The Anthropology of Money and Finance: Between Ethnography and World History
Author(s): Keith Hart and Horacio Ortiz
Source: Annual Review of Anthropology , 2014, Vol. 43 (2014), pp. 465-482
Published by: Annual Reviews
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43049586
REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/43049586?seq=1&cid=pdf-
reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
Annual Reviews is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Annual
Review of Anthropology
This content downloaded from
147.251.113.161 on Mon, 20 Mar 2023 15:01:25 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Anthropology of Money
and Finance: Between
Ethnography and World
History
Keith Hart1'2 and Horacio Ortiz3
department of International Development, London School of Economics,
London WC2A 2AE, United Kingdom; email: johnkeithhart@gmail.com
2 Human Economy Program, University of Pretoria, Pretoria 0028, South Africa
3 Research Institute of Anthropology, East China Normal University, Shanghai 200241,
China; email: horacio.ortiz@free.fr
Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2014. 43:465-82
The Annual Review of Anthropology is online at
anthro.annualreviews.org
This article's doi:
10. 1 146/annurev-anthro-102 3 1 3 -02 58 14
Copyright © 2014 by Annual Reviews.
All rights reserved
Keywords
distribution, economic anthropology, exchange, globalization, politics,
world society
Abstract
We review here recent developments in the anthropology of money and finance,
listing its achievements, shortcomings, and prospects, while referring
back to the discipline's founders a century ago. We take our departure from
the work of Marcel Mauss and Karl Polanyi, both of whom combined openness
to ethnographic research with a vision of world history as a whole. Since
the 1960s, anthropologists have tended to restrict themselves to niche fields
and marginal debates. The anthropological study of money and ethnographies
of finance, in particular, have been the focus of much research since the
1980s. Despite taking on new objects and directions, anthropologists still find
it difficult to connect their situated analyses with global processes and world
history. We propose some conceptual and empirical directions for research
that would seek to overcome these limitations by integrating ethnography
more closely with human history, while stressing the importance of money
in shaping world society and attempts to reform it.
This content downloaded from
147.251.113.161 on Mon, 20 Mar 2023 15:01:25 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
INTRODUCTION
There is much talk today of a financial and economic crisis comparable to that
With the threat of a currency war and the euro's collapse looming, the specter
Depression's bloody aftermath has returned with a vengeance. Several versions of w
being should be and how to build society coexisted during the Cold War, when much
won independence from colonial empire. Yet, discussion of humanity's growing int
is now limited to a one-world capitalism driven by finance. What have anthropo
about that? It would seem very little. However, a positive case can be made for t
contribution to public debate. We make such a case here.
We review recent developments in the anthropology of money and finance, listin
ments, shortcomings, and prospects, while referring back to the discipline's found
ago. Economic anthropologists have tended to restrict themselves to niche fields
debates since the 1960s. We hope to reverse this trend by focusing on money's r
global society and bringing world history into a more active dialogue with ethnogra
Money and finance have been prominent in anthropology since its formation
discipline. The economists emphasize what money does - a medium of exchange, res
means of accounting - but anthropologists can approach it as an integral part of th
and networks of exchange through which it circulates. Its multiple meanings, in tur
together and reinforce the roles played by each member. Money's capacity to tr
boundaries drives the extension of society to more inclusive levels and transforms id
process. It is commonplace for our discipline to show that money's meanings and re
be confined to a single theory.
Fieldwork-based ethnography - a commitment to joining the people where they li
what they do and think - was the principal achievement of twentieth-century anthr
is insufficient for studying money (Hart 1986). The ethnographic revolution event
world history from twentieth-century anthropologists' repertoire. This is hardl
the task of investigating money's global role in our historical moment. Progres
anthropology depends on combining ethnography and world history within a criti
(Hann & Hart 201 1).
So our trademark research method reaches a limit when we try to understand m
circulation today. Anthropologists should be aware of developments in relevant outs
and of contemporary currents of world history that shape how we think. In terms
means having some knowledge of the history of monetary economics and a perspec
finance. If the new ethnography of finance is to throw more than superficial light
must transcend the categories that shape media discussions of the "crisis" and try
our shared human predicament as a moment in the history of money. We need new
wish to account for how money underpins social identities and relations of conflict,
interdependence in the world we are making today. This review proposes some of th
drawing first on classical authors who combined openness to ethnographic discovery
vision of economic history in their times and then on contemporary anthropologic
First, we consider the main social theories of money a century ago, when it was s
the constitution of nation states, capitalist bureaucracy, and colonial empire. Kar
Simmel, and Max Weber aspired to develop a general theory of money, whereas
and Karl Polanyi emphasized money's multiple meanings. The latter were thus ab
account for a variety of monetary arrangements, but also to avoid thinking of history
terms and to embrace money's plasticity as a tool for social transformation.
466 Hart • Ortiz
This content downloaded from
147.251.113.161 on Mon, 20 Mar 2023 15:01:25 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Second, we assess anthropologists' achievements since the 1980s. Not only has money come
to be seen in a more constructive light, but its variability has also been widely acknowledged.
With one or two notable exceptions, however, anthropologists have found it hard to link their
detailed ethnographic accounts to world history in the longer run. Some still restrict their analyses
to observable situations, whether these be personal interactions or organizational spaces such as
offices and street markets. Even when anthropologists highlight the political relevance of their
findings, they do not direcdy study global flows of money or their historical context. A few address
the larger picture, but they tend to do so from on high without ever touching the ground, thereby
repeating the grand theory model whose limitations are well-known.
In our concluding section, we identify some moves that may help anthropology to illuminate
money's role in constituting world society today. Nostrums inherited from the Cold War era,
such as neoliberalism, Marxism, or postcolonial theory, will not do the job. If anthropologists
were to recognize money's potential to transform both world society and each of us, we could
contemplate the future as well as the past and present. We will not get far as isolated individuals
or by denying the need for interdisciplinary collaboration. However, harnessing the example of
inspiring ancestors to contemporary possibilities is a good place to start.
MONEY AND FINANCE: ANTHROPOLOGY'S CLASSICAL LEGACY
Sociology and anthropology emerged as part of a drive to understand and explain how
alization was changing the West's place in world history. Of all the important works
during that time, we highlight Mauss's contribution as especially relevant because, witho
to fit everything into a unitary theory of money, he showed how it fundamentally shapes
identities. He used world history to highlight power relations in the industrial societies
while showing how money extended societies beyond their aspirations to local self-suffi
consequendy was a conspicuous means of their transformation. Mauss stands out when c
with Marx, Weber, and Simmel. His stance links him to Polanyi, who also studied mon
in world history as a window on the terrible decades of war and depression from 1914
Polanyi traced these conflicts not only to the Victorians' Utopian experiment in free ma
also to the need to redress an excessively unequal distribution of wealth, a thrust we ho
on in charting a progressive path for anthropology today.
Mauss: Money and Credit as the Basis of Human Identity
and for an Expanded Society
In his famous essay The Gift , Mauss (1990 [1925]) showed how freedom, justice, and th
can be understood only within the specific monetary arrangements that give us our var
identities. Emile Durkheim (1960 [1893]) had demonstrated how the British emphasis on
private contracts in markets obscured the social glue of "the noncontractual element i
tract" that made the economy possible - a combination of law, state, custom, morals, a
history that the sociologist must try to make more visible. The valuation of persons a
through money is never just technical; it is also moral, religious, and political, placing
symbolically in society according to various orders of reckoning.
The concept of "persona" evolved over time (Mauss 1985 [1938]) and society with it: Th
inner rules and external boundaries were reshaped by monetary relations. Malinowski
adamant that the Trobriand kula valuables were not money, in that they did not fun
www.annttalreviews.org • The Anthropology of Money and Finance 4
This content downloaded from
147.251.113.161 on Mon, 20 Mar 2023 15:01:25 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
medium of exchange and standard of value. In a long footnote, Mauss held out for a broader
conception:
On this reasoning . . . there has only been money when precious things . . . have been really made into
currency - namely have been inscribed and impersonated, and detached from any relationship with
any legal entity, whether collective or individual, other than the state that mints them . . . One only
defines in this way a second type of money - our own. (Mauss 1990 [1925], p. 127n)
He suggested that "primitive" valuables are like money in that they "have purchasing power and
this power has a figure set on it" (Mauss 1990 [1925], p. 127n). He also took Malinowski to
task for reproducing the bourgeois contrast between commercial self-interest and the free gift, a
dichotomy that many anthropologists have subsequently attributed to Mauss.
One ofMauss's key modifications to Durkheim's legacy was to conceive of society as a historical
project of humanity whose limits were extended to become ever more inclusive. Society could not
be taken for granted as a préexistent form. It must be made and remade, sometimes from scratch.
Gift exchange pushes the limits of society outward. "The whole intertribal kula is merely the
extreme case ... of a more general system. This takes the tribe itself in its entirety out of the narrow
sphere of its physical boundaries and even of its interests and rights" (Mauss 1990 [1925], p. 36).
Mauss (1990 [1925]) was enthusiastic about the publication oí Argonauts of the Western Pacific ,
but he held that money and markets were human universais, whereas Malinowski (1921, 1922)
went out of his way to oppose the kula ring to both. The impersonal economic forms found in
capitalist societies were recent inventions, according to Mauss. They shared the world with many
other ways to use money, even in Europe and North America, and were bound to be transformed in
the future. For him, the socialist movement from below and the development of social protection
in Europe were part of this process (Mauss 1990 [1925]).
Mauss's financial journalism, particularly concerning the exchange rate crisis of 1922-1924,
accounts for a fifth of his published political writings (Mauss 1997, Hart 2014), but he generally
maintained a firewall between politics and his academic work (Fournier 2006 [1994], Hart 2007).
He broke this rale only once, in the concluding chapter to The Gift . An example of how far he
was prepared to go politically may be found in an unpublished paper, "A Means of Overhauling
Society: The Manipulation of Currencies" (Fournier 2006 [1994], pp. 212, 390nl05), where he
claims, with a strong echo of Keynes, that the great economic revolutions are "monetary in nature"
and the manipulation of currencies and credit could be a "method of social revolution . . . without
pain or suffering":
It suffices to create new monetary methods within the firmest, the narrowest bounds of prudence.
It will then suffice to manage them with the most cautious rules of economics to make them bear
fruit among the new entided beneficiaries. And that is revolution. In this way the common people of
different nations would be allowed to know how they can have control over themselves - without the
use of words, formulas or myths. (Mauss, quoted in Fournier 2006 [1994], pp. 212, 390nl05)
Mauss argued for a pragmatic understanding of the human economy that would be of use to people
in their daily lives. Nearly a century later, we draw inspiration from him for a similar argument
(Hart & Maurer 2009, Hart et al. 2010).
Marx, Weber, and Simmel: Grand Narratives of Capitalist Globalization
In spite of his insights into world history and his analytical interest in the institutions governing
contemporary money, Mauss did not explore them systematically, unlike several other founders
468 Hart • Ortiz
This content downloaded from
147.251.113.161 on Mon, 20 Mar 2023 15:01:25 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
of modern social theory. Among those who did, Marx, Weber, and Simmel stand out. Marx
(1977 [1869]) was the first economist to recognize the centrality of machine production to the
modern economy. For him, what matters in our societies are people, machines, and money, in
that order, but money controls the machines and through them most workers. His early slogan,
"workers of the world unite" (Marx & Engels 1987 [1848]), showed how to reverse that situation.
Unlike the antimarket left (and his Stalinist successors), Marx (1973 [1858]) put money at the
center of any complex society, both actual and potential (Nishibe 2005). An apparently neutral
instrument of exchange among equals in liberal theory, money also acts as a "fetish," both hiding
and articulating hierarchical relations between the owners of the means of production and the
workers they exploited (Marx 1977 [1869]). This insight underpinned a vision of relations and
forces of production in history that would soon lead to the whole world being overtaken by
capitalist expansion. Marx's anthropology was largely a retrospective exercise emphasizing how the
movement of resistance he and Engels built would become the horizon of all humanity (Hart 201 3).
In The Philosophy of Money, Simmel (1978 [1900]) sought to make sense of money as part of a
neo-Kantian project aiming for a society of equal and independent individuals. Money allowed
for individual expression of desires and, thus, for the social constitution of autonomous subjects.
Yet it worked as a measure of value only because people could count on others to accept it,
so money transcended the individual. Simmel identified money's twin anchors as its physical
substance (coins, paper) and the community of its users, which is an invisible third party to all
transactions. He predicted that the first would wither away, thereby revealing money's social
character; indeed, it is a symbol of our human capacity to make universal society. As capitalism
and colonialism expanded, money would dialectically unite the world through common standards
of measure, provoking a general recognition that all participants are intrinsically equal. This in
turn would give rise to a more just distribution of money than was possible under capitalism.
Simmel, following Hegel, understood the present as a historical moment that would be surpassed
by its own teleology.
Weber did not engage with world history as teleology, but his analytical categories closely
reproduced the moral vision of neo-Kantianism. For him, the origins of modern capitalism lay in
a religious revolution, the Reformation, whose cultural premises had an affinity with the need of
business enterprises for rational calculation (Weber 2003 [1904-1905]). He was also aware of the
intimate links among bureaucracy, states, and capitalist firms (Weber 2013 [1922]). Yet, whether
the discussion was of Chinese peasants or Protestant entrepreneurs, the personality structure of
his ideal types does not change over time or between places. A subject always exercises free will
in relation to different values through three types of action - habitual, affective, and rational that
limited what Weber's (1978 [1920]) sociology can account for. Money does not occupy a
distinctive position in this sociology; in general, it is a means of exchange that depends on trust
between the participants. Thus, Weber's historical analysis of capitalism does not support a vision
of an alternative future for humanity, but rather envisages the tragic repetition of his general types
of human action.
Polanyi and the Politics of Distribution
In The Great Transformation, Polanyi (2001 [1944], p. 72) argued that "[a]ctual money is merely a
token of purchasing power which, as a rule, is not produced at all, but comes into being through the
mechanism of banking or state finance." Money thus did not serve a specific function but, on the
contrary, was a product of the social relations it articulated. Consistent with this approach, Polanyi
inverts the liberal myth of money's origin in barter: "Long-distance trade often engenders markets,
an institution which involves acts of barter, and, if money is used, of buying and selling" (Polanyi
www.annualreviews.org • The Anthropology of Money and Finance 46p
This content downloaded from
147.251.113.161 on Mon, 20 Mar 2023 15:01:25 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
2001 [1944], p. 58). Money and markets thus extend society beyond its local core. This usually
entails changes in society, especially distribution (who gets what), for which money is central.
Polanyi distinguished between "token" and "commodity" forms of money. Token money was
designed to facilitate domestic trade; commodity money, foreign trade. Money was thus
not a commodity, it was purchasing power; far from having utility itself, it was merely a counter
embodying a quantified claim to things that could be purchased. Clearly, a society in which distribution
depended on possession of such tokens of purchasing power was a construction entirely different from
market economy. (Polanyi 2001 [1944], p. 196)
Polanyi (2001 [1944]) held that the Utopian attempt to organize all social life as individualized
and impersonal market relations, for which nineteenth century Britain was the paradigmatic case,
generated the inequality and broken social ties that led to World War II (when he wrote his book).
As society expanded through monetary relations, the tension between community and anonymity
in economic transactions became intolerable. Markets had once been kept at arm's length from
society, but they were now intrinsic to its internal functioning. The move to a welfare state was
part of this history, but it implied new forms of sociality that called into question the boundaries
separating inside society from its outside (Polanyi 2001 [1944]).
Polanyi, like Mauss, explored money's constitutive role in framing the limits of sociality. He
did not take it to be a set of eternal functions (Polanyi 1977 [1964]), nor did he see it as establishing
the same power relations and social hierarchies across time and place. His vision was grounded in
a critique of market economy, in some ways similar to the Marxists' approach. However, Polanyi
wanted to show how various monetary arrangements correspond to different social configurations
and that the current alliance between a powerful finance industry and nation-states must be seen
in this light, especially if we wish to transform it.
Rather than start, as economic liberals do, with a definition of money's functions and an
ontology of the agents who use it, Mauss and Polanyi show how monetary relations are fundamental
to the definition of self and society in specific settings. These relations are potentially subversive, in
that they challenge social rules and hierarchies, even the boundaries of society. The perspective on
economy that prevails today represents our interdependent world's contradictions as being largely
a conflict over credit and currency, but Mauss and Polanyi point to how anthropologists could
help shape humanity's common future. In his postwar reincarnation as an American academic,
however, Polanyi (1957) settled for encouraging anthropologists to acquiesce in an academic
division of labor that limited us to parochial debates and exotic objects of study (Hann & Hart
2011). Although the anthropology of money and finance has been resurgent since the 1980s, we
are still struggling with this limitation.
CONTEMPORARY RESEARCH IN THE ANTHROPOLOGY
OF MONEY AND FINANCE
The legacy of the classics has only marginally shaped recent anthropological research on m
Some anthropologists still try to link local situations to global history through a grand nar
that would encompass all humanity. The idea that Western money has unified and colonize
world has, however, been undermined by a flood of demonstrations that money is more m
and labile than either its supporters or critics suppose. At the same time, the finance ind
has become a focus of anthropological attention, without yet relating local investigations
global politics of financial flows. New approaches, avoiding grand narratives but integrating
470 Hart • Ortiz
This content downloaded from
147.251.113.161 on Mon, 20 Mar 2023 15:01:25 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
processes and regional research (e.g., Guyer 2004), point to how the anthropology of money may
begin to redress this situation.
What is Money? Where Does it Come From?
Is money an object or an idea, real or virtual? One thing or many? Historically specific or a human
universal? Is it a creature of markets or states, or both? Is it credit or debt, or both? Is money
impersonal or personal, or both? If it is what it does, which function is most important - medium
of exchange, means of payment, unit of account, or store of wealth? Many anthropologists still
use the word "money" without saying what they mean by it. Perhaps this is not so remarkable.
Money is after all the ocean we swim in. Whenever did fish make an object of their world? It is
not our aim here to provide definitive answers to these questions, but we should at least indicate
where we are coming from.
Few anthropologists today (Hart 2005a, Graeber 2011) seem to accept the myth of money's
origins that has entered Western folklore since Adam Smith (1961 [1776]) invented it. Individuals
exchanged things they had and others needed for what they needed and others had. Money made
the barter more efficient as a commodity that could be kept and would be widely accepted later.
This myth assumes that private property is primordial: All that is missing from primitive markets is
money. Some theorists since the nineteenth century have opposed a view of money as the creation
of the state to this focus on money as a product of individual exchange (Ingham 2004). They see
money as a means of payment (of taxes in particular) and as a standard measure of credit and debt.
Monetary policy after 1945 has swung violendy between these two extremes.
Keith Hart (1986) suggested that coins are two-sided for the good reason that political authority
and market exchange are both indispensable to money. Money is both a credit token linking persons
in society (heads) and a measure of commodities circulating in impersonal markets (tails). David
Graeber (2001, 2009, 2011) links money to debt in a unique historical synthesis. The invention
of money 5,000 years ago allowed moral obligations to be given an impersonal measure. This
measure's name was debt and violence was the midwife of its birth. World history since then has
seen money oscillate between two poles, virtual credit and currency, often in the form of coinage
made from precious metals.
Mauss and Polanyi saw money as a means of extending the economic reach of local societies that
generally aspired to self-sufficiency. In this sense, money and the markets it sustains are human
universais, although they take many forms different from those with which we are familiar. Polanyi
(1977 [1964]) noted that the modern form of money, national monopoly currencies ("all-purpose
money"), was invented in the mid-nineteenth century, and we now know that it has been unraveling
since the 1970s. Several anthropologists have noted in this context that state-building depends on
articulating domestic monetary policy with global financial flows (Maurer 2004, Neiburg 2006,
Peebles 2008, Holmes 2009).
Viviana Zelizer (1994), with whose work we are in substantial agreement, has shown that people
grant multiple meanings to money in the United States that cannot be grasped by either liberal
or statist theories. Money is central to relations with a high emotional content, such as buying
a child's present, settling a divorce, or taking out life insurance. Social relations frame money's
existence: It makes sense only as part of specific social identities; it articulates family ties (Zelizer
2005) and mediates life and death (Zelizer 1979).
This snapshot of the field indicates the pluralism of contemporary anthropological approaches
to money. There remains, however, the question of the ocean; but here too, we must escape from
the legacy of top-down world histories that tell just one story.
www.annmlreviews.org • The Anthropology of Money and Finance 471
This content downloaded from
147.251.113.161 on Mon, 20 Mar 2023 15:01:25 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Grand Narratives in Current Research on Money and Finance
As early as the 1950s, some anthropologists, notably Paul Bohannan (1955, 1959), developed the
idea that Western or modern money was imposing its disruptive rules and social hierarchies on
traditional societies in the context of colonialism. Bohannan's analysis has since been shown to
be factually wrong, historically misleading, and theoretically naive. Far from being a one-sided
process, the integration of sterling or dollars into local economies created new uses for money
that also reflected the internal workings of those societies (Parry & Bloch 1989, Akin & Robbins
1999, Breton 2002). Yet these critiques accepted that Western money was indeed modern in ways
that were usually left unstudied (Maurer 2005a, 2006, 2012; Hart & Maurer 2009).
The conversion of the world economy from the Bretton Woods system of managed exchange
rates to a neoliberal dispensation allowed finance to escape from national production and politics
and to invade all areas of social life in a process known as "financialization" (Epstein 2005). This
historical shift has supported another wave of grand narratives, often, but not always, drawing
on Marxism (Gregory 1997, Harvey 2005). LiPuma & Lee (2004) studied the rise of derivatives
in foreign exchange markets. Their framework, however, led them to consider these new
developments as simply another instance of financial capitalism's encroachment (with its fictitious
money) on the rest of the world. Graeber's (2011) book on debt covers the whole world
and many historical moments in a fashion that recalls Weber. He identifies three moral forms
of economic relations - everyday communism (sharing), exchange (reciprocity), and hierarchy
(inequality) - that are combined with varying emphasis throughout human history. Nevertheless,
echoing Marxist approaches and theories of the Great Divide, his universal history of money does
not sit easily with recent research showing how the uses and meanings of money in everyday life
are much more multiple and fluid than can be captured by any grand narrative, however encyclopedic
its sources. Drawing on Weber more explicitly, Arjun Appadurai (2012) has also recently
launched a project to reinvent social theory through studying the finance industry in terms of a
new "spirit of calculation" (2012), but this too is likely to run up against similar limits.
The Ethnography of Finance and the Politics of Distribution
Finance currently occupies a special place in the anthropology of money because of the finance
industry's disproportionate role in allocating wealth around the world. This was made possible
by regulatory changes in the 1970s and 1980s and is sustained by a neoliberal ideology claiming
that independent investors (mediated by financial professionals) meet in efficient markets that
ensure a globally optimal distribution of wealth (Abdelal 2007, Krippner 201 1). The gap between
these abstract premises of financial regulation and how they are implemented in practice has been
pointed out by numerous researchers.
Many ethnographers, drawn from sociology, cultural studies, and science studies as well as
from anthropology, have shown how the workings of finance in different settings often have little
to do with the neoliberal ideology that has justified its recent rise to global dominance. Mitchel
Abolafia (1996) revealed how the pits of the New York Stock Exchange were organized by local
rules that sought an implicit balance among employees between competition and collaboration
(Baker 1986). Olivier Godechot (2008) likewise identified a "hold-up" strategy allowing traders
to secure high salaries and bonuses by threatening to take proprietary trading software if forced
to leave the company. It is hard to imagine these financial employees as an exploited labor force.
These studies challenge propositions that money and finance can be organized by a single set of
rules, that they are Western in any meaningful sense, and that they conform to the model of labor
relations outlined in Capital
472 Hart • Ortiz
This content downloaded from
147.251.113.161 on Mon, 20 Mar 2023 15:01:25 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Financial professionals operate in a bureaucratic world, where they are expected to embody
the figure of the investor by following stringent and often contradictory rules (Clark & Thrift
2005). These rules routinely depart from the ideal of "freedom" of exchange that underpins
the neoliberal model (Zaloom 2006, Preda 2009, Ortiz 2014). The methods used for making
valuations and investments rest on intellectual traditions for which the theological notion of
infinity is central (Maurer 2002). Furthermore, positivist constructions of the relationship between
natural law and mathematics (De Goede 2005) are used to determine stock indexes or the "financial
value" of futures and credit derivatives (Tett 2009; Ortiz 2013a,b). The usefulness of probabilistic
models of risk has been questioned by Ayache (2010), following Meillassoux (2010), but these
still significantly shape the economy by being an essential part of everyday practice in the rating
agencies, for example (Ouroussoff 2010, MacKenzie 2011). Their adoption is not due to any
intrinsic cognitive clarity, which is largely absent (Knorr Cetina 2005, Knorr Cetina & Preda
2007, Lépinay 2011, Riles 2011). Rather, it depends in part on the strong links forged between
academia and the finance industry during the late twentieth century, an alliance reinforced by
so-called Nobel prizes awarded to economists who promoted the right message (Whitley 1986,
MacKenzie 2006).
None of this criticism appears to disturb the dominant liberal narrative, which continues to
shape the finance industry's institutional practices, as Lucia Müller (2006) has shown for Brazil
and Karen Ho (2009) has for the United States. Indeed, far from being undermined by financial
failure, neoliberalism goes from strength to strength (Mirowski 2013). Even the notion of "financial
crisis" has been assimilated to this discourse (Ortiz 2012). Discussions over how prices would be
determined by the Euronext software, for example, hinged on whether it would reproduce the
true value expected by liberal theory (Muniesa 2000, 2007). Ellen Hertz's (1998) pioneering study
showed that the Chinese middle classes embraced stock markets as a way for decentralized investors
to check state control. Eventually, however, they found themselves helpless in the face of "the
market," allowing the state to retain much of its power.
Several anthropologists have shown that citizenship is shaped by the debates over monetary
policy (Hart 1986). The monetary policy that led to the US subprime mortgage crisis (Jorion
2007) was based on identifying citizenship with home ownership, while hiding the economy's
dependence on global credit. The idea that currencies are made by states is contradicted by
many studies of proliferating monetary instruments produced by other bodies, which include
complementary currencies with transnational circulation. Other examples are Islamic practices
opposed to conventional finance and currencies that simply differ from legal tender (Zelizer 1998,
Maurer 2005b, Hart 2006).
Bringing World History Back In
Although most ethnographers of finance assume they are studying global processes, their rich
observations usually can only hint at this general horizon or, at best, pinpoint just one aspect.
Grand narratives allow situated observations to speak for a world conceived of as being unitary,
but the foundation of such claims is illusory, as any analysis of money and finance based on multiple
local practices reveals. Some anthropologists have responded to Nader's (1972) call to "study up"
and Appadurai's (1986) injunction for us to approach global economic transactions through the
meanings that people give to them by showing how plural practice may be unified without being
reduced to a single narrative.
Keith Hart (2000, 2005b) has explored how personal uses of money may be linked to the
activities of transnational corporations, state control of money, and the rise of new digital media.
Here a unifying perspective comes not from an omniscient narrative, but from a moral and political
www.annualreviews.org • The Anthropology of Money and Finance 473
This content downloaded from
147.251.113.161 on Mon, 20 Mar 2023 15:01:25 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
question: How might each person's everyday experience of money be related to massive global
inequalities in the distribution of money? Any conclusions must simultaneously draw on several
processes that compete with and influence each other. Nigel Dodd (2005, 2014) agrees: Only
by approaching money as a labile social relation with rules that change can we address money's
multiplicity at the global level, seeing it as a product of several histories that join and part in an
increasingly interconnected world.
Jane Guyer (2004) has demonstrated how this can be done in practice, thereby opening up new
methodological horizons for the study of money. On the basis of long-term participant observation
and archival research, she shows that Atlantic Africans developed a plural framework for commerce,
where social rank, multiple scales of monetary valuation, and circuits of exchange intersect and
diverge. Her historical analysis takes in indigenous developments, reactions to imperialism, and
global economic ties after independence. Guyer contrasts this flexible regional culture with the
reductive oversimplifications of economic historians and the parochialism of local ethnographers.
She has subsequently extended her reach to include monetary practices in the contemporary
United States and British economic history (Guyer 2010, 2012). In the process, she finds that the
European sailors and traders who first encountered Atlantic Africa brought with them commercial
practices that were closer to the indigenous model than to any that we have later imputed to them.
Guyer's outstanding achievement is that she can describe and explain how new monetary relations
are created without resorting to a single overarching narrative of what money is.
THE WAY FORWARD FOR AN ANTHROPOLOGY
OF MONEY AND FINANCE
Finally, we propose a reflexive strategy for the anthropology of money and finance gr
in the pragmatic approach we have outlined so far. Our own analytical categories, con
assumptions, and normative propositions are part of the object that we study. This present
a challenge and an opportunity. The academic division of labor still reigns supreme, an
anthropologists prefer to stay on the familiar ground of fieldwork-based ethnography rath
risk being exposed as naive interlopers on territory made familiar through common journ
or already colonized by specialists. Fieldwork-based research does not only allow observ
everyday practice in minute detail, especially its dynamic, temporal dimension. By "being
anthropologists, each in their own way, learn spontaneous rules of practice, ways of actin
reacting, as well as implicit, even unconscious, common understandings - all of which may
reflexively objectified and transmitted to others in a variety of media. This is how anthrop
bridge the gap between different ways of living, blurring and sometimes creating new bou
that the concept of "culture" captures only partially.
With something similar in mind, Michel Foucault was led to argue that psychoanaly
sociocultural anthropology occupy a privileged position in the human sciences, "because
confines of all the branches of knowledge investigating man, they form a treasure-hoard o
riences and concepts, and above all a perpetual principle of dissatisfaction, of calling into q
. . . what may seem, in other respects, to be established" (Foucault 1973 [1966], p. 373).
[They] are not so much two human sciences among others, but they span the entire domain of th
sciences, they animate its whole surface . . . [They] are 'counter-sciences'; which does not mean th
they are less 'rational' or 'objective' than the others, but that they flow in the opposite direction,
they lead them back to their epistemological basis, and that they ceaselessly 'unmake' that very m
who is creating and recreating his positivity in the human sciences. (Foucault 1973 [1966], p. 379)
474 Hart • Ortiz
This content downloaded from
147.251.113.161 on Mon, 20 Mar 2023 15:01:25 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
At the same time, however, to connect with the world, anthropologists must reach out beyond
their own immediate observations. As a result, anthropologists have developed new methods of
research in recent decades, following the global circulation of particular objects (Appadurai 1986)
or advocating multi -sited ethnography (Marcus 1995). Here, we highlight some possible ways for
an anthropology of money and finance to connect minute field observations to world society and
history.
States, Corporations, and Regional Associations
Money, first as precious metals and lately in paper and electronic forms, has been long guaranteed
by what Weber (1978 [1920]) called the state's "monopoly of the use of legitimate violence." However,
it did not take the form of a national monopoly until the mid-nineteenth century, reaching its
apogee after World War II, and has been decomposing since the end of the Bretton Woods system
in 1971 (Galbraith 1975, Eichengreen 1996, Hart 2012). "National capitalism" (Hart 2009) is the
modern synthesis of the nation-state and industrial capitalism, the institutional attempt to manage
money, markets, and accumulation through central bureaucracy within a cultural community of
national citizens. The nation-state has dominated thinking about society since the mid-nineteenth
century - even though society has long been leaking across its boundaries - and money is its most
powerful symbol. Nevertheless, the "noncontractual element in the contract" (Durkheim 1960
[1893]) is no longer sustained by national frameworks alone. The single-currency model of national
economy is being extended to become a more plural or federal assemblage, thereby creating
new forms of inclusion and conflict. Regional associations, whatever the limitations of their design,
are already a step in this direction. International financial institutions search for a new Bretton
Woods, whereas the Beijing Consensus challenges the Washington Consensus in a multipolar
geopolitics, and bottom-up approaches to building world institutions claim afresh their share of
the overall political design (Pleyers 2010).
National governments are being sidelined by international and regional organizations, such
as ASEAN, the Chiang Mai agreements supporting foreign exchange stability in East Asia, Mercosul,
or the European Union with its eurozone. East African governments are discussing a tax
union to deal with Chinese trade. United Nations bodies, the International Monetary Fund, the
World Bank, the World Trade Organization, and the International Organization of Securities
Commissions all still claim to derive their legitimacy from nation-states. Yet, in their specific areas
of competence, they initiate a global network of decision making that no single state can control.
National governments are enmeshed in symbiotic and conflicting relations with corporations
and global financial institutions. Global corporations, called transnational because of their ambiguous
allegiance to state-made laws, articulate money flows that defy regulation by any government.
They create their own monetary instruments (Zelizer 1994), and while retaining limited liability
for debts, they benefit from the legal rights and moral personhood accorded individual citizens,
despite their much greater wealth, power, and longevity (Hart 2005b). They are redrawing the
concept of citizenship around the world. Anthropologists have been slow to grasp the dynamics
of a world economy where these corporations seek to control all economic phases from research
and development, production, regulation, distribution, and marketing to household consumption
(Applbaum 2004).
If fieldwork-based knowledge is always haunted by the limits to what one person can observe
in a given time and place, this is even more the case with the study of money. When it comes
to money and finance, whatever we study is part of exchange networks that go far beyond the
limits of our observations. The extent of markets is often unknowable and beyond effective local
control. Not only do social interactions proliferate beyond our gaze, but so too do the concepts and
www.annualreviews.org • The Anthropology of Money and Finance 475
This content downloaded from
147.251.113.161 on Mon, 20 Mar 2023 15:01:25 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
narratives that people use to make sense of them. Studies of money and finance are often confined
to a trading room in a bank, a neighborhood where street transactions occur, or a company where
salaries are paid and goods and services sold. We can begin to connect these settings to the wider
processes of which they are part if we "follow the money."
Monetary transactions often link a variety of organizations (states, companies, associations,
churches, credit networks, etc.) whose rules are in turn written and unwritten, explicit and implicit.
These come into play whenever a company pays salaries and taxes; when a state creates an
independent central bank that establishes interest rates, prints money, and collects taxes; when
wages enter local credit networks; or in any act of buying and selling on the street. Because multisited
ethnography cannot capture money's endless circulation, we must find other methods to
trace these connections. In this process, it becomes obvious that money's meanings and the social
identities that they generate belong to a broader and more complex reality. When a mother buys a
toy for her child, using her banked salary, they are linked to global finance and to the global circuit
of goods and services in which the toy producer and the mother's employer also take part. Even
street transactions outside the banking system connect people to commercial networks, state-made
money, and global finance in ways that extend far beyond their neighborhoods.
How people imagine gender, age, citizenship, class, ethnicity, or locality is played out through
money and finance; each time it is enacted and transformed in situations observed by the ethnographer.
Monetary connections can be explored through interviews as well as by entering into a
dialogue with other specialists. Anthropologists must read about macroeconomic developments,
examine monetary flows, and engage critically with analyses of the finance industry. If we shy away
from these avenues to learning about money, our field observations will become detached from
global debates to which anthropology could make a crucial contribution.
The Need to Combine Fieldwork Methods with Historical
Study of Global Processes
The first step in linking everyday practices to their relevant global contexts is historical comparison.
Here we focus on the categories of economic and financial theory and the alleged contrast between
state-made money and citizenship in the West and elsewhere. Because much ethnography of
finance focuses on the cognitive aspects of observed situations, as if knowledge production were the
firms' principal objective, we learn how barriers to the communication of information challenge
regulators' assumptions concerning efficient markets and the optimal allocation of resources.
However, we rarely discover where the money goes and in what quantities, yet these are businesses,
not academic departments. If anthropologists do not examine the relationship between money and
knowledge reflexively, we risk reproducing the finance industry's own vision of itself. The same
is true of unreflecting use of categories such as "investors" and "markets" (Ortiz 2014). In recent
talk of the crisis, it has passed largely unnoticed that, according to financial regulations, the term
refers to the temporary failure of markets without ever questioning their long-term efficiency.
Moreover, the financial crisis looks very different when viewed from countries such as China and
Brazil where economic conditions improved recently or the Democratic Republic of Congo where
conditions remain catastrophic without ever attracting the investment interest that fueled real
estate speculation in the United States (Jorion 2007, Hart 2012 , Ortiz 2012). Rather than repeat the
categories of financial theory and regulation without reflection, anthropologists need to investigate
their intellectual history more critically (De Goede 2005, MacKenzie 2006, Preda 2009).
The Great Divide still beggars investigation of the state's role in the production of money.
Hegel's (1967 [1821]) idea of the state bears little resemblance to the variety of forms that go
by that name today. Yet, the West, which supposedly invented money in the form of a national
476 Hart • Ortiz
This content downloaded from
147.251.113.161 on Mon, 20 Mar 2023 15:01:25 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
monopoly currency, is routinely contrasted with the rest who must adopt the "modern" model by
means of colonization or rationalization (Hart 2000, Guyer 2004). Nevertheless, anthropologists
have shown that state formation in Caribbean offshore islands requires them to adopt a form of
sovereignty that remains open to global financial flows (Maurer 2004), whereas the Chinese state
seeks to control its citizens through regulating participation in financial markets (Hertz 1998).
By placing fieldwork observations within a framework of global comparison, anthropologists can
promote different views of the state and its relation to money.
Too often, anthropologists acknowledge the centrality of history but leave it out of their
descriptions and analyses. Thus, even when analyzing colonial relations, the contributors to Parry
& Bloch (1989) assume the global context away to concentrate on their local objects of study.
Global networks usually appear in ethnographies of finance, if at all, only as an implicit abstraction.
As with media accounts of the financial crisis, most ethnographers conflate local events with "the
world" (Ortiz 2012). Labeling everything "neoliberalism" is likewise a poor substitute for studying
world economy.
It is therefore important to connect fieldwork observations with the history of the economic
and political categories used by people in a given place. If we want to understand their different
uses, we also need to link these ideas to the history of institutions and organizations, such as states,
corporations, or the academy. In this way, we can develop a reflexive critique of monetary and
financial practices, both in the data we highlight and in our own discipline. What were the questions
asked by those whose analytical categories we adopt? Do we want to ask similar questions? Do they
help us to connect local situations to their global context, or do we need to invent new concepts?
Finance, Communication Technologies, and New Forms of Money
The progressive collapse of the gold standard in the twentieth century has been accompanied
by the extension of mass communications: first, radio, TV, and cinema; lately, the Internet and
cellular phones. This has been fundamental to the finance industry and its crises as well as to
global tensions over trade and currencies. New communication technologies have changed how
billions relate to humanity as a whole at all levels from the most intimate to the most inclusive.
All-purpose money (Polanyi 1977 [1964]) has been breaking up since the US dollar went off gold
in 1971 (Dembinski & Perritaz 2000). The world economy has been moving toward a new plural
pattern of competing currencies reminiscent of what was normal before the advent of national
capitalism. The finance industry produces restricted monies and forms of credit that mix with
national currencies, thereby reinforcing and weakening them. Similar to state-money since the
gold standard ended, other money forms based on communications networks, multiple institutions,
and mutual trust are emerging.
Thanks to the communications revolution, foreign exchange markets now turn over $5 trillion
a day, while the capitalization of markets for stocks and bonds far exceeds global output. The
volume of information now circulating in real time through the Internet's cables and satellites was
unthinkable less than a century ago. Along with mass media, this has allowed the whole world to
enter people's homes and to inform daily transactions everywhere. This technological revolution
has reinforced centralized institutions such as banks and governments. In addition, everyday life
is now linked to the world economy through money (Hart 2000). Since 2000, we have seen an
explosion in the use of social media (Web 2.0) and a shift toward the use of mobile phones for
computing operations and, increasingly, monetary transactions. The Internet never had a built-in
means of payment, but mobile phones do (Agar 2004, Horst & Miller 2006).
Finally, alternative currencies now proliferate, creating different forms of monetary sovereignty
while educating participants in new ways of thinking about monetary possibilities and social justice
www.annualreviews.org • The Anthropology of Money and Finance 477
This content downloaded from
147.251.113.161 on Mon, 20 Mar 2023 15:01:25 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
(Zelizer 1998, Maurer 2005b, Hart 2006). An exclusive focus on national currencies misses how
these experiments open windows onto global distribution. In the past 20 years, money has been
reshaped by the technological means of its production and circulation. New economic relations
and forces have emerged, and new circuits of distribution and exclusion have been created.
Anthropology is bound to change in this context. In the 1960s, the discipline confronted the
collapse of colonial empires but knew nothing of personal computers and the Internet. By the
1990s, anthropologists saw the Internet as a "new technology of communication," while struggling
to figure out what it meant to live without the Cold War. Members of Generation Y who
have grown up in the rich areas of the world may only vaguely recall a time when life did not
take place through social media and financial crisis was not a permanent feature of politics. In
their Introduction to Digital Anthropology (Horst & Miller 2012), "The Digital and the Human:
A Prospectus for Digital Anthropology," the editors argue for an affinity between digital worlds
and money (Hart 2000). It seems clear that the objects and methods of anthropological study
of both fields are likely to converge. Tom Boellstorff's (2012) review chapter makes the striking
observation that the anthropology of digital worlds is particularly suited to the method of participant
observation. This is pardy because those who have grown up with the new technologies are
more open to learning pragmatically through virtual social interaction than to relying on technical
manuals. We must learn to observe and analyze new social identities and patterns of relationships
in the spaces created by today's means of communication. In doing so, anthropologists can learn
from and help shape new ways of imagining the world of money.
Money in the Making of Society at All Levels
Where are the levers of democratic power to be located now that globalization has exposed
the limitations of national economic management? The current crisis challenges contemporary
financial ideas, while its tangible distributive effects are felt and feared throughout the world. We
are witnessing a power struggle of awesome consequences, and economic anthropologists cannot
afford to stand aside. Rather than support our proposals with a single story, we start from the
multiple ways that human beings have already inserted themselves into existing unequal society;
these existing practices should inform new developments in the human economy (Hart et al. 2010,
Pleyers 2010).
Anthropologists have gained immensely from exploring the capitalist heartlands, but we must
still aspire to a wide range of geographical knowledge. An economic anthropology that limits itself
to ethnographic studies of stockbrokers or traders will never grasp humanity's shared economic
predicament. By studying monetary relations at different levels, from intimate encounters to
foreign exchange markets, anthropologists can help create new meanings and connections between
our everyday life and the seven billion people with whom we share it.
Through the Internet or phone networks, we can now span the world and connect personally
with people whom we will never meet physically. Humanity has finally found universal media for
the expression of universal ideas. Money is essential to their dissemination. It is a constitutive
part of our multilayered identities, from the most intimate relations to communities of exchange
on a vast scale. Money allows us to express ourselves and indexes our place in hierarchies, solidarities,
and enclosures. Our identities expand, fragment, and recombine as we move from the
most local transactions to national or regional currencies. Central banks, insurance companies,
pension funds, global and local banks, savings clubs, and other local credit schemes, all shape the
possibilities for our personalities to develop. We learn about politics and our membership of larger
groups by participation in monetary networks that exclude and entrap us even as they extend our
horizons.
478 Hart • Ortiz
This content downloaded from
147.251.113.161 on Mon, 20 Mar 2023 15:01:25 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The object of anthropology, following Kant, could be the making of world society or the human
universal. One word for this is humanity, at once a collective noun, a moral quality, and a historical
project for our species. This ethical horizon of the anthropological endeavor is what helps us to
reach for the minutiae of other people while trying to span the gap between their local specificity
and the global connections in which they take part. As Mauss recognized, the notion of society
is reshaped by this multifarious expansion. If we hope for a more peaceful and integrated world
society, money will certainly play an important role in its formation. For fieldwork to be useful
to this end, it must be liberated from the limits of direct observation. Interdisciplinary dialogue is
also vital, but it may not be enough. We have to rid ourselves of the delusion that positive methods
are the only way anthropologists can generate valuable knowledge. The best anthropology has
always been based on extension from concrete observations to the imagination of more inclusive
social worlds. The study of money would be impossible without such extension. Indeed, money is
the prime example of this process. Once we extend our gaze to the horizon, anthropologists will
discover that we bring far more to the table than we think.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
The authors are not aware of any affiliations, memberships, funding, or financial hold
might be perceived as affecting the objectivity of this review.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Research by H.O. has been funded by the European Research Council (ERC Stg-Gt 26
LITERATURE CITED
Abdelal R. 2007. Capital Rules. The Construction of Global Finance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. P
Abolafia M. 1996. Making Markets: Opportunism and Restraint on Wall Street. Cambridge, MA: Har
Press
Agar J. 2004. Constant Touch: A Global History of the Mobile Phone. London: Faber & Faber
Akin D, Robbins J, eds. 1999. Money and Modernity: State and Local Currencies in Melanesia. Pittsb
Univ. Pittsburgh Press
Appadurai A. 1986. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge, UK:
Univ. Press
Appadurai A. 2012. The spirit of calculation. Camb. Anthropol. 1(30):3- 17
Applbaum K 2004. The Marketing Era: From Professional Practice to Global Provisioning. New York:
Ayache E. 2010. The Blank Swan: The End of Probability. New York: Wiley
Baker WE. 1986. Floor trading and crowd dynamics. In The Social Dynamics of Financial Markets, ed
PA Adler, pp. 107-28. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press
Boellstorff T. 2012. Rethinking digital anthropology. See Horst & Miller 2012, pp. 39-60
Bohannan P. 1955. Some principles of exchange and investment among the Tiv. Am. Anthropol. 57
Bohannan P. 1959. The impact of money on an African subsistence economy. J. Econ. Hist. 19:491Breton
S, ed. 2002. Questionnes de monnaie. UHomme 162 (avril/juin): 13-2 6
Carrier J, ed. 2005. Handbook of Economic Anthropology. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar
Carrier J, ed. 2012. Handbook of Economic Anthropology. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. 2nd ed.
Clark G, Thrift N. 2005. The return of bureaucracy: managing dispersed knowledge in global f
Knorr Cetina & Preda 2005, pp. 229-49
De Goede M. 2005. Virtue , Fortune and Faith. A Genealogy of Finance. Minneapolis: Univ. Minn. Pr
Dembinski P, Perritaz C. 2000. Towards the break-up of money. When reality driven by informat
nology outshines SimmeFs vision. Foresight 5(2):483- 97
www.annualreviews.org • The Anthropology of Money and Finance 47
This content downloaded from
147.251.113.161 on Mon, 20 Mar 2023 15:01:25 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Dodd N. 2005. Laundering money: on the need for conceptual clarity within the sociology of money. Eur. J.
Sociol. 3(44):387- 41 1
Dodd N. 2014. The Social Life of Money. Princeton, NT: Princeton Univ. Press
Durkheim E. 1960 (1893). The Division of Labor in Society . Glencoe, IL: Free Press
Eichengreen B. 1996. Globalizing Capital. A History of the International Monetary System. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
Univ. Press
Epstein G. 2005. Financialization and the World Economy. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar
Foucault M. 1973 (1966). The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Hurnan Sciences (Les mots et les choses). New
York: Vintage Books
Fournier M. 2006 (1994). Marcel Mauss: A Biography. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press
Galbraith JK. 1975. Money: Whence It Came , Where It Went. New York: Penguin Books
Godechot O. 2008. "Hold-up" in finance: the conditions of possibility for high bonuses in the financial
industry. Rev. Française Sociol. 49(Suppl.):95-123
Graeber D. 2001. Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value. The False Coin of Our Own Dreams. New York:
Palgrave
Graeber D. 2009. Debt, violence, and impersonal markets: Polanyian meditations. See Hann & Hart 2009,
pp. 106-32
Graeber D. 201 1 . Debt : The First S ,000 Years. New York: Melville House
Gregory C. 1997. Savage Money: The Anthropology and Politics of Commodity Exchange. Amsterdam: Harwood
Guyer JI. 2004. Marginal Gains. Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa. Chicago, IL: Chicago Univ. Press
Guyer JI. 2 0 1 0. The eruption of tradition? On ordinality and calculation. Anthropol. Theory 10:123-31
Guyer JI. 2012. Soft currencies, cash economies, new monies: past and present. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA
109(7):22 14^21
Hann C, Hart K, eds. 2009. Market and Society: The Great Transformatim Today. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
Univ. Press
Hann C, Hart K. 2011. Economic Anthropology: History , Ethnography , Critique. Cambridge, UK: Polity
Hart K. 1986. Heads or tails? Two sides of the coin. Man 3(2 1):637-56
Hart K. 2000. The Memory Bank: Money in an Unequal World. London: Profile
Hart K. 2005a. Money: one anthropologist's view. See Carrier 2005, pp. 160-75
Hart K. 2005b. The Hit Man's Dilemma: Or Business , Personal and Impersonal. Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm
Hart K. 2006. Richesse commune: construire une démocratie économique à Faide de monnaies communautaires.
In Exclusion et liens financiers - monnaies sociales: Rapport 2005-6 , ed. J Blanc, pp. 135-52. Paris:
Economica
Hart K. 2007. Marcel Mauss: in pursuit of the whole. A review essay. Comp. Stud. Soc. Hist. 49(2):473-85
Hart K 2009. Money in the making of world society. See Hann & Hart 2009, pp. 91-105
Hart K 2012. The financial crisis and the history of money. See Carrier 2012, pp. 626-37
Hart K 2013. Anthropology. In The Elgar Companion to Marxist Economics , ed. B Fine, A Saad-Filho, pp. 22-2 7 .
Cheltenham, UK Edward Elgar
Hart K. 2014. Marcel Mauss's economic vision, 1920-1925: anthropology, politics, journalism. J. Class. Sociol.
14:34-44
Hart K, Laville J, Cattani AD, eds. 2010. The Human Economy: A Citizen's Guide. Cambridge, UK: Polity
Hart K, Maurer B. 2009. The politics, pragmatics and promise of money. http://thememorybank.co.Uk/2009/l 1/
2 1/conversation-about-money
Harvey D. 2005. A Brief History ofNeoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press
Hegel GWF. 1967 [1821]. The Philosophy of Right. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press
Hertz E. 1998. The Trading Crowd: An Ethnography of the Shanghai Stock Market. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
Univ. Press
Ho K. 2009. Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press
Holmes D. 2009. Economy of words. Cult. Anthropol. 3(24):381-419
Horst H, Miller D. 2006. The CeU Phone: An Anthropology of Communication. Oxford: Berg
Horst H, Miller D, eds. 2012. Digital Anthropology. Oxford: Berg
Ingham G. 2004. The Nature of Money. Cambridge, UK: Polity
480 Hart • Ortiz
This content downloaded from
147.251.113.161 on Mon, 20 Mar 2023 15:01:25 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Jorion P. 2007. La crise du capitalisme américain. Paris: La Découverte
Knorr Cetina K. 2005. How are global markets global? The architecture of a flow world. See Knorr Cetina
& Preda 2005, pp. 38-61
Knorr Cetina K, Preda A, eds. 2005. The Sociology of Financial Markets. Oxford, UK: Oxford Univ. Press
Knorr Cetina K, Preda A. 2007. The temporalization of financial markets: from network markets to flow
markets. Theory Cult. Soc. 24(7-8): 12 3^45
Krippner GR. 2011. Capitalizing on Crisis. The Political Origins of the Rise of Finance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Univ. Press
Lépinay VA. 201 1. Codes of Finance. Engineering Derivatives in a Global Bank. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ.
Press
LiPuma E, Lee B. 2004. Financial Derivativesand the Globalization of Risk. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press
MacKenzie D. 2006. An Engine not a Camera. How Financial Models Shape Markets. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press
MacKenzie D. 201 1 . The credit crisis as a problem in the sociology of knowledge. Am. J. Soc. 6(1 16): 1 778-841
Malinowski B. 192 1. The primitive economics of the Trobriand Islanders. Econ. J. 3:11-16
Malinowski B. 1922. Argonauts of the Western Pacific : An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the
Archipelagoes ofMelanesian New Guinea. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul
Marcus G. 1995. Ethnography in/of the world system: the emergence of multi-sited ethnograpgy. Annu. Rev.
Anthropol. 24:95-117
Marx K. 1973 (1858). Grundrisse. Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. New York: Vintage
Marx IC 1977 (1869). Capital. A Critique of Political Economy , Vol. 1, trans. B Fowkes. New York: Vintage
Marx K, Engels F. 1987 (1848). The Communist Manifesto. New York: Pathfinder
Maurer B. 2002. Repressed futures: financial derivatives' theological unconscious. Econ. Soc. 31:15-36
Maurer B. 2004. Cyberspatial properties: taxing questions about proprietary regimes. In Property in Question.
Value Transformation in the Global Economy , ed. C Humphrey, K Verdery, pp. 297-318. New York: Berg
Maurer B. 2005a. Finance. See Carrier 2005, pp. 176-93
Maurer B. 2005b. Mutual Life , Limited: Islamic Banking , Alternative Currencies , Lateral Reason. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton Univ. Press
Maurer B. 2006. The anthropology of money. Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 35:15-36
Maurer B. 2012. Finance 2.0. See Carrier 2012, pp. 183-201
Mauss M. 1990 (1925). The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. London: Routledge
Mauss M. 1985 (1938). A category of the human mind: the notion of person; the notion of self. In The Category
of the Person: Anthropology , Philosophy , History , trans. WD Halls, ed. M Carrithers, S Collins, S Lukes,
pp. 1-25. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press
Mauss M. 1997. Ecrits politiques, ed. M Fournier. Paris: Fayard
Meillassoux Q. 2010. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity Of Contingency. London: Continuum
Mirowski P. 201 3. Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste. New York: Verso
Müller L. 2006. Mercado Exemplar: um estudo antropológico sobre a bolsa de valores. Porto Alegre: Ed. Zouk
Muniesa F. 2000. Un robot walrasien. Cotation électronique et justesse de la découverte des prix. Politix
52(13):121-54
Muniesa F. 2007. Market technologies and the pragmatics of prices. Econ. Soc. 3 (3 6): 3 77-95
Nader L. 1972. Up the anthropologist - perspectives gained from studying up. In Reinventing Anthropology ,
ed. D Hymes, pp. 284-3 1 1 . New York: Pantheon
Neiburg F. 2006. Inflation: economists and economic cultures in Brazil and Argentina. Comp. Stud. Soc. Hist.
3(48):604-33
Nishibe M. 2005. The theory of labor money: implications of Marx's critique for Local Exchange Trading
Systems (LETS). In Marx for the 21st Century , ed. H. Uchida, pp. 89-105. London: Routledge
Ortiz H. 2012. Anthropology - of the financial crisis. See Carrier 2012, pp. 585-96
Ortiz H. 2013a. Financial professionals as a global elite. In The Anthropology of Elites, ed. T Salverda, J Abbink,
pp. 185-205. New York: Palgrave
Ortiz H. 2013b. Financial value: economic, moral, political, global. HAU 3(1):64 - 79
Ortiz H. 2014. The limits of financial imagination: free investors, efficient markets and crisis. Am. Anthropol.
116:38-50
www.annualreviews.org • The Anthropology of Money and Finance 481
This content downloaded from
147.251.113.161 on Mon, 20 Mar 2023 15:01:25 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Ouroussoff A. 2010. Wall Street at War. Cambridge, UK: Polity
Parry J, Bloch M, eds. 1989. Money and the Morality of Exchange. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press
Peebles G. 2008. Inverting the panopticon: money and the nationalization of the future. Public Culture
2(2 0):2 3 3-65
Pleyers G. 2010. Alter-Globalization : Becoming Actors in A Global World. Cambridge, UK: Polity
Polanyi K. 2001 (1944). The Great Transformation : The Political and Economic Origins of Our Times. Boston,
MA: Beacon
Polanyi K. 1957. The economy as instituted process. In Trade and Market in the Early Empires: Economies in
History and Theory , ed. K Polanyi, C Arensberg, H Pearson, pp. 243-69. Glencoe, IL: Free Press
Polanyi K. 1977 (1964). Money objects and money uses. In The Livelihood of Man. Studies in Social Discontinuity,
ed. K Polanyi, pp. 97-121. New York: Academic
Preda A. 2009. Framing Finance: The Boundaries of Markets and Modern Capitalism. Chicago/London: Univ.
Chicago Press
Riles A. 2011. Collateral Knowledge. Legal Reasoning in the Global Financial Markets. Chicago/London: Univ.
Chicago Press
Simmel G. 1978 (1900). The Philosophy of Money. London: Routledge
Smith A. 1961 (1776). An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. London: Methuen
Tett G. 2009. Fool's Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J. P. Morgan Was Corrupted by Wall Street
Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe. New York: Free Press
Weber M. 2003 (1904-1905). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. T Parsons. Mineóla, NY:
Dover
Weber M. 1 978 ( 1 92 0). Economy and Society. An Outline oflnterpretive Sociology , ed. G Roth, C Wittich. Berkeley:
Univ. Calif. Press
Weber M. 2013 (1922). General Economic History, trans. F Knight. Eastford, CT: Martino Fine Books
Whitley R. 1986. The transformation of business finance into financial economics: the roles of academic
expansion and changes in U.S. capital markets. Account. Org. Soc. 1 1(2): 17 1-92
Zaloom C. 2006. Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London. Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press
ZelizerV. 1979. Morals and Markets: The Development of Life Insurance in the United States. New York: Columbia
Univ. Press
Zelizer V. 1994. The Sodai Meaning of Money. New York: Basic Books
Zelizer V. 1998. The proliferation of social currencies. In The Laws of the Markets , ed. M Callón, pp. 58-68.
Oxford: Blackwell
Zelizer V. 2005. The Purchase of Intimacy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press
482 Hart • Ortiz
This content downloaded from
147.251.113.161 on Mon, 20 Mar 2023 15:01:25 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms