Session 9: Money and multiplicities of values - Some questions

The readings for this session can be seen as lying at the intersections of the disciplines of economics and anthropology. Anthropological treatment of the questions that are usually understood through the disciplinary lens of economics encourages us to challenge some of the basic conceptual assumptions with which economics as a discipline operates. This challenge brings us back to the questions we started with, about ‘where does value lie?’, especially when we consider a symbolic object such as money (that does not seem to have any intrinsic ‘use value’ of its own). And in the set of essays for this class, we think the various authors are grappling with this question, particularly in the context of the increasingly complex, mathematically abstracted game of numbers of global finance capital and economy today, in which value seems all the more ephemeral and fleeting. Two large questions looming through the readings are: how does money come to become a general equalizer? And where does money’s power to equate widely differing objects (sometimes even morally fraught, such as children or sex) come from? (As Jane Guyer and Simmel provocatively argues, it may not just be from its ability to quantify and represent a particular quality or attribute in two widely different objects in numerical ratios, in certain cases at all. For pointing to the case of Atlantic African trade, Guyer argues, it may in fact be based on a completely different system of evaluation that can range from ordinal ranking to ‘tropic concepts’).    

But in the range of ways in which money finds its means and backing, we are left perhaps with more doubts than answers about what really provides money with this power? As Hart would have it, is it from the state backing of its authenticity, and the market which makes it a possible medium of exchange? Or as Marx and Simmel would have it, is it from its power to abstract and commensurate and order disparately different objects on a single scale? Or as Maurer (partly shows) and High points out, due to the social meanings we embed it with – the way in which these numerical calculations draw on moral significance or affective qualities that also similarly become a measure of our individual lives itself?

Whether we have a clearer answer to these questions or not, what the essays together do is destabilize the notions of uniformity and permanence associated with money, and  bring out the multiplicity of meanings and values it acquires as it circulates through different spheres of exchange, passing different hands.  This is as much true of the modern money markets and financial capitalism, as it is of primitive societies or traditional economies that are introduced into the network of modern money. As Jane Guyer tries to argue, in a complexly interconnected world, money can acquire several different meanings, and can perform several different functions, from being a reserve of wealth and value in its hard form, to playing the role of a medium of exchange in its soft form. While the former gets more and more abstracted from the real world of transactions and appears to gain its power and significance through the meanings imbued by increasingly complex mathematical calculations, and technological wizadry, she points to how soft currencies are materially constituted by real world political rankings, perceptions of stability of nations and national currencies, and the indeterminate relations between these different spheres of valuation (‘hard’, and ‘soft) along with everyday transactions of conversions and conveyances. Similarly, High tries to show us how currency or money is not a neutral exchange medium but accumulates conflicting and contestable meanings depending on the perceptions of people. Thus the article shifts the logic of money from the domain of ‘economic’ to that of ‘cultural’, and in the process also shows how even fiat money can be challenged through local meanings and interpretations. Thus, this again brings to centre the question of what power or how does money come to acquire its value?

Hart’s essay tries to also contribute to this dissolution of the certainty of the economic power of money, backed by state authority. The central preoccupation in Hart’s theoretical conceptions of value of money across disciplines and schools of thought that show it as either emanating from the fiat of state diktat or from the commodity exchange in market. Two sides of the coin – heads or tails become metaphors to capture a series of theoretical conceptions that line up with either of the one. He tries to further problematize this division by introducing an additional element of stateless societies into the question of value in money. Thus, he thinks through this question along a temporal continuum with stateless societies and their logic of money as holding the clues for a better understanding of the nature of money in the contemporary times.

As Maurer and High note, the materiality of money, and these socially embedded ways in which money comes to be understood, evaluated and used, comes to fore only during points of crisis (like the financial scandal of 2008; or the post-Suharto crisis in Indonesia when artists claimed the right, alongside the state, in symbolising money), but which otherwise finds its strength, like with Melanesian exchange, through its hidden qualities, its magical effects. These ‘magical effects’ are perhaps what Simmel refers to as the psychological experience of valuation that is completely delinked from and can exist separately from the real world.

But despite these various ways in which we can see how money is embedded socially, Maurer asks why do we still carry on with the foundational myth of anthropology and economics about the depersonalising and abstractive qualities of money? He asks why do we become enamoured by the infinite mathematical regressions effected on the way finance capital functions today, as having a power of its own? Perhaps as an antidote to such criticism, most of the essays for this class perform an interesting feat, in bringing the ground level practices to question the fundamental assumptions underlying the macro level economics. Through such attempts, they point to the importance of seeing how  we perpetuate the myth of money; but also as and push us, as Maurer  does, to question when and when is it not possible for money to achieve this abstraction?  

- Rashmi & Maithreyi