subroza

Maurer, Bill (2006) “The Anthropology of Money” Annual Review of Anthropology  35:15–36

I. Introduction

Maurer begins by noting the similarities between his own review article on money and money itself. Do they not both seek to provide a universal yardstick with which to measure different things as equals? Are they not categories themselves (words, concepts, abstractions) in the end but a type of money? The linguist Saucerre used money as a metaphor for meaning. Thus, is not meaning an essential metaphor for money too? The extent to which Maurer wishes to elicit anything useful from such observations is hard to determine. Basically, the answer to such rhetorical questions for Maurer is yes. His own review of anthropological theory; words; even meaning itself is – in a way – money. The introduction ultimately serves to signal Mauerer’s own agreement with the philosophical assumptions of academic anthropology, in particular the school of academic thought derived from post-Marxism and post-modern thought that became canonized in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The general use of such ‘nods’ and ‘allusions,’ while easy enough to follow theoretically, makes it laborious to follow the arbitrary order with which Maurer chooses to organize what should be a standard academic review of his field for the general academic reader.  

For clarity, we must understand his general claim and then turn to the outline he provides based categorically on his own interests. First, Maurer accepts the basic critical thesis of Parry and Bloch’s 1989 edited volume Money and the Morality of Exchange, which argued that anthropology “too often repeats the same story of the ‘great transformation’ from socially embedded to disembedded and abstracted economic forms” (p. 15). This argument, which Maurer follows closely from the editors introductory chapter, claims that Marx and Simmel’s theory of money is based on the fetishization of money which in turn posits a theoretical divide between the pre-capitalist and capitalist world and which comes to define modern anthropologies repetition of the story of the ‘The Great Transformation’ in which societies turned from the socially embedded forms of exchange to the disembedded forms which give rise to the abstracted economic forms. This story was finally overturned in the 1980s (largely with Bloch and Parry) and thus gave way to new work which supersedes the fatal categorical flaw of previous workd. This, at least, is the story that is told by Maurer.

He breaks the categories of fetishization into four different general categories under which he reviews the scholarships that fall into this history more generally: (1) commensuration, (2) abstraction, (3) quantification, and (4) reification. Finally, he introduces his own ‘contributions’ to the advancement of anthropological theory. 

This review will just treat all together and piece together the basic chronological review and critique that Maurer provides. 

I. Marx, Weber, and Simmel 

Maurer tells an intellectual history of money that is extremely similar to that narrted by Parry and Bloch (1989). With Marx, it begins as a commodity theory of money but that is given little note.  It truly begins with Marx and Simmel (1907) who are claimed to be responsible for the  “the common idea in the sociology of money, via Marx and Simmel, that money commensurates, flattens, and homogenizes” (p. 23). Thus,  

According to Marx, Simmel, and Weber, capitalist moneys render everything quantifi- able according to one scale of value and permit previously unthinkable comparisons among objects, persons, and activities. Uniscalar valuation (Kelly 1992) and universal commodification (Taussig 1980) were seen as the hall- marks of modern, capitalist money, and as eroding other societies’ systems of value, flattening the dense and complex networks of value formation that had previously been built on distinctions of gender, rank, age, and status.” (p. 20-21)

Simmel’s 1907 Philosophy of Money in turn is said to be responsible for the general theory that money is responsible for the separation of  gemeinschaft from  gesellschaft. This in turn is at the heart of the berneral binary divides in that remain present in the study of the anthropology of money: the economy is something separate and disembodied from the society. It is this general theoretical division (which in fact is drawn in Marx from his 1839 Crititique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and which later is transformed into his theory of the class struggle) that Maurer argues is responsible for the mistaken narrative of economic anthropology. 

II. Polanyi and Substantivism 

Simmel’s divide between gemeinschaft from  gesellschaft is thus claimed to provide the roots of Polanyi’s divide of the dismbedded economy from the socially embedded economy. It is worth mentioning that this is not what The Great Transformation in fact refers to in Polanyi. It refers in fact to the transformation of industrial capitalism to financial global capitalism which he argues is responsible for the outbreak of world war 1 and the near total destruction of human civilization that it wrought. That scholars continually quote the title without having read the book is indicative of the shallowness with which the professional academic world  appraoches these essential intellectual traditions. Polanyi famously contended that there are three spheres of exchange: (1) the reciprocal, (2) the redistributive, and (3) market exchange. Furthermore, he utilized the functional theory of money. 

Polanyi’s students, Bohannan and Dalton, are credited with the development of this fundamental categorizatoin of pre-monetary and post monetary societies. Bohannan (1959) developed this model to include two categories: (1) Special-Purpose Money, which “serve only one or two of these functions, and, in Bohannan’s exposition of the Tiv economy, only within specific spheres of exchange” (p.20) and (2) General-purpose Money, which “serves three (or four, or five, depending on who is consulted) functions: means of exchange, method of payment, standard of value (and store of wealth, and unit of account)” (p. 20). Unfortunately Maurer does not cite the authors who use these different systems and when or how they are used by  Bohannan. Dalton (1965) likewise sought to further define money on the basis of functions. The functional account, which is still used by economists and economic historians, is deemed to come to a final dead end. 

H. Codere (1968) worked on the correlation of the money and quantification. She “created a classification of money systems and monetary semiotics based on the extent and magnitude of the numbers involved… It was notable for its attempt to categorize moneys on the basis of the interrelationships among symbol, number, and use.” While Maurer provides a critique of Codere’s work, it is on particularly shaky grounds and is followed by a review of work that appears to largely substantiate her basic theoretical approach. 

III. Bloch and Parry 

With Bloch and Parry this whole tradition of thought is overturned as a “folk theory” of money. As Maurer confidently claims: “Bloch & Parry (1989) identified money’s depersonalizing effects as a Western folk theory of money; money’s role in commensuration, abstraction, and quantification is also a Western folk theory, even if it is instantiated (performed, if you will) in monetary practices” (p. 19). They thus proved to provide a critical intervention in the history of the annthropology of money. 

IV. Contemporary Theory 

Yet, Parry and Bloch failed to take note of their own participation in the “folk tale” of “western discourse.” As Maurer tells the story,  

As anthropologists delved more deeply into the impact of money on subsistence economies, and as the societies’ anthropologists studied themselves transformed under the impact of capitalist money, scholars became less certain that money’s homogenizing effects were as complete as once believed. Melanesianists and Africanists provide important correctives to Bohannan’s model (p. 21). 

The critiques took many forms and largely are responsible for the field of the anthropology of money. None accepted the theory that Parry and Bloch themselves proposed. Then critiques can be gathered and summarized for the sake of examination and clarity. 

First, the analytical category of money (as taken from Marx, Weber, and Simmel) reifies Western capitalist categories of experience (even the Western notion of subject and object itself) and thus effaces indigenous notions of emic social experience and reality (p. 21). 

Second, the introduction of Western Money “does not always gather to itself exclusively the functions social scientists have ascribed to it, as a means of exchange, store of wealth, measure of value, method of payment, or unit of account.” (p. 21) 

Third, the categories of economy and money utilized since Polanyi have failed to account for the emic, socially embedded nature of modern finance and money (p. 22).  

Such criticisms allow Maurer to put forth his own contributions within the study of quantification. He, like Parry and Block before him, puts this forth within the context of the theory of fetization. He writes, “When monetary exchange is anonymous and anonymizing, the social identities of transacting parties are irrelevant to the value of the objects mediated by money (Graeber 1996, p. 6), and so the things take on the powers of the fetish described by Marx and the object of desire discussed by Lacan, Zizek, and others” (p. 23). This, however, “does not mean that numbers always do what we think they do, or that numbers really are abstract and disembodied entities from a realm of pure form (Rotman 1997).” Therefore, “We should aim to develop richer vocabularies of numerical scale and quantification techniques and procedures, even borrowing such vocabularies from the realm of statistics and mathematics themselves. We should also examine the interaction of the different scales, for example, of time and money in wage labor and the new disciplines of loan repayments in colonial and postcolonial contexts (Berry 1995; Elyachar 2002; Falola 1995; Stiansen & Guyer 1999, p. 10).” Curiously, we begin with Marx’s theory of the fetish (which is claimed to be inherent to the basic overdetermination of the binary divide of monetary vs. non-monetary societies) and from it draw the conclusion that we must not “we might want to leave Marx to one side while we do this.” (p. 23-24) Marx is the origin of the problem, yet is invoked to explain the conditions, then he is determined once again to be the problem that stands in our way. This is all a bit absurd. There is no reason to base the study of money on Marx’s theory at all. Yet, this is not what his theory was. And to continue to fail to read him and at the same time present him as both necessary to and invalidiating of productive knowledge is a condition peculiar to modern academics. 

He does, however, ask a good research question: Does number actually always permit “a generalized abstraction of value across otherwise incommensurable domains” (Maurer 2005b, p. 104)? “When does it do so, and when does it do something else?” (p. 24) There is no need to use or misuse Marx to study this important and fascinating question. 

V. Conclusion 

Maurer brings up the sociological conditions at the heart of the study of money in the academia. It is a helpful review of the general economic conditions that lie at the heart of such theoretical work: 

Perhaps anthropologists are now fascinated again with money because it is their new exotic. Most living anthropologists today have grown up and were trained during or immediately after the Bretton Woods era. The end of that era has made a direct impact on our lives as academic employees and citizens of nation states. We are increasingly called on to “enterprise up” our contributions to knowledge and demonstrate the value-added of anthropological research in the corporatizing university (Poovey 2001, Strathern 2004). And we are increasingly made responsible not only for accounts-keeping at work but also for portfolio management at home, as the possibility of retirement hinges on our financial investments, not our affective attachments to a lifetime employer or a national welfare state (p. 18).

Maurer appears to have been successful in this particular regard. Today he is the dean of the School of Social Sciences and the Director of the  Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusionat the University of Irvine, California. The latter, whose research partners include Wells Fargo and Capital One, provides public facing research on the  question of money and its affect on society. Their publication, which Maurer is the editory of is “Money at the Margins: Global Perspectives on Technology, Financial Inclusion, and Design” which includes his own contributions such as the 2019 “[Afterword] Monetary Ingenuity: Drink It In.” In it, he focuses on “forms of collaborations between academics and practitioners in industry and philanthropy relating to new designs of money for inclusion” (p. 2). In it, he provides a pitch for the world bank, the IMF, and the Bill Gates foundation: 

We trace the history of the current global campaign for banking the unbanked to the emergence of microfinance in the late 1970s. As de- scribed earlier, following the initial success of the Grameen Bank a number of international development agencies, governments, nongov- ernmental organizations, and private philanthropists joined in a global campaign advocating microfinance as a means of including the “bottom of the pyramid” in regulated financial institutions (banks, credit, and, consequently, debt). More recently, such campaigns see the dematerial- ization of money—the movement from cash to digital payments—as a technological fix to the broader problems of poverty and financial exclu- sion. Thus, leading international organizations (the World Bank), govern- ment bodies (USAID), and private philanthropic foundations (the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, MasterCard Foundation) have embraced (and are heavily investing in) developing mobile money and other electronic and digital financial instruments under the banner of financial inclusion (see, for instance, Demirgüç-Kunt et al. 2015).

With due epistemic and ethical caution, it calls for the extension of the neo-liberal banking system into the colonial world, destabilized by the same forces that caused academics to “enterprise up” in the 2000s. He writes, “As microfinance inclusion initiatives target and expand the financialization of the poor (Roy 2010), these chapters also caution against importing ready-made models of inclusion, and provide design guidelines attuned to local institutions and practices of financial resourcefulness and responsibility” (p. 10). Thus, we see now the reason for Maurer’s use of theory and the deconstruction of the critique of modern money and its destructive power in the hands of accumulated capital. He is in fact an advocate for global financailization – a regime he promotes in the language of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Whether or not the liberalization of global capitalism is ultimately good or bad is a political and economic question. But we ought to condemn the way in which scholars like Maurer invoke the critique of Marx as a scholarly endeavor of objective knowledge when they are active and participants paid and supported by the advocates of global capital.