“The book points to a domain of research that is still understudied by anthropologists, and is thus a stimulation to explore it further.” • Anthropological Forum
“This is a compelling collection that contributes rich case studies and sharp theoretical insights for more serious anthropological attention to money, number, and calculation.” • Anthropos
“This compact collection focuses on money as number, seen from a wide range of perspectives. The style is impressively dialectical, offering hope that anthropologists may soon be open to more promising ways of engaging with money.” • Keith Hart, University of Pretoria
“Why do anthropologists get so uncomfortable when it comes to working with (and on) numbers? This book provides answers and exemplifies what a quantity-embracing, yet ethnographically rich, economic anthropology can look like.” • Stefan Leins, University of Konstanz
Traditionally viewed as an abstraction, the quantitative nature of money is essential in evaluating the relationship between monetary systems and society. Money Counts moves beyond abstraction, exploring the conceptual diversity and everyday enactment of money’s quantity. Drawing from case studies including British jewelers, blood-money payments in Germanic law codes, and the quotidian use of money in cosmopolitical Moscow, a Western Kenyan village, and socialist Havana, the chapters in this volume offer new theoretical and empirical interpretations of money’s quantitative nature as it relates to abstraction, sociality, materiality, freedom, and morality.
Mario Schmidt is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School of the Humanities at the University of Cologne. He has published in journals including Africa, Ethnohistory, and HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. His research interests include the rise of behavioral economics in East Africa, the importance of part-whole relations for an understanding of money, and the impact of concepts from the natural sciences on the development of Émile Durkheim’s and Marcel Mauss’s thought.
Sandy Ross has been a Senior Lecturer at Leeds Beckett University, and a Sociology Fellow at the Higher School of Economics. With Chris Swader, she is editing a forthcoming issue on post-socialist moral economies for the Journal of Consumer Culture, and her newest book, Weapons of the Geek: Moral Economies in the 21st Century, will be published in 2020 by Palgrave.
Area:
LC: HG226.3 .O58 2020
BISAC: SOC002010 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Anthropology/Cultural & Social; BUS045000 BUSINESS & ECONOMICS/Money & Monetary Policy
