Notes for Week 9: Money and Multiplicities of Values

We discussed that both Simmel and Marx write about money when it becomes a universal concept but Marx situates the question of money in the larger frame of capitalism. Simmel and Weber do a broader sociology of money, and how it stands in for industrial economy, new society and modernization. Simmel did a phenomenology of money looking at money itself, its symbolic meanings and as a category through which we make sense of world. While Simmel recognizes that there is no real objective world, he argues that categories such as money are the objectivities we impose on the world to get a grip on it. 

Maurer’s article is a review in which he is offering a broad review of the intellectual debates that have happened around the concept of money across disciplines to arrive at a critique of anthropology of money. He has tried to look at contemporary finance and critique western folk theory of money within anthropological literature. Maurer subscribes to the semiotic, symbolic and performative aspects of money. Maurer also opines that many anthropologists have missed the nuances of the way money operates and functions by subscribing to the folk theory of money.

We elaborately discussed on what gives money its value and found out from Hart that most theories and theorists either place it in market exchange or state power. This dichotomy has found its way into most anthropological debates on the value of money. Hart’s article is an attempt to escape and resolve this dichotomy looking at heads and tails as two aspects which give money its value depending on its operation. It breaks this dichotomy and questions the assumption that modern societies are fundamentally different from the primitive societies. Hart shows this by introducing another layer to the complexity of the question of money by discussing money in marginal spaces and stateless societies and how their functioning is not fundamentally different from monetary societies. Hart is also of the opinion that there is a monetarist double moment in Simmel which equates money with quantification and uniformism which effects in singularization and individualization of societies.

We further discussed the cultural biography of money and the regimes of value through which it circulates. Some points discussed include: how money gets incorporated in smaller economies in different ways and acquire different symbolic load and how we cannot have a single theory of value and money though the impulse is to achieve that which since the 90s. We also discussed the question of morality in relation to money and its multiple values. The question that we were left with was - are these articles again restaging the nostalgia for older times/days by being debating the question of value of money within an evaluative framework. A few of us felt the articles chosen for the class, especially by High and others do it do it differently as in – it does not come across as yearning for older times, but they try to show how our own worldviews frame the way in which we come to attribute symbolic value to money.

-Rashmi & Maithreyi