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Money, meaning, and morality.(Changing Forms of Payment)
by Bruce G. Carruthers and Wendy Nelson Espeland
Modern money creates, transforms, transports, and possesses meaning by virtue of how it is
used. This article devises a framework for the systematic study of monetary meaning. In
particular, monetary meanings depend on the flow of money (both its proximate source and future
direction) and on who promulgates or issues it. Meanings also derive from how money’s use and
flow are restricted and on monetary media. Monetarization quantifies social activities and
introduces new equivalences and comparisons. The factors shaping meaning also underpin
important types of monetary variation (homogeneous vs. differentiated money; anonymous vs.
personal; material vs. immaterial).
© COPYRIGHT 1998 Sage Publications, Inc.
Titus complained of the tax which Vespasian had imposed
on the contents of the city urinals. Vespasian handed him
a coin which had been part of the first day’s proceeds:
"Does it smell bad?" he asked. When Titus said "No," he
went on: "Yet it comes from urine."
- Suetonius (1957, pp. 290-291)
Cecil Graham. What is a cynic?
Lord Darlington. A man who knows the price of everything
and the value of nothing. Cecil Graham. And a
sentamentalist, my dear Darlington, is a man who sees an
absurd value in everything, and doesn’t know the market
price of any single thing.
- Oscar Wilde (1980, p. 67)
On 25 July 1996, Ada Louise Huxtable, a noted
architecture critic and historian, was honored by the
Museum of the City of New York. That evening, Mayor
Rudolph W. Giuliani presented Huxtable with the $24
award that is bestowed on people who have made
important contributions to improving the quality of life for
city residents. Named for the cash value of the goods that
the Dutch offered to Native American inhabitants in
exchange for Manhattan Island, previous recipients of this
award included such wealthy and notable people as
Brooke Astor, Felix Rohatyn, and Joseph Papp (see "Ada
Louise Huxtable Receives Award," 1996).
Clearly, the $24 that Huxtable received was, in Viviana
Zelizer’s (1994, pp. 21-24) terms, "special money" - money
that was richly symbolic in ways that marked it and made it
incommensurate with other money. But just how and by
whom was this distinctiveness accomplished? What
accounts for the specialness of Huxtable’s money? And
how, more generally, should we analyze the varied ways
that monies become inscribed with meanings? Is it
possible or even desirable to devise more systematic
strategies for understanding the meaning of money?
We will argue that the meaning of money, like other forms
of meaning, is enacted in use and that our understanding
of how these processes unfold can be improved by
systematically attending to some general features of the
pragmatics of money. Before we tackle broader questions
about the meanings of money, let us begin by unpacking
the meanings of Huxtable’s "special" $24.
One way that the symbolic significance of this money was
signaled was the context in which it was presented. As the
centerpiece of a public, ritualized event, the occasion
marked the money. The food served, the clothing worn,
the speeches made, and the photos taken all attested to
the importance of what this particular money stood for. The
participants and the witnesses to this exchange also
mattered for its meaning. The prominent people in the
audience added their luster, as did the cultural institution
that initiated the award, the mayor who conveyed it, and
the accomplished woman who received it.
But all this portent and weight was in stark and calculated
contrast to the trivial sum that Huxtable received.
Twenty-four dollars in Manhattan might buy you a decent
breakfast at a downtown hotel, a few of hours of parking,
or a cab ride from Wall Street to the Upper East Side,
hardly a sum that would normally warrant the presence of
the mayor of New York. We often think of the meaning of
money as depending on what it can be exchanged for.
Although we do not know if or how Huxtable spent this
money, this sum signals to us that we should appreciate its
symbolic value rather than its exchange value. Here, the
amount matters not for what it can do for Huxtable but for
what it says about her. And one of the things it does say
about her is that she does not really need this money. If
she or her projects needed money, its symbolic message
would be compromised. In contrast, presenting $24 to
someone like Mother Teresa would seem wildly
inappropriate.
The significance of the prize money stemmed partly from a
series of symbolic juxtapositions. The size of the award
inverts one common pattern of equating price with value,
where things of great value or significance are often
represented by large sums of money. Some awards, like
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the Nobel Prize or the MacArthur Foundation "genius"
grant that Huxtable received some years earlier, include
sizable sums of money that reinforce the significance of
the accomplishments being honored. This meager sum
emphasizes the discrepancy between the amount of
money that was awarded and the value of what was being
honored - Huxtable’s accomplishments. This discrepancy,
by highlighting the inappropriateness of $24 as an
estimate of her civic contributions, problematizes the
commensurative capacity of money that we take for
granted in routine economic exchange. The name of this
prize, and no doubt the accompanying speeches, draws
attention to this intentional mismatch, making it playful and
funny rather than something to be reproached. Thus, a
small sum of money symbolizes, in ironic fashion, a large
civic contribution.
Another way to symbolize important values is to define
them as intrinsically valuable, as incommensurate. This
logic rejects money as an appropriate way to express or
reward certain values, and their meaning is marked by
removal or separation from the realm of money. Other
awards, such as the Congressional Medal of Honor or the
Presidential Medal, explicitly do not provide any money to
recipients; cash would seem an inappropriate expression,
as if money’s profane associations would taint the
sacredness of what is being honored. The creators of the
$24 award rejected these alternative logics of valuing,
instead adopting a form that makes explicit and plays off
the disjunctures implicit in them. This "compromise"
strategy pits contradictory symbolic logics against one
another. In violating the assumptions underlying both, it
evokes a rich semiotic space.
Of course, the meaning of Huxtable’s prize derived not
only from the small sum she received but from its specific
magnitude. It mattered that it was not $23 or $25 she
received but exactly $24. The meaning of this money
depended on its historical associations with an earlier
exchange that became notorious for its gross
undervaluation. This interpretation reinforces the value of
Huxtable’s accomplishments by associating these with
value of contemporary Manhattan compared with its
"purchase" price. But one could imagine that this
association would mean something different if the recipient
or members of the audience were Native American.
The meaning of Huxtable’s prize money depended on its
designation as an award, who was bestowing it, the
occasion on which it was presented, to whom it was
presented, its sum, and its historical associations; on
assumptions about how these associations would be
interpreted; and on the audience that witnessed this event
and those who learned of it through various media. These
aspects of its "context" made this money special,
incommensurable with other monies. And although it is
rare for money to be so elaborately marked, as Zelizar
(1998) argues, people are ingenious at finding ways to
transform the meanings of money in ways that render it
personal, cultural, incommensurable, and moral.
Like all other social objects, money has meaning that
depends on its use and context. Such uses are not,
however, idiosyncratic. Nor is context ad hoc. Both are
socially structured in patterned ways we can discern. In
this article, we propose a set of categories and analytical
distinctions that help us to interpret context and use.
These should help us to think more systematically about
the meaning, significance, and legitimacy of money.(1)
In a highly monetarized economy, money penetrates and
participates in almost every economic exchange. Its social
meanings pervasively influence the economic life of a
society, and vice versa.(2) But money is so widespread, it
has become almost invisible, a taken-for-granted,
"natural," and easily overlooked feature of the economic
landscape. We try to reestablish analytic distance to
appreciate the profound effects of money.
Our efforts draw on Wittgenstein’s (1958) pragmatic theory
of language. Following Wittgenstein, we consider the
meaning of money as something accomplished and
revealed in its use. Wittgenstein rejects any theory of
language that posits a constant relationship between
words, their meaning, and how these correspond to the
empirical word. Words are not simply the names of things,
and their meanings cannot be reduced to the objects to
which they refer; there are no rules and no precise
relationships that govern the way we use and understand
language in daily life. We believe that Wittgenstein’s
general argument can usefully inform the analysis of
money. The meaning of money, like the meaning of words,
cannot be reduced to that which it represents. Thus, it is
misguided to try and identify universally representational
properties of money and to link these to its meaning. The
meaning of money does not depend on some
characteristic that is common to all money. Instead, its
meaning depends on what people in a particular context
do with it.
Wittgenstein’s (1958) analogies for understanding
language suggest useful questions for thinking about how
to understand the meaning of money in practical contexts.
Wittgenstein uses two simplified models of language to
ground his analysis: language as a tool and language as a
game. In likening language to a tool, Wittgenstein wants us
to appreciate that language shares many of the same
characteristics as tools. Words are actions as well as
symbols; we use words, like we use tools, to do things.
Wittgenstein urges us to ask "On what occasion, for what
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purpose, do we say this? What kind of action accompanies
these words?" (par. 489). Although the same tool can have
diverse functions (think of all the things you can do with a
hammer or a screwdriver), it is important to notice when
we use certain tools and when we do not. Not all uses or
occasions are appropriate. What cannot we do with this
tool? According to Wittgenstein, we should not be
deceived by the superficial similarity of some tools. Even
though cranks may look alike, they produce very different
effects, and the meaning depends heavily on the
particularity of these effects.
Different kinds of money, like tools, can look superficially
alike although they do and mean very different things. The
same piece of currency, like the same tool, can be used in
a dazzling array of contexts to do very different things.
There are some places where money does not or should
not go and some functions for which it is inappropriate.
What action does money engender? When and from
where is its use prevented?
Wittgenstein’s (1958) conception of the language game,
which he describes as "consisting of language and the
actions into which it is woven" (par 7), helps us appreciate
both the multiplicity of meaning in language and how
meanings are constrained and defined by contexts.
Meanings may be ambiguous, but they are not arbitrary.
Although he argues that there is no universal relationship
between words and their referent, there are constraints
around meaning, and these are defined by the contours of
their particular language game. Whether it is "poetry" or
"following orders" or "telling a joke," it is possible for those
engaged in a particular game to understand the meaning
of words, to see some word as nonsensical or
inappropriate. Language games provide a system of
references, the necessary linguistic context for meaning.
Their parameters are established internally, by loose,
improvisational, and collective "rules" about how to use
language in this particular game.
The meaning of money, like the meaning of language, is
diverse, practical, and local but not completely malleable.
Money is not merely a label or a symbol for something.
Both analogies of language, as tools and as games, firmly
ground the meaning of language in what people do with
language, point to the diversity of meanings that emerge in
use, and show how appropriateness is grounded in the
loose, proximate rules that bound particular contexts or
"games."
Markets share some of the characteristics of language
games. As Zelizer (1996) argues, there are many markets
that are distinguished by the particular systems of meaning
that become attached to them. Markets proliferate, and
people in markets are inventive. But like the variety of
language games, the variety of markets need not
compromise their connectedness. For Zelizer, diversity
does not contradict uniformity. These are two aspects of
the same transactions. The transformative potential of
money derives partly from the tension between these two
aspects: The universalism of money enables it to
penetrate into, and link together, multiple contexts, each
with its own particular meanings and relations. The
semiotic power of the 24-dollar award results from a
deliberate play on the tension between money’s
universalistic ability to represent value, on one hand, and
its particularistic meanings, on the other.
What do people do with money? How does it function?
Consider the standard economics textbook definition of
modern money: Money functions as a medium of
exchange, measure and store of value, means of payment
and unit of account.(3) Because many things can perform
these functions, it is more accurate to speak of monies
rather than to assume that money is a singular, unitary
thing.
Money is used to evaluate, to assess the magnitude of
value possessed by some good or service. As such, it
attaches a precise and often public number to represent
the worth of something, a numerical price that "condenses"
and summarizes value (Simmel, 1978, p. 196). Money is
also used as a numeraire to commensurate among
alternatives faced by a decision maker (Espeland, 1998;
Orlean, 1992, p. 140). Using money as a common
denominator, a decision maker can make tradeoffs and
comparisons and, in effect, choose between apples and
oranges. Money also serves as a general resource, as the
means to any end, that allows activities to proceed. Money
is empowering, for it allows its possessor to do what she
wants. Finally, money facilitates economic exchange, and
in so doing it circulates, moving from one set of hands to
another and connecting distinctive market transactions in a
long monetary chain. In fulfilling this last function, money
has long served as a hallmark of market or capitalist
society.(4)
Each of these uses represents a way for money to acquire
meanings, to bestow them, to shift and to transform them.
Furthermore, although modern money is characterized by
most scholars as anonymous, homogeneous, fungible,
and universal,(5) in fact money itself varies in several
different ways that relate to its meaning. As we elaborate
below, money varies in its impersonality, ranging from
highly anonymous to highly individualized. It can also differ
in its scope, with general-purpose money at one end of the
continuum and specialized or restricted money at the other
(Douglas, 1967). Money can vary depending on how
"natural" or "artificial" it seems. None of these
characteristics is immutable or incontestable. In fact, the
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dynamism of money, and how its place in a society
changes, depends very much on the kinds of conflicts,
divergent understandings, and disagreements that arise
over its proper role (Guyer, 1995, pp. 25-26).
MONEY IN EXCHANGE: HOW FLOW AFFECTS
MEANING
Some of the different meanings that money can acquire
depend on its universalistic potential: Money circulates - it
flows from one place to another as people use it in
successive exchanges and different contexts. The
direction of these flows, and the social meaning of the
places through which money moves, affects the meaning
of money: Money itself can become morally tainted or
purified. Terms like dirty money and the salience of money
laundering suggest that money may not come through
such exchanges unscathed. Yet, whether money gets
colored by where it has been (or where it goes) is not a
foregone conclusion. In fact, as the discussion between
the Roman Emperor Vespasian and his son Titus
suggests, this question, like many other moral questions,
is subject to debate. Vespasian argues that money from
urine smells no different than money derived from other,
more reputable, tax sources. And yet, in Titus’s mind, such
money is somehow unclean, tarnished, or polluted.
Furthermore, these meanings adhere to money as it
performs one of its primary functions: facilitating exchange.
They are not attached "extrinsically" or "artificially" but as
part of money’s normal role in the functioning of markets.
The status of money can be influenced by its place in a
network of monetary flows. Money is affected by its
proximate source, its "ultimate" source, and by its future
direction. The status of where money comes from, and
where it goes, matters. Consider first the proximate source
of money. Where does particular money come from? If the
source involves some kind of inappropriate, socially
sanctioned, or morally problematic activity (theft, sale of
illegal drugs, bodily functions), or if it involves illegitimate
individuals (crooks, thieves, sinners), then it may become
dirty money or be defined as "ill-gotten gains." Of course,
fungible and homogeneous money is hard to track, and it
is hard to determine where the money came from. But,
frequently, monetary sources can be traced, and so the
nature of the source becomes an issue.
The Kenyan Luo, a group of Christianized East African
farmers, distinguish between good and bad money.(6) The
latter is termed bitter money, and its moral status depends
on its source. Money obtained through theft, as a reward
for killing or hurting someone else, or through unearned
gain (winning a lottery or finding someone else’s lost
money) becomes bitter. The sale of certain commodities
like land, gold, tobacco, and cannabis also generates bitter
money. Such money is dangerous - it threatens both the
holder and the holder’s family and must be kept strictly
separate from transactions involving livestock or
bridewealth. Its status as bitter is not permanent, however,
for it can be converted into good money through a
purification ceremony.
In a different cultural context, money derived from the sale
of blood plasma also bears a cultural stigma (Espeland,
1984). Selling plasma comes dangerously close to
violating American normative prohibitions on the sale of
one’s body parts or even, because blood is symbolic of
life, of "selling life." Although legal, such market
transactions are morally problematic. Sellers often
distinguish between the money obtained from plasma
sales and other money, earmarking the former for
particular uses and purposes.(7)
The problem of how to mitigate the stigma of dirty money
is a familiar one to state governments that depend on
legalized gambling. Although gambling and lottery dollars
look (and smell) the same as other dollars, their
association with a highly disreputable activity taints them.
State governments often "launder" this dirty money by
earmarking it for noble purposes. Education is often a
favored target for stigmatized revenues.
People distinguish money based on its source. In
particular, earned money (of which the recipient is
somehow morally deserving) gets differentiated from
unearned money (derived from some kind of windfall).
Whether the recipient saves or spends her money, and on
what she spends it, depends on how the money is
categorized (Lea, Tarpy, & Webley, 1988, pp. 230-231;
Thaler, 1992, pp. 112-114).
Consider the example of Ms. Willis, a tenant leader and
council member of a large public housing complex in a
midwestern city. Her decision about whether to accept
dirty money from gang leaders was a complex moral
dilemma, one that reflected the inability of mainstream
groups to provide for the basic needs of her community.
Charged with raising money for a community party, she
had been turned down by housing authority officials and
had few other potential sources. "Guess I’ll go back to
Ottie [a gang leader] again," she concluded. "I just don’t
like takin’ ’dirty money’ if I can avoid it. You know?! But
whatcha gonna do?" As drug money offered by gang
members, its source tainted this money, however badly it
was needed. Its meaning was mobilized - symbolically and
materially - in the conflict over the moral standing of gangs
as legitimate community members, their capacity to "buy"
legitimacy with drug money, and conflict over who could
rightfully represent and effectively serve the community
(Venkatesh, 1997, pp. 96-97).
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Money also derives meaning from what we might term its
ultimate source (as opposed to proximate source). Who (or
what) created and disseminated the money? Is the money
issued by a sovereign government, by a private bank, by a
local community, or by a single individual? Because
money symbolizes or represents its issuer (whose
specialized marks of authenticity and authority are
frequently inscribed on it), the characteristics of the latter
affect how the money is viewed and treated. Furthermore,
the value of money depends on the issuer.
Money has had a historical connection with political
sovereignty (Klinck, 1991, p. 3; Shipton, 1989, p. 6;
Spufford, 1988, p. 83). To document their independence
from former colonial masters, newly sovereign African
countries frequently issued their own currency, following a
fairly standardized iconography (paper money is usually
stamped with numbers, pictures of political leaders, and
signatures).(8) Money represents nationhood.(9) Kings
and rulers put their faces or silhouettes on coins and often
monopolized the right to mint new money (Geva, 1987, p.
139).(10)
One of the reasons sovereign rulers put their stamp on
money (literally and figuratively) is that it can serve as an
instrument of control. For example, sovereigns mobilize
resources from the territories they govern in the form of
taxes and tribute. To do so effectively, they try to track
economic productivity and activity (Hart, 1986, p. 641).
Tracing money, which is involved in most economic
transactions in a monetarized economy, is much easier
than directly monitoring the economic transactions
themselves.(11) Consider the African colonial
government’s insistence on the collection of hut or
capitation taxes in cash rather than in kind. The need for
money forced many native Africans into the cash economy
and particularly into wage labor (Arhin, 1976, p. 460;
Shipton, 1989, p. 22).
A standardized currency helps sovereigns to monitor the
economic base, but it also can enlarge that base. Uniform
money encourages trade and economic development
within national boundaries. This was one reason, for
example, why the U.S. Constitution granted the power to
regulate money to the federal government rather than to
the individual states (Hurst, 1973, p. 18). Thirteen states
could well have established 13 different currencies, which
would have made interstate commerce much more
difficult.
Tensions inhere in the connection between money and
sovereignty. The scale of sovereignty has changed over
time, but so has money. Even as governments try to
control money, its evolution and growing liquidity threaten
to undermine such control. These tensions are exemplified
by the struggles to regulate an ever-innovating financial
sector (which generated new forms of money) during the
period from the 1960s to the 1990s in advanced capitalist
countries.(12) Financial innovation undercut the economic
sovereignty of nation states (Leyshon & Thrift, 1997).
The strong relationship between money and sovereignty
has not been uncontroversial. In the early United States,
for example, people were deeply concerned about the
danger that the national government might get too much
control over the coinage and become tempted to abuse,
clip, or depreciate its value (Hurst, 1973, pp. 8-10). Later
on, post-Civil War bullionists celebrated the autonomous
value that specie (allegedly) possessed as a protection
against politically driven inflation. Paper money, according
to their analysis, was too easily controlled and abused by
governments (Carrothers & Babb, 1996).(13)
Local units of government can also issue monetary tokens.
These function as money within a small community and
represent an attempt to bolster the local economy by
restricting expenditures. Such money can only be spent
locally, and so, rather than buy goods from outside, money
holders must reinvest their purchasing power
internally.(14) Acceptance of such currency symbolizes
confidence in the community and support for one’s
neighbors.
Nongovernmental units can issue money. Before the Civil
War, private banks, not the U.S. government, issued paper
money. The multitude of banks meant that each type of
money had a value that depended on the financial
standing and reputation of the issuing bank (Myers, 1970,
p. 121).(15) Dollar bills were not generic or homogeneous
but were differentiated according to the issuer. No one in
the United States imagined leaving the supply of money
entirely up to market forces, although by granting private
banks the right to issue bank notes, the supply of money
was dispersed and "privatized" to a significant extent
(Hurst, 1973, p. 31). Money can have individual as well as
organizational sources. Personal checks function like
money (and demand deposits are part of the official money
supply), but their value depends on the individual who
writes them.(16)
Money creation by nongovernment agents, either
individuals or organizations, contributes to the idiosyncrasy
of money and counteracts attempts by governments to try
to standardize money. Even modern money remains
heterogeneous. Of course, official, standardized, unitary
money - the kind of currency issued by a central
government - is what people have in mind when they first
think of money. But one can shift attention to near monies,
special monies, and quasi-monies: things that function
(almost) like money and that may even be a part of the
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official money supply but that were not issued by the
central government. Such things include personal or
business credit, promissory notes, negotiable paper,
demand deposits, and notes issued by private banks.(17)
Alternative monies get produced privately in domestic
households, as Zelizer (1994) has amply documented.
But, they are also produced publicly, as part of standard
commercial practices.
Personal credit is a kind of personal money. Unlike official
money, it is nonanonymous - its value depends on a
particular individual (the debtor or issuer). The example of
18th-century Paris bakers (Kaplan, 1996) suggests that
the extension of credit establishes or constitutes a
personal relationship between lender and borrower. It is a
personal form of money, eventually to be exchanged for
impersonal money (when the customer pays off his
account) or offset against personal money going in the
opposite direction (when two parties cancel offsetting
claims and only settle the net balance). As Mary Douglas
(1967) points out, credit often precedes money and so
facilitates exchange even in economies where there is no
generalized money supply (p. 121).
In early modern economies, credit was crucial for
commerce (Earle, 1989; Hunt, 1996).(18) Early business
handbooks (e.g., Defoe, 1745/1987) stressed the
importance of credit for the success of business. No one
could operate a trading firm, bakery, brewery, or textile mill
if he could not obtain credit from his suppliers. Such
handbooks underscored the necessity of credit and also
advised on how to be creditworthy. The latter feature was
conceived at the time to be a particular and deeply
personal characteristic of the individual businessman.
Credit was based on a man’s personal character - his
moral standing, ethical rectitude, and trustworthiness
(Hoppit, 1990; Muldrew, 1993). Handbooks advised on
which individual features reflected or signaled high moral
standing (for example, the orderliness of one’s accounts or
the use of double-entry books were interpreted as good
indicators of character and hence of creditworthiness).(19)
In the late 19th century, at the origin of today’s credit-rating
agencies (e.g., Dun and Bradstreet), creditworthiness was
still a matter that rested on the personal characteristics of
the borrower. In the textile trade of 19th-century Buffalo,
New York, credit raters put considerable emphasis on the
ethnicity of the borrower, sharply distinguishing, for
example, between Jews and non-Jews (Gerber, 1982).
Their assumption was that ethnic identity served as an
indicator of character and trustworthiness.
Cash money differs from credit money by shifting and
reducing the problem of trust. In credit relations, creditors
have to determine the trustworthiness of a specific debtor
in relation to the creditor (i.e., will so-and-so repay me?). If
cash is used to consummate the transaction, the
seller/creditor only has to know if the money is trustworthy,
and she can forget about the other party. If the money is
"green," so to speak, then it does not matter who the other
person is.
Money’s meanings depend on its future direction of flow as
well as its proximate and ultimate sources. When dealing
with fungible money, it is always hard to know exactly
where it goes.(20) But earmarking and other techniques
for differentiating money can be used to track it and
discern what future transactions it enters into. The moral
purity of a future use of money can help counterbalance
the immorality of its source (as governments that "purify"
gambling revenues by earmarking them well know).(21)
Money that goes to a "good cause" becomes good
money.(22) As well, idiosyncratic money (credit,
commercial paper) often acquires the characteristics of its
issuer, ensuring that money brings a reputation with it.
Such money is definitely not anonymous.
MONEY AND NONEXCHANGE: LIMITS ON LIQUIDITY
Money’s meaning is also a function of where it does not
flow and why it does not flow. From what social spheres,
activities, or exchanges is money excluded? How is its
flow restricted? Douglas (1967) points out that even
modern money is restricted to within national boundaries:
Its purchasing power may be almost limitless within a
country, but try to spend it elsewhere and serious
problems arise. Restricted "spheres of exchange" are an
anthropological truism (Bohannan, 1955, p. 1959) that
reflect, among other things, social boundaries placed on
the set of possible exchanges: Some things cannot be
traded for others no matter what the terms of trade (Parry,
1989, p. 88). Generalized all-purpose money cannot
function as such in an economy composed of separate
spheres of exchange (Douglas, 1967).
Modern money may not be completely excluded from
certain social domains or types of exchange, but its use is
nevertheless highly constrained and restricted. Perhaps
the best example of this concerns money’s relationship to
gift exchange. Money characterizes the exchange of
commodities in markets, which is quite different from gift
exchange. Although gift giving is universal, its pattern and
meaning vary cross-culturally (Bloch & Parry, 1989, p. 9).
In modern, Western society, gift exchange tends to be
personal and altruistic, as compared with the impersonality
and self-interestedness of commodity exchange. Gregory
(1982) poses the difference sharply: "Commodity
exchange is an exchange of alienable things between
transactors who are in a state of reciprocal independence.
. . . Non-commodity (gift) exchange is an exchange of
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inalienable things between transactors who are in a state
of reciprocal dependence" (p. 12). Gift exchange
establishes (or maintains) a social relationship between
giver and recipient, whereas commodity exchange tends
not to.(23) A gift invokes an obligation - a relationship of
indebtedness, status difference, or even subordination.
Consequently, the meaning of the gift must be appropriate
to the relationship.(24)
Most exchanges in modern society occur in markets and,
thus, are mediated by money.(25) Goods circulate as
commodities purchased for money. Normatively, markets
are distinctive institutions: "The norms structuring market
relations . . . have five features . . . they are impersonal,
egoistic, exclusive, want-regarding, and oriented to exit
rather than voice" (Anderson, 1993, pp. 144-145). Yet,
some exchanges are protected from monetarization and
commodification because of their inappropriate ethos.
Money in our society is so strongly identified with market
exchange that its attachment to something brings with it
strong "economic" connotations that may be deemed
unsuitable. In many situations, the use of money violates
and endangers the spirit of gift giving. Consequently,
money is generally inappropriate as a gift, and even when
it is used as such, all kinds of restrictions, flamings,
markings, and reinterpretations come into play.(26)
The ethos of the gift is strong enough to influence some
market transactions. In the contemporary West, much
cultural work has gone into defining blood donation as an
instance of gift giving (Titmuss, 1971). Thus, to donate
blood confers status on the donor, status that will not
accrue if the person sold their blood. Furthermore,
transplantable body parts (like kidneys, hearts, livers, etc.)
are not for sale. But, in the United States, certain blood
components can be legally exchanged for money.
Nevertheless, given that selling blood transgresses
sensibilities about the integrity (both physical and moral) of
the human body, the exchange of blood plasma for money
is enormously problematic. The meaning of money is
deemed inappropriate to a context of gift giving, and so
plasma selling is stigmatized. As Espeland (1984) shows,
blood plasma centers devote considerable effort to
managing and ameliorating this stigma.
Of course, the difference between gifts and commodities
has little or nothing to do with the objects themselves but
rather with the role that they play and how they are
perceived. Things can be transformed from commodities
into gifts (and vice versa) through their insertion into
different types of exchange - the book that one buys at
Barnes and Noble becomes a birthday gift for a friend as
its price is removed and it is "personalized" through
wrapping, the addition of an inscription, or the attachment
of a card (Carrier, 1990, p. 30). Things are not intrinsically
gifts or commodities - that status is bestowed on them
depending on how they are used.
Even though things can be transformed from commodities
into gifts, many gift exchanges remain separate from the
monetarized economy. A guest who receives the gift of an
invitation to dinner becomes indebted and may reciprocate
later on by having the host over for a meal (thus
extinguishing the debt). But polite guests would never
dream of offering money in return. Nor would they treat
such a social debt like a monetary debt: as a negotiable or
transferable obligation.(27) The debt is personal and direct
and cannot be shifted to others.
Such restrictions on the use of money in exchange are not
immutably grounded in timeless and unchanging cultural
categories. Norms of exchange evolve, and what may
have been deemed inappropriate at one point in time can
become acceptable later on. Those who Barth (1966) calls
"entrepreneurs" attempt, with mixed success, to break
down the barriers that separate spheres of exchange:
"Innovation for an entrepreneur must involve the initiation
of transactions which make commensurable some forms of
value which were previously not directly connected" (p.
18). Entrepreneurs contest what is deemed an illegitimate
exchange and try to redefine the boundaries of exchange.
Others may resist their attempts.
In societies in which the monetarized economy is sharply
distinguished from other social spheres, the presence of
money in noneconomic exchanges can become highly
problematic. Money brings with it a lot of moral baggage,
and so members of the society (although not the
entrepreneurs) will endeavor to keep money out of some
exchanges. But the problematic nature of money is
certainly not a universal phenomenon. As Bloch and Parry
(1989) point out,
The problem seems to be that for us money signifies a
sphere of "economic" relationships which are inherently
impersonal, transitory, amoral and calculating. There is
therefore something profoundly awkward about offering it
as a girl expressive of relationships which are supposed to
be personal, enduring, moral and altruistic. But, clearly,
this awkwardness derives from the fact that here money’s
natural environment - the "economy" - is held to constitute
an autonomous domain to which general moral precepts
do not apply. Where it is not seen as a separate and
amoral domain, where the economy is "embedded" in
society and subject to its moral laws, monetary relations
are rather unlikely to be represented as the antithesis of
bonds of kinship and friendship, and there is consequently
nothing inappropriate about making gifts of money to
cement such bonds. (p. 9)
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Gerriets (1985) offers a good example of this in her
discussion of money in early Christian Ireland. Money was
crucial in the management and maintenance of social ties
but played little role in anything like a separate or
autonomous economic sphere.(28)
How money gets used in exchange, and also how it is not
used, both reflect and constitute meaningfulness. By virtue
of its inclusions and exclusions in a social network of
exchanges, and how it flows from one activity to another,
money can become good or bad, appropriate or
inappropriate, legitimate or illegitimate. As an economy
and society evolve, not only does the network of monetary
flows change, but so do the meanings that money
acquires. Yet, exchange is not the only determinant of
monetary meaning, for other factors matter as well.
MONETARY MEDIA
Over time, it seems that money has become less
material.(29) From pieces of precious metal, to pieces of
paper that represent (or are convertible into) metal, to
inconvertible pieces of paper, to numerical entries in
electronic accounts, money is becoming increasingly
intangible. Cross-culturally, everything from cowrie shells
to iron bars and cattle has functioned as money. Yet, the
materiality of money mattered enormously in the past and
even today still makes a difference. The extent of historical
and cultural variation in monetary media suggests that
what serves as the material for money is an arbitrary issue
or at most a matter of convenience. Within societies at
specific points in time, however, the matter of media has
seemed anything but arbitrary.
Postbellum U.S. politics were dominated by monetary
controversies (Carruthers & Babb, 1996; Ritter, 1997).
Before the Civil War, the U.S. money supply consisted of
coins (predominantly gold but also some silver) and
banknotes convertible into specie. During the war, the
United States went off the gold standard, and inconvertible
paper currency (greenbacks) circulated as money. After
the war ended, a widespread and protracted political
conflict broke out concerning the choice between two
monetary alternatives: gold (and gold-backed paper
currency) versus greenbacks (inconvertible paper
currency). Although this monetary controversy connected
to many other conflicts (partisan, regional, class,
ideological, etc.), much of the debate focused on the
merits and liabilities of different monetary media.
Bullionists - those who advocated a return to the gold
standard - celebrated the intrinsic and natural value of gold
and its traditional place as the basis for money.
Inconvertible paper money, in their eyes, lacked
substantial worth, and it devalued so easily that inflation
was an ever-present danger. Greenbackers argued in
response that value was conferred by law and that it did
not inhere in the material out of which money was
fashioned. Later on in the 19th century, Populists claimed
that silver could function "as good as gold" and supported
the monetarization of silver. Like the bullionists, silver
advocates believed that the medium for money mattered.
The connotations of monetary media continue to resonate,
long after the end of the Populist era. Consider a World
Gold Council advertisement in the June 24, 1993, The
New York Times that states, "No one has ever said of
gold, It’s not worth the paper it’s printed on," and that "gold
has intrinsic value." Gold remains a powerful symbol.
Although most people today rely on immaterial money
(e.g., credit cards) for their market transactions, the
traditional materiality of money still possesses an aura of
solidity, beauty, and trustworthiness.(30)
MEANING AND MONETARIZATION
To monetarize means to attach monetary value to
something. Another way that money acquires and bestows
meaning relates to the consequences of monetarization.
Sometimes, these consequences are deeply symbolic.
Progressive-era women’s reform organizations signaled
their seriousness, their civic maturity, and their character
as modern organizations by substituting cash contributions
for personal service. The president of the General
Federation of Women’s Clubs chided her members, "As
soon as women get big enough to spend money
impersonally, then the story is told" (Clemens, 1997, p.
209). Elisabeth Clemens (1997) argues that these women
understood that "cash was a criterion of citizenship" (pp.
208-210). This shift to a cash economy and the adoption of
business practices, in turn, helped to displace the familiar
models of sisterhood and maternalism that shaped how
American women understood their organizations in the
19th century.(31)
Among other outcomes, monetarization involves affixing
precise numerical values (the amount of money something
is worth) to things. It also entails a distinctive type of
valuation, quite different from and potentially inconsistent
with other modes of valuation. Money can be
"Procrustean" in its effects, as social values are stretched
or trimmed to fit into quantitative monetary categories.
Finally, by facilitating exchange, money can induce a set of
equivalences across objects and activities that were
previously considered incomparable or incommensurable.
Because meaning is partly a matter of what something is
like, creating new equivalences changes meaning.
In our society, it is considered wrong to value some
activities using money as a metric (to do so would be
cynical, in Oscar Wilde’s sense). For instance, many
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domestic or familial relationships and activities are highly
valued but not in monetary terms. Most mothers would not
wish their children to attach a dollar value to the mothering
they receive (see Firth, 1967, p. 19). Such a valuation
would violate the normal meaning of motherhood, even
though many of the activities that comprise mothering
(e.g., baby-sitting, feeding, cleaning) can easily be
purchased for cash.(32)
Some 19th-century reformers, as well as later feminists
(Oakley, 1976), have devised estimates of the market
value of women’s unpaid labor as one strategy for
publicizing and criticizing inequities.(33) But, many women
remain leery of efforts to commodify domestic work. As
Judith Stacey (1990) points out, "modern-traditional"
conceptions of the family emphasize family relations as
fundamentally different from market relations. For some,
the family is crucial precisely because they believe it is a
"haven" from the self-interested calculations that
characterize economic behavior (Lasch, 1977). For women
who embrace traditional roles, efforts to commodify their
work are deeply threatening to their investments and
identities (Stevens, 1996).
Different societies value different things in nonmonetary
terms, but nonmonetary valuation is itself almost a
universal feature.(34) The majority of contemporary
Americans comfortably put a money value on land and will
view such a monetary assessment as legitimate. The
Yavapai Indian tribe of Arizona, in sharp contrast, has
refused to put a dollar value on their ancestral lands
(despite considerable political pressure to do so). Such a
valuation violates their cultural heritage and insults their
collective self-identity (Espeland, 1994, 1998).(35) In the
past, widespread monetarization has altered people’s
perceptions of some quite ordinary things:
Just as cultivable land ceased to be regarded simply as a
source of immediately consumable produce and came to
be seen as a source of money, so other resources came to
be judged in terms of the money that they would produce.
Forests ceased to be seen merely in terms of hunting for
pleasure or food and were valued in monetary terms.
(Spufford, 1988, p. 245)(36)
Even the monetarization of things that are now ordinarily
exchanged in markets can be consequential. The
monetary valuation of economic investments seems valid
almost by definition (most people understand capital as a
stock of money). Yet, as Baldwin and Clark (1994) argue,
the use of money as a measure of value focuses attention
almost exclusively on the most quantifiable aspects of a
situation and necessarily overlooks the unquantified.
According to their analysis, U.S. companies after World
War II adopted the discounted cash flow methodology to
assess capital-budgeting projects. They evaluated their
investment alternatives in purely monetary terms, and in
so doing, failed to develop various organizational
capabilities that had a discernible effect on performance
but that were almost impossible to cast in monetary terms.
Much the same problem applies to labor. Workers now
routinely exchange their labor for wages, and so, in effect,
a money value gets attached to their labor. Yet, the
establishment of wage labor was hardly an uncontroversial
or inconsequential process. In the French textile industry,
they [workers] resisted trading off money for certain
categories of things, especially limited control over their
own bodies and routines and a coherent structure for the
family life cycle. They resisted trading off money for these
things because these things had an importance they did
not wish to quantify. (Reddy, 1984, p. 334)
The monetarization of labor was no uniform process, for
the attachment of money to labor varied considerably,
even within the same industry. In the 19th century, workers
were paid using a piece-rate system in both the British and
German wool-weaving industries. Yet, these monetary
compensation schemes measured the product (length of
cloth manufactured) in the case of Britain and the labor
expended (number of "shots," or trips of the shuttle across
the warp) in the case of Germany as the basis for wages
(Biernacki, 1995). Multiple monetary measures of labor
were possible.(37)
Valuation in general is a kind of assessment or estimation
- a form of measurement. Some kinds of valuation simply
put objects into different classes: This is good, that is bad;
this is male, that is female. One can take a set of objects
and determine which are similar (by virtue of belonging to
the same class) and which are different. A different
valuation might place the objects into classes that are
ordered along some dimension (as in small, medium, and
large). Valuations vary in terms of what psychometricians
call the "level of measurement" (Fraser, 1980; Lea et al.,
1988, pp. 336-337). When things are valued monetarily,
one knows about much more than just similarities and
differences. Money allows for, and in fact compels, the
precise specification of magnitudes of value (i.e., this is
worth exactly $100), differences between value (as in, this
is worth $50 more than that), and relative values (this is
worth twice as much as that).
The numerical precision of monetary price renders
exchange much less ambiguous than before. Thanks to
standardized money, it becomes absolutely clear what
something is worth, and the magnitude of equivalences set
up in exchange are rendered unambiguous. Of course, for
many types of exchanges, undertakings, and relationships,
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ambiguity has its virtues.(38) Gift givers normally take the
price tag off a gift because knowledge of an exact
monetary value encourages the recipient to draw
conclusions ("Our friendship is only worth a $10 gift?") and
make comparisons ("Samuel’s gift is worth twice as much
as Esther’s, therefore I must mean more to Samuel") that
violate the ethos of gift giving. In such a context, price
provides too much inappropriate information. In other
respects, price can provide too little information, as it offers
only a one-dimensional assessment of value. The
complexity of things with multiple dimensions may simply
be ignored in a price.
Monetarization also encourages the belief that the
arithmetic operations that can be applied to numbers
(addition, division, subtraction, etc.) accurately represent
real qualities of the things to which monetary value has
been attached.(39) For example, to value jointly two
assets, one might sum their individual monetary values,
but such an operation would ignore the kind of asset
specificities and synergies that make wholes sometimes
more, and sometimes less, than the sum of their parts.
Nonmonetary values may not conform with the laws of
arithmetic, but widespread monetarization of value
enforces such conformity (Ferreira, 1997). The
monetarization and, consequently, arithmetization of the
economy also encourages and privileges numerical skills.
Numeracy becomes almost as valuable as literacy
(Thomas, 1987).
Finally, the spread of monetarization inserts local
transactions into larger circuits of exchange. Implicitly, all
bilateral exchanges become multilateral (because money
provides a common denominator, it makes all two-way
comparisons possible), and so money creates
equivalences between unlike things (M. Strathern, 1992).
For example, suppose in some society object A did not
equal and was not comparable with object B and,
therefore, could never be exchanged for B. But with
money, if A = $x and B = $x, then by the transitivity of an
equivalence relation, A = B. This is another way of saying
that generalized money threatens to break down spheres
of exchange (Bohannan, 1959) and to commensurate
incommensurables (Espeland, 1998).
Even in situations in which monetary valuation occurs and
is deemed appropriate, moral sensibilities can still make a
difference. It may be "right" to attach prices to things, but
the question of the right price remains open. E. P.
Thompson (1971) argued that the 18th-century English
crowd used standard forms of collective action, in
particular the bread riot, to enforce moral standards about
what was a "fair" price for bread or flour. Although one
might dismiss such normative standards as early-modern
holdovers from precapitalist society, Kahneman, Knetsch,
and Thaler (1986a, 1986b) present strong evidence that
similar standards apply today.(40) Some mechanisms for
market allocation in situations of excess demand are
considered more fair than others (for example, queues
seem much fairer to people than do auctions). People
bring to economic exchange a reference transaction (often
a previous price or market price) that helps to define what
is fair. The circumstances of a price change dictate
whether it seems fair (i.e., it is more legitimate to raise a
price if costs have gone up than if demand for the final
product has risen).
The perceived distinction between natural and artificial
applies to prices as well as to monetary media (e.g., gold
vs. paper). A market price has a natural or inevitable
quality to it that administered prices do not, and so the
latter are more vulnerable to contestation. Valuation of
assets in bankruptcy court frequently involves the
derivation of prices in situations in which the market
provides little guidance (Delaney, 1994; Fortgang & Mayer,
1985). Consequently, bankruptcy valuation can involve a
very political and conflictual series of negotiations among
interested parties. The transfer prices used by large firms
to account for their internal transactions also often lack
market benchmarks. Without the legitimacy of a seemingly
natural reference point, organizational political interests
weigh heavily as these artificial prices get negotiated and
administered (Eccles, 1985).
CONCLUSION
Money derives meaning and transfers it both in the course
of facilitating exchange and outside of exchange. Money
creates meaning pragmatically, that is, through use.
Money is not a neutral or meaningless social object, and
its meanings are consequential. People treat money
differently depending on what it means - good or bad,
appropriate or inappropriate, right or wrong, dirty or clean.
Such meanings change over time, as "entrepreneurs"
propose new exchanges, comparisons, and equivalences
that transform preexisting categories and distinctions. The
monetarization of economic life has led to the penetration
of money into many (but certainly not all) spheres of
exchange. Considerable effort goes into the protection of
certain relationships and exchanges from money and into
modifying, attenuating, or distinguishing money so that it
becomes less dangerous. In our society, gift giving and
money coexist uneasily.
Multiple monies exist in a structure with a core of official
money (usually supplied by the national government)
surrounded by a penumbra of quasi- and near monies that
get supplied by banks, organizations, corporations, and
individuals. If the core is standardized and anonymous, the
penumbra is neither. Official money represents the
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sovereignty of government and, flowing easily from one
transaction to the next, links them in a monetary chain that
can transfer meaning from one site to another (e.g., dirty
money comes from a disreputable source and must be
treated differently). Quasi-monies are often less liquid and,
by not flowing easily, cannot transfer meaning so readily.
Yet, by virtue of who (or what) issued them, quasi-money
acquires a distinctive meaning as the representation of the
issuer. General monies also raise the issue of power more
acutely than do special monies. The latter are not the kind
of generalized resource that empowers money holders in a
threatening way.
Those who use money to value the world see it through
more quantitative eyes. The ability to apply mathematical
operations to value has clearly been understood as a
considerable economic advantage (witness the number of
numerically based financial techniques that monetary
valuation has generated). But it discounts, downplays, or
even ignores those aspects of value that cannot be
reduced to a single number. Although such a claim may
seem fairly obvious in the case of pricing priceless
heirlooms, it applies even to basic factors of production
like capital and labor.
In addition to where it does and does not flow, who issues
it, and how it values, money derives meaning from its
medium. The tangibility of gold still weighs heavily on the
public imagination, connoting intrinsic worth, natural value,
solid tradition, and economic security. To gain marketing
cache, even plastic credit cards turn to gold.
This article lays out some of the dimensions of monetary
meaning: proximate and ultimate source, future flow, mode
of valuation, and monetary media. These dimensions
undergird much of the variation in money we have
surveyed: homogeneous versus differentiated money,
general versus specialized money, material versus
immaterial money, anonymous versus personal money.
The next step is to demonstrate the usefulness of this
framework in a sustained empirical analysis of money and
monetary change - something we hope to undertake soon.
Authors’ Note: An earlier version of this article was
presented at the 1997 American Sociological Association
Meetings, Toronto, Canada, for the panel "Changing
Forms of Payment" organized by Viviana Zelizer. Thanks
to her and to Christopher Tomlins and Julie Nelson for
their helpful comments. Direct all correspondence to Bruce
Carruthers or Wendy Espeland, Department of Sociology,
Northwestern University, 1810 Chicago Avenue, Evanston,
IL 60208-1330.
NOTES
1. Our goal in this article is to begin devising a general
analytic framework for analyzing the meaning of money.
Here, we use examples drawn promiscuously from
different historical periods and societies. We unfortunately
must relegate to future work our efforts to enlist this
framework in a more sustained, detailed, and historically
responsible analysis of money.
2. For this reason, we draw distinctions between economy
and society, or between the economic and the social, for
analytical purposes only. In reality, of course, both
influence and interpenetrate each other in variable ways
that call for explanation (see Carruthers, 1996).
3. See, for example, Stiglitz (1993, pp. 880-883).
4. "A market system requires for its existence the full and
free convertibility of all objects of human desire into money
equivalents and the full and free operation of a separate
economic sphere of social life" (Reddy, 1987, p. 154).
5. See the summary in Zelizer (1994, pp. 6-12).
6. This discussion relies on Shipton (1989).
7. Earmarking money involves setting it aside, in reserve
or for some special purpose (Zelizer, 1994, pp. 21-25).
8. Such iconographic conventions are very old. Procopius
(the Byzantine chronicler) notes that as Franks and other
tribes conquered regions of the western Roman Empire,
they also took over the mints and started to issue coins.
Procopius thought it fine that barbarian rulers should put
their likenesses on silver coins but thought it a travesty
that such undistinguished and inaugust people would also
put it on gold coins (Spufford, 1988, pp. 12-14). These
conventions of symbolism even apply to paper money, as
Marco Polo’s description of Kublai Khan’s paper money
suggests:
And all these papers are sealed with the seal of the Great
Khan. The procedure of issue is as formal and as
authoritative as if they were made of pure gold or silver.
On each piece of money several specially appointed
officials write their names, each setting his own stamp.
When it is completed in due form, the chief of the officials
deputed by the Khan dips in cinnabar the seal or bull
assigned to him and stamps it on the top of the piece of
money so that the shape of the seal in vermilion remains
impressed upon it. And then the money is authentic. And if
anyone were to forge it, he would suffer the extreme
penalty. (Polo, 1958, p. 147)
In 1792, the U.S. Congress asserted national sovereignty
by defining the gold content of a dollar so as to distinguish
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it from the other foreign coins then in circulation (see
Hurst, 1973, p. 32).
9. Consider Israel’s switch in its currency units from
pounds (borrowed from the British monetary system) to lira
to shekels (a unit with rich historical connotations and
cultural resonances).
10. Minting coins was a prerogative that engaged rulers
personally. Numerous 16th-century Italian city rulers vied
for the services of the famous goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini
in designing their coinage. Rulers competed to have their
portraits cast on the most beautiful money.
11. Thus, one way to evade taxes is to exit the money
economy and exchange via barter.
12. For instance, the euro-dollar market that emerged in
the 1960s escaped U.S. financial and banking regulations.
13. Hurst (1973) suggests why monetary controversies
were so intense:
But, regulation of the money supply made itself felt among
the people with a sharpness and breadth of impact which
did not characterize uses of most fiscal or regulatory law.
Money was part of the form and substance of almost all
economic transactions and entered into the calculations
and expectations by which men structured much of their
lives and behavior outside the market. (p. 91)
14. Such local money tokens are issued in places like
Ithaca, New York; Madison, Wisconsin; and Waldo
County, Maine and are legal. See The Wall Street Journal,
June 27, 1996 (thanks to Marc Ventresca for calling this
article to our attention).
15. For example, the real (as opposed to nominal) value of
a one-dollar bill issued by an insolvent bank was less than
that of a dollar issued by a healthy bank.
16. For some time, demand deposits have constituted a
large proportion of the total money supply. The resurgence
of state banks after the Civil War, despite a prohibitive tax
on state bank notes instituted by Congress, attested to the
growing importance of demand deposits as a proportion of
the total U.S. money supply (West, 1977, p. 25).
17. A question we do not treat here concerns the large
number of quasi- and near monies. Given the existence of
standardized official money, why are there so many of the
others? Two reasons might help explain this: First, the
supply of official money is frequently insufficient to support
all of the economic transactions that people wish to
undertake (and so they develop substitutes). Second,
money is not qualitatively superior to the alternatives.
Money is usually justified by economists as a solution to
the nontrivial problem of barter (which requires a "double
coincidence of wants"). In fact, however, actual barter is
quite a bit easier than this suggests (Humphrey &
Hugh-Jones, 1992, pp. 4-6).
18. Freyer (1982) and Weinberg (1982) discuss the
importance of commercial paper, another quasi-money, in
the 19th-century U.S. economy. The value of commercial
paper depended on the initial issuer but also on the
reputations of those who endorsed it as it changed hands.
19. See Addison (1711/1965) and Carruthers and
Espeland (1991).
20. This is partly why money is an exception to the
common law rule that a seller can transfer no better title
than she herself has. Someone who in good faith
unknowingly takes money from a thief gets to keep the
money, even though the thief did not legally own it (see
Geva, 1987, pp. 117-118).
21. The proportion of state tax revenues that are
earmarked for specific purposes is surprisingly high. In
1993, the average proportion across all U.S. states was
24%, and the distribution ranged from 4% (in Kentucky) all
the way to 87% (in Alabama). Many states earmark
questionable revenues from tobacco and alcoholic
beverage sales (see General Accounting Office, 1995).
22. In early 19th-century United States, corporations were
legitimized by generating tax revenues that could be put to
legitimate public purposes like funding public education
(see Freyer, 1994, pp. 92-95).
23. Appadurai (1986) elaborates the contrast:
Gifts, and the spirit of reciprocity, sociability, and
spontaneity in which they are typically exchanged, usually
are starkly opposed to the profit-oriented, self-centered,
and calculated spirit that fires the circulation of
commodities. Further, where gifts link things to persons
and embed the flow of things in the flow of social relations,
commodities are held to represent the drive - largely free
of more or cultural constraints - of goods for one another, a
drive mediated by money and not by sociality. (pp. 11-12)
For an analysis of gift giving in contemporary societies,
see Cheal (1988) and Caplow (1982). In anthropological
societies, gift giving manages relations among not only
individuals but also groups, tribes, and villages (see A.
Strathern, 1971, pp. 10-11; Mauss, 1990, p. 5).
24. For example, silk undergarments are considered highly
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inappropriate as a gift from a man to a woman unless they
are in an intimate relationship. To give a Christmas ham to
a good friend who is Muslim suggests that the insensitive
gift giver is not really a very good friend (see Carrier,
1990).
25. Although commodity exchange predominates now, in
the past gift exchange was much more important, precisely
because it was so much more effective for the
manipulation of social and political relationships. On
Europe in the Middle Ages, see Grierson (1959), Geary
(1986) and Spufford (1988, p. 17).
26. A friendly neighbor who does a favor usually gets
repaid with a small gift, not with cash. Money’s
impersonality means that those who wish to give it as a gift
must frequently personalize it (see Anderson, 1993, p.
152; Lea, Tarpy, & Webley, 1988, pp. 322-333; Webley &
Wilson, 1989; Zelizer, 1994, pp. 77-91).
27. By virtue of their negotiability, financial debts can
function like money in the following way. Suppose A owes
B a sum and gives to B a promissory note. If B also owes
money to someone else, C, B can give the promissory
note to C in satisfaction of the debt. Thus, A’s debt can
circulate and function like money. In contrast, consider a
similar pattern of social debts. A owes B dinner, and B
owes C dinner. Social debts are not negotiable, and so B
would not transfer A’s debt to satisfy the obligation to C.
Negotiability would violate the meaning of the social
obligation.
28. The early medieval wergild system, which attached
monetary "prices" to an elaborate list of wrongs, did not
represent an immoral intrusion of mammon into the
resolution of interpersonal disputes. Rather, it was a
system of monetary compensation. Consistent with Bloch
and Parry’s (1989) argument, the economy did not
constitute a separate, autonomous social realm (see
Grierson, 1977; Spufford, 1988, pp. 9, 17).
29. In Simmel’s (1978) terms, money has shifted from
substance to function (pp. 168-169).
30. Even plastic money is given a metallic sheen. An
American Express credit card with a higher credit limit gets
labeled a gold or even platinum card and is colored
appropriately. Regular cards are colored green, just like
cash.
31. These reformers also recognized that the source of
their money mattered symbolically. Fund-raising that
capitalized on women’s traditional roles was common, but
some saw it as threatening women’s claims to full
citizenship. For example, a leader in Wisconsin’s Political
Equality League threatened to retire to a "cool spot near
Lake Superior" rather than to resort to selling cookbooks or
postcards to raise campaign funds (Clemens, 1997, p.
209).
32. Similar strictures constrain the valuation of children.
Although children are considered highly valuable, valuation
of them in monetary terms is considered wrong. This is
why Landes and Posner’s (1978) proposal for market
governance of child adoptions generated such a vehement
response (see Cohen, 1987; Landes & Posner, 1978; and,
more generally, Zelizer, 1985).
33. See Siegal (1994).
34. Weiner (1992) proposes that a fundamental social and
cultural distinction exists between alienable and
inalienable things: "What makes a possession inalienable
is its exclusive and cumulative identity with a particular
series of owners through time" (p. 33). Such objects can
be transferred, just not bought and sold (i.e., exchanged
for money). In fact, to ensure their physical preservation
and the maintenance of their special significance over
time, they must be passed down from one owner to the
next, as successive owners die (e.g., the British Crown
jewels, hereditary landed estates).
35. On a more personal level, one can consider family
"treasures" and "heirlooms" as the kinds of objects for
which monetary valuation is inappropriate, at least for the
family members.
36. Arhin (1976) notes that the introduction by the British
of cash into the Asante economy changed social and
political relationships.
37. Biernacki (1995) explains the difference in the
monetarization of labor in terms of national cultural
understandings of labor. Different meanings of labor
entailed different monetarizations of labor.
38. For more on the political and economic uses of
ambiguity, see Padgett and Ansell (1993) and Pollard
(1983).
39. As Reddy (1984) puts it, "Unlike similar categories
originating in earlier periods - noble and common, sacred
and profane - the categories of market culture may all be
expressed in numerical form, representing a real or
potential exchange price, and, therefore, they may be
added and subtracted, substituted, or canceled out" (p.
12).
40. See also Alexander and Alexander (1991).
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