Pet Shop Boys:
Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money) [1985]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PyeWRd7ZEBs
Money / Morality
Flight Of The Conchords. Inner City Pressure.
(Series 1 - Episode 2 – ‘Bret Gives Up The Dream’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNfV1dTTMLU
Start question Name some authors that Bloch & Parry
are critical of:
Maurice Bloch & Jonathan Parry (LSE)
London School of Economics and Political Science
Bloch, M. & J. Parry (eds) 1989. Money and the Morality of
Exchange (Cantab: Cambridge University Press).
Book aims to show how diff societies symbolically represent
money and understand their moral evaluation of money and
commercial exchanges as opposed to other systems of
exchange.
Not concerned with ‘primitive money’, since all chapters deal with
state-issued currencies.
Unsurprisingly, there’s enormous cultural variation, so:
“it is vitally important to understand the cultural matrix into which
it is incorporated” (p.1).
From Aristotle we have an overall damnation of money and
trade as against an idealised view of household selfsufficiency
(remember the word Oikos etymologically behind
‘economy’ refers to domestic management).
These views resurface in the middle ages, 13th century with
St Thomas Aquinas, to illustrate the Church’s distrust of nonlabour
valuation.
The insinuation is that the ‘Aristotle-Aquinas sentiment
influences or is reproduced in Marx, through his main idea
that money denies humans their bonds of solidarity.
The School of Athens, Raphael
[1509-1511]
13th century, end of middle-ages. Following a romantic ideology,
Aquinas cites Aristotle’s view that ‘usuary’ and accumulation are
deeply problematic.
Another side of the case studies reveal a real unity. This is
neither in the meaning or the moral perceptions. Rather a
pattern that is part of a reproduction of social and
ideological systems winch are concerned with time
scales far longer than individual lifespan.
So Bloch & Parry claim to have uncovered a cyclic
relationship between short-term exchange, domain of
individual, vs long-term reinforcement of socio-cultural and
cosmic orders.
First part of introduction, how has Western discourse
impeded any true appreciation of cross-cultural variations.
Second part, highlight a wider total system of exchange
thesis.
Tendency to formulate a fundamental division between
non-monetary and monetary economies. And this gets
associated with other dichotomies. Pre-post
capitalistic; gift/commodity; traditional/modern. Inalienable
objects between interdependent transactors vs alienable
objects between independent transactors.
Our western idea of gift has been constructed in antithesis
to market exchange.
But money exists in non-market economies and is thus
connected to moral ideologies where kinship/friendship
rules are guiding principles. So money gifts are not
problematic in such cases. Likewise, money can also
moral qualities of those who transact it.
Marx’s assertion that money is not inert but personified
approximates Mauss view of the gift. So both pre and
capitalistic societies can demonstrate this fetishistic view of
exchange mediums (maybe because of separtion of producer
and product). So this old anthropological dichotomy for Bloch &
Parry is not
convincing.
Bohanann’s Tiv example. Elders deprived of power through no
longer arranging marriage.
Spheres of exchange Kopytoff. In perfect market economy
everything is exchangeable. Tehcnology limitations are the
explantion for why not all spheres of exchange overlap. Bloch
Parry call this technological determinism.
Myth: Money gives rise to particular world view (Simmel Marx)
Money in Alan Macfarlane, often seems connected to
increasingly evoking moral confusion (sense of evil).
Contrary to this, Bloch & Parry argue it’s the other way around:
existing worldviews give rise to particular ways of representing
money.
Michaal Taussig, Mining in Andean cases, aregues that the devil
enters into packs with miners. This reflects an indigenous
perceptions of danger and immorality of new capitalistic system.
Ore is a gift that is transformed into a commodity. This is the
problem (the sin) for Taussig.
Not so according to our editors B&P who show that peasants
have long been part of the pre-capitalistic markets and the latter
does not have any comparable supernatural dangers.
Also, agriculture and mining are not symbolically or ritually
opposed. Ore is like a super-valuable fruits or vegetable. It
can replenish itself underground via libations, offerings and
sacrifices as well as with fallow time.
The problem in mining is that
the value should rise upward
toward the state.
If there’s a good balance,
the community is prosperous.
This balance is threatened by
individual accumulation of wealth.
Fijians talks of the ‘world of money’ as the antithesis of the
ordered moral world of chiefs and kinship. But money itself does
not stand in opposition to the realm of the sacred.
Initially it seems there’s an opposition between money as antisocial
acquisitiveness and Kava drinking as community. But this
opposition has as much to do with the contrast between crosscousin
and other kinsmen as between market and pre-monetary
economy.
Fijian kinship opposes society as ordered by hierarchy to an
egalitarian chaotic system of cross-cousin affines. The latter can
destabilise the order unless the cousins marry or the tension is
appeased. This takes place in a synthesis of these opposites
which occurs in the ‘drinking cash’ ritual. Her cash rivalries get
transformed into a beneficial social fund.
Other examples of money being cooked. Or digesting pilgrim
gifts.
All this is to highlight Short-Term cycle of exchange vs long
term social reproduction cycle.
Much of the Formalist – Substantivist debate revolved around
issues of whether a maximising human existed or exists now
in the pre-capitalist examples.
What is the place of the individual in a social or cosmic order
that transcends the individual.
B & P’s relativistic conclusions are: because of the instrumental
uses to which money lends itself, we have more examples of
short term cycle. And so the morality connected with money is
seen as more negatively. But even in non-market economies,
exchange can take place in anonymous, impersonal and
instrumental ways.
So the values of the short-term order become elaborated into a
theory of long-term reproduction (Adam Smith, freedom
depends on abstracted money systems).
i.e. capitalism has so engrained the idea that gift and market
economies are fundamentally different. But since the case
studies of the volume take place outside (or at the margins) of
capitalistism, this is not in the scope of their observations.