life, a parallel shift took place from 
thinking in terms of goods to money. When a businessman signs a piece of 
paper to mobilize remote forces, this gesture stands in an abstract 
relationship to the power of labour and machinery, only taking the form 
of money numbers in a retrospective accountancy process. Thinking in 
money generates money. It turns the world into subjects and objects -- a 
few executives and those who follow their orders. Each individual is 
either a part of the money force or just a mass.

The classical economists, from Smith to Marx,[32] <#_edn32> focused on 
the commodity's higher-order ability to enter into abstract relations of 
exchange with other commodities through money (quantity) rather than on 
its concrete value in use (quality). But the commodity remains something 
useful and in that use lies its concrete realization. The reality of 
markets is not just universal abstraction, but this mutual determination 
of the abstract and the concrete. If you have some money, there is 
almost no limit to what you can do with it, but, as soon as you buy 
something, the act of payment lends concrete finality to your choice. 
Money's significance thus lies in the synthesis it promotes of 
impersonal abstraction and personal meaning, objectification and 
subjectivity, analytical reason and synthetic narrative. Its social 
power comes from the fluency of its mediation between infinite potential 
and finite determination.

Money is intimately linked to democracy as a political principle because 
its impersonality dissolves differences between people. So we vote with 
our money whenever we buy something. But this system of voting is vastly 
unequal. Ever since Keynes, modern economies have been seen to be driven 
by the 'purchasing power' of people in the mass.[33] <#_edn33> The 
extension of personal credit in digital forms allows for this power to 
be realized by individuals. Governments and corporations still account 
for much of the debt in our money system, but increasingly you and I 
keep that system expanding through our willingness to contract personal 
loans. If modern society has always been individualistic, perhaps only 
now is the individual emerging as a social force.

Economic history is dialectical. Most people become quite anxious when 
they depend on impersonal and anonymous institutions. This is an immense 
force for reversing the historical pattern of alienation on which the 
modern economy has been built. How we combine the personal and 
impersonal aspects of money has much in common with religion. Religion 
binds something inside us to an external force, lending stability to 
meaningful interaction with the world and providing an anchor for our 
volatility. What we know intimately is our own everyday life, our 
personal routines; but this life is subject to larger forces whose 
origins we do not know ? natural disasters, social revolutions and 
death. We recognize these unknown causes of our fate to be at once 
individual and collective. Religion is the organized attempt to bridge 
the gap between the world of ordinary experience and an extraordinary 
world that lies beyond it. Emile Durkheim held that what is ultimately 
unknown to us is our collective being in society.[34] <#_edn34> The 
chaos of everyday life thus attains a measure of order to the extent 
that it is informed by ideas representing the social facts of a shared 
existence. Humanity's task today is to assume responsibility for life as 
a whole on this planet and religion is indispensable to that end.[35] 
<#_edn35>

Because our ephemeral economic transactions depend on using money, it 
seems to be more stable than the relations it expresses. Money may thus 
be conceived of as durable ground on which to stand, anchoring identity 
in a collective memory whose concrete symbol is money; or as the outcome 
of a more creative process where we each generate the personal credit 
linking us to society.[36] <#_edn36> When money is seen to be what each 
of us makes of it, we may be ready at last to dethrone the archaic God 
of capitalism it has become.

Making world society today

The world has seen three periods of 'globalization' -- increasing 
awareness of the world as a framework for shared social life. Around 
1800, the American and French revolutions, British industrial capitalism 
and the international movement to abolish slavery evoked the accelerated 
integration of world society. Unprecedented international migration took 
place in the decades before the First World War and the world economy 
was instituted then as a racial order.[37] <#_edn37> Our interdependence 
in a global economy made by markets and money has lately been increased 
by the digital revolution in communications. Only now can we speak of 
world society as a realized fact, although the process of global 
integration is far from finished. We need to understand this virtual 
world of abstraction in order to make meaningful connection with it from 
the perspective of our everyday lives. Over the last three centuries, 
the money form has evolved rapidly from metallic coins and ledger 
entries through paper notes to electronic digits. From having been an 
object produced by remote authorities, money is becoming more obviously 
a subjective expression of our own will; and this development is 
mirrored in the shift from 'real' to 'virtual' money.

It is now possible to attach a lot of information about individuals to 
transactions at distance. The trend is thus to restore personal identity 
to impersonal contracts, not least in the market for credit. Of course, 
powerful organizations have access to huge processors with which to 
manipulate an often unknowing public; and rich individuals always 
experienced markets and money as personalities in their own right. But 
for many people these developments have introduced new conditions of 
engagement with the impersonal economy. The idea is slowly taking root 
that society is less an oppressive structure out there and more a 
subjective capacity that allows each of us to learn how to manage our 
relations with others. Money symbolizes this shift. It once took the 
form of objects outside ourselves of which we had a greater need than 
the available supply; but now it is increasingly manifested as 
digitalized transfers mediated by plastic cards and telephone wires, 
thereby altering the notions of economic agency that we bring to 
participation in markets. Cheap information makes possible the 
repersonalization of complex economic life, undermining the assumptions 
that supported mass production and consumption for a century.

If plastic credit could be seen as a step towards greater humanism in 
economy, this also entails increased dependence on the impersonal 
organization of governments and corporations, on impersonal abstraction 
of the sort associated with computing operations and on the need for 
impersonal standards and social guarantees for contractual exchange. We 
may nevertheless become less weighed down by money as an objective 
force, more open to the idea that it is simply a way of keeping track of 
complex social networks that we each generate as active individual 
subjects. Money could once again take a wide variety of forms compatible 
with both personal agency and collective forms of association at every 
level from the local to the global.

Mauss was far-sighted when he traced the foundations of the modern 
economy to its origin in the archaic gift, rather than primitive barter 
as the liberal myth holds. The idea of money as personal credit, linked 
less to the history of state coinage than to the acknowledgement of 
private debts, is consistent both with Mauss's emphasis and my argument 
here. As the principal instrument of collective memory in its many 
forms, money helps us keep track of connections with others.[38] 
<#_edn38> We can now enter closed circuits of exchange using self-made 
currencies of the sort pioneered in LETS schemes, where acknowledgment 
of personal debt is the transparent source of money.[39] <#_edn39> But 
retreat into the local will not help us make world society. Individuals 
also need to participate in global markets of infinite scope, using 
international moneys-of-account, such as the dollar and euro, electronic 
payment systems of various kinds or even direct barter via the internet. 
We must develop more effective impersonal institutions ('the state') at 
the level of world society as well as below.[40] <#_edn40> Money's 
ability to sustain local meaning and universal connection at the same 
time is an indispensable means to that end.**


------------------------------------------------------------------------

[1] <#_ednref1> K. Hart 'World society as an old regime', C. Shore and 
S. Nugent editors, Elite Cultures: anthropological perspectives (2002, 
Routledge, London, 22-36).

[2] <#_ednref2> I. Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View 
(2006 [1798] Cambridge U.P., Cambridge).

[3] <#_ednref3> P. Grignon, www.moneyasdebt.net 
<http://www.moneyasdebt.net/> (2006, 47 minutes).

[4] <#_ednref4> E. LiPuma and B.Lee, Financial Derivatives and the 
Globalization of Risk, (2004, Duke U.P., Durham NC).

[5] <#_ednref5> N. Taleb, The Black Swan: the impact of the highly 
improbable (2007, Penguin, London).

[6] <#_ednref6> J.K. Galbraith, Money: whence it came and whether it 
went (1995 [1975], Penguin, London).

[7] <#_ednref7> K. Hart and C. Hann, 'A short history of economic 
anthropology', C. Hann and K. Hart editors, Market and Society: The 
Great Transformation today (forthcoming).

[8] <#_ednref8> B. Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1961 
[1922], Dutton, New York).

[9] <#_ednref9> M. Mauss, The Gift: form and reason for exchange in 
archaic societies (1990 [1925], Routledge, London).

[10] <#_ednref10> B. Malinowski, 'The primitive economics of the 
Trobriand Islanders', The Economic Journal (1921, 31, 1-16).

[11] <#_ednref11> M. Mauss, op. cit., 100-102n.

[12] <#_ednref12> L. Sigaud, 'The vicissitudes of The Gift', Social 
Anthropology (2002, 10.3, 335-358).

[13] <#_ednref13> K. Hart, 'Marcel Mauss: in pursuit of the whole', 
Comparative Studies in Society and History (2007, April, ).

[14] <#_ednref14> M. Mauss, Écrits politiques, edited by M. Fournier 
(1997, Fayard, Paris).

[15] <#_ednref15> M. Fournier, Marcel Mauss: a biography (2006 [1994], 
Princeton U.P. Princeton NJ).

[16] <#_ednref16> J. Parry and M. Bloch editors, Money and the Morality 
of Exchange (1989, Cambridge U.P., Cambridge).

[17] <#_ednref17> D. Akin and J. Robbins editors, Money and Modernity: 
state and local currencies in Melanesia (1999, Univ. Pittsburgh Press, 
Pittsburgh); J. Guyer, Marginal Gains: monetary transactions in Atlantic 
Africa (2004, Univ. Chicago Press, Chicago): C. Zaloom, Out of the Pits: 
traders and technology from Chicago to London (2006, Univ. Chicago 
Press, Chicago); and others reviewed by B. Maurer, 'The anthropology of 
money', Annual Review of Anthropology (2006, 35.2).

[18] <#_ednref18> V. Zelizer, The Social Meaning of Money (1994, Basic 
Books, New York).

[19] <#_ednref19> D. Graeber, 'Debt, violence and impersonal markets: 
Polanyian meditations', Hann and Hart editors, op.cit. (forthcoming).

[20] <#_ednref20> E.P. /Thompson, The Making of the English Working 
Class (1968, Penguin, Harmondsworth)./

[21] <#_ednref21> K. Hart, The Hit Man's Dilemma: or business, personal 
and impersonal (2005, Prickly Paradigm, Chicago).

[22] <#_ednref22> B. Parekh, Gandhi's Political Philosophy (1989, Notre 
Dame U.P., South Bend).

[23] <#_ednref23> K. Hart, 'Heads or tails? Two sides of the coin', Man 
(1986, 21.3: 637-656).

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