“Money may be dirt, although dirt is no money” (Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, 1887)

Money is fascinating because it is manifold. Some regard it as the epitome of abstract exchange impersonality (the opposite of Mauss’ conceptualisation of the gift, 1950), while at the same time it is of value only because of personal agreement about, imagination of, and trust in the value it represents. It can be dirt - a materially worthless token of an independent reference value - and in itself valuable as a medium. One of its defining features is its exchangability, its exchange value. But is that all there is to money? In what other ways - both historically and across societies - has money been conceptualized, used, signified? This essay constitutes merely an attempt, merely one possible wandering across a particular field within which such inquiry has taken place - that of anthropology. Why anthropology? Because it is humans who use money, and humans who make it worth something.

Commonly, when one refers to money, one means an object, or any other record accepted as a payment for goods or services. Etymologically, the term money derives from moneta (Lat. ‘mint’), referring to the ancient temple of Goddess Juno, wife of Jupiter in which coins were printed in Ancient Rome. Money, etymologically, is the physical object, the coin, or, as it had been referred to - specie (Lat. ‘in the form’). One way value preservation was the metal used. Mass production of specie began in Britain around 1800 and continued to be the key currency until the mid-nineteenth century, when paper-money was introduced (Hart 1986: 639). Base metal coinage, however, was not common until after WWII, replacing paper and metal versions of national currencies with an essentially worthless, representative form of money. Representative here is exemplified by a statement on all English bank notes. Get one out of your pocket (if you have one), and have a look: it says, under Bank of England, “I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of ...”. Money, in this specific sense is defined by its exchange-value, that is, its institutionally defined representation of exchange of the respective denomination of the coin. The Bretton-Woods conference after WWII led to the adoption of this so-called fiat currency - money without intrinsic use-value, which derives its value from its representative functions. The Bretton-Woods system fixed the value of money to the US Dollar, which, in turn, was backed by gold (and as such, “state-guaranteed”, Hart 1986: 640). In the early 1970s, in part as a consequence of the oil crisis, the US suspended the gold standard backing of the Dollar, effectively unbacking all currencies bound to the Dollar with it.

This brief, state-centered, Euro-American narrative illustrates the symbolic nature of money. As fiat currency, it has become a token of an exchange-value, which is stable only insofar as money supply is in proportion to commodity production. The hyperinflation of the Weimar Republic (but also more current examples), when, in 1923, a 100,000,000,000,000 Mark bill was in exchange, exemplifies the instability of this signifier (Tobin 2008). Such extreme examples propose an important point: the exchange-value of money can dangerously fluctuate, and is, to a large extent, based on the trust people have in its value. For Marx, money was endowed with this value only because it is the “socially recognized incarnation of human labor” (1887: 97). Since he regards money as a possible exchange for commodities, he assumes that it alienates both - the input-labor and the laborer himself. Money, in this view, objectifies, and because Marx sees every economic relation as a social relation, thereby envisioning these alienations to have a direct feedback onto the structure of society (Giddens 1971: 105). This view corresponds with a different approach, that of German philosopher Georg Simmel’s Philosophy of Money. Simmel argues that money is an agentive, personified instrument of homogenisation (“Das Geldwesen drängt den Dingen einen außer ihrer selbst liegenden Maßstab auf”, 1907: 435).

These views, however, fetishise the independence of money and its agentive power in depersonalising personal relations. “In money, the values of commodities have independent realities”, Marx suggests (1887: 116). In the sense of ‘anthropological’ I suggested at the outset, perhaps we ought to pay attention to the “culturally constructed notions of production, consumption, circulation and exchange” which underlie the attribution of money with this kind of symbolic and moral meaning (Bloch and Parry 1989: 1). Let me therefore attend, in the remainder of this intellectual wandering, this Spaziergang, to some alternative ways in which money has been used, conceptualised, and integrated into social contexts. In doing so, I suggest that by limiting our understanding of money to that of a “radical leveller” of social relations (Marx 1887: 132), we reproduce an ideal antagonism between impersonality/solidarity, commodity/gift that has haunted us for (too) long. Perhaps, money as we know it - as (unfathomably large) virtual sums booked from our bank accounts with every bill, or as (frustratingly small) numbers on the bills we use every day - is merely one system of exchange and value which co-exists with other such value systems.

In 1989, Christina Toren published an account of money in Fiji, entitled “Drinking Cash”. In Fiji, she writes, people frequently consume a drink - yaqona - made from a locally available root. Gunu sede (the drinking of cash) is a ritual gathering of townspeople, in which money is raised for a communal cause - for poor elders, or young members who need to travel. In this ritual, participants buy yaqona for relatives and those potentially to be, consuming their exchanged drinks together. A common joke plays on the fact that one pays for other people’s drinks. While this may sound trivial, it is interesting to note that in everyday parlance, Fijians construct a symbolic contrast between the ‘Fijian’ and the ‘European’ way of associating with others. The latter is characterized by impersonal money exchange, while the former is regarded as traditional barter among friends. What happens in this ritual gunu sede, then, is the consumption of gifts by drinking money, thereby reinforcing notions of hospitality, community, and generosity. Money, thereby, is embraced as enhancing the kinship nexus. What Toren describes as purification, I see as an appropriation of the dangerous, impersonal connotations of money by integrating it into a social field and making it a mediator of relations.

If we recognize that the exchange-value of money is a construction of limited relevance to some economic domains, we hopefully gain a more complex understanding of the ways in which money is imagined, transformed, or ignored. In spite of all the personified powers we attribute to money, it is, after all, we who believe in it and by our trust, create it. In reference to Marcel Mauss’ The Gift, the anthropologist Mary Douglas has suggested that the whole of our society can be described by the catalogue of transfers that map the obligations between its members. Perhaps we should think about how these manifold types of exchanges, and as such the manifold forms money can take, are fundamentally about the imaginations and agreements societies hold about their value.

Bloch, M. & J. Parry (eds) (1989): Money and the Morality of Exchange. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Giddens, A. (1971): Capitalism and Modern Social Theory. An Analysis of the Writings of Marx, Durkheim and Max Weber. Cambridge: CUP.

Hart, K. (1986): Heads or Tails? Two sides of the Coin. Man, New Series. 21 (4): 637 – 656.

Marx, K. (1887 [1961]): Capital. A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production. Vol. 1. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House.

Mauss, M. (1990 [1950]): The Gift. The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. London/ New York: Routledge.

Simmell, G. (1907 [1977]): Die Philosophie des Geldes. 7te Aufl. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot.

Tobin, J. (2008): "money", in: Durlauf, S. & L. Blume (eds): The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics Online. Palgrave Macmillan. (Visited 06 February 2011) http://www.dictionaryofeconomics.com/article?id=pde2008_M000217

Toren, C. (1989): Drinking Cash: The Purification of Money through Ceremonial Exchange in Fiji, in: Bloch, M. & J. Parry (eds)(1989): Money and the Morality of Exchange. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 142 – 160.