Social Analysis

In anthropology, sociology, and the humanities, money’s quantity is usually conceptualized as objectifying, creating abstract indexes of value, and as representing and enforcing abstraction, economic or otherwise. It is this link between quantity and abstraction that is partly responsible for questionable dichotomies opposing money’s numerical quantities and its qualities. Contributors to this special issue interrogate these dichotomies by exploring material and qualitative aspects of quantities in the history of economic thought, through British jewelers, blood money payments in Germanic law codes, and the everyday use of money in Russia, Kenya, and Cuba and among Brazilian Gypsies. Our introduction frames these engagements by presenting phenomena that blur differences between quality and quantity: part-whole relations, recursivity, set partitioning and infinities, and hysteresis and elastic thresholds.

This article explores the extent to which gold jewelry, an object type conventionally looked on as a means of display, should also be seen as a type of money. Drawing on historical evidence and ethnographic research, the analysis considers the ways in which two examples—the Renaissance money chain and the modern jewelry collection—exhibit characteristics fundamental to money: liquidity, partibility, and recursive divisibility. As a result, this study proposes that gold jewelry can best be described as a type of para-money. The article concludes that due to its ambiguous state, gold jewelry is able to act as a mediator in social situations where exchanges of money proper are considered unacceptable, and that this is an important yet under-acknowledged aspect of its social identity.

The article takes a close look at Jacob Grimm’s astonishing account of measurement in his lesser-known studies on the history of law. Grimm gives a thorough description of concrete quantification of property and the measurement of economic value in a European rural setting. Both techniques are considered a necessary ‘infrastructure’ for any use of money, yet his exposition is curiously devoid of numbers. Instead, ‘poetic’ and procedural scripts of measurement take center stage. However, these qualitative procedures are not contrasted to quantitative ones in any expectable way. In Grimm’s polemic, precise quantification emerges as a shorthand for administrative regimes that circumvent and prohibit negotiation, appearing to be less rational and more socially binding.

This article explores how affluent expatriates in urban Russia adapt to different money practices that involve numbers and quantities. The discussion centers on three analytic categories: difficult sums (5,000); denomination and usage problems (Five Thousand); and rule-of-thumb calculations (five thousands). Each category illustrates different entanglements of money quantities, qualities, and material forms. For example, quantities—exchange rates, denominations, prices—are called upon to justify moral judgments about the Russian people and their culture, as well as the country’s economy. Thus, relations involving money quantities provide ways for wealthy migrants to participate in Russian society, yet they also reinforce migrants’ separation from Russian society. This analysis also suggests that money’s multiplicities exist on a more basic, fundamental level, requiring conversion and mental reckoning across multiple currencies.

This article focuses on how money’s quantity is enacted as multiple in Kaleko, a small market center in Western Kenya. Residents of Kaleko conceptualize money’s quantity as abstracting, concretizing, and recursive. Theorizing this ethnographic data allows us to understand money as a sign that stands against itself. The abstracting and concretizing properties of money’s quantity symbolize what it means to be coerced to do something, while its recursive property symbolizes what it means to act freely. The article scrutinizes how money’s recursive quantity thereby relates to one peculiar trait of free social encounters in Kaleko: it suspends the distinction between part and whole with the help of ‘combinatory practices’.

Based on ethnographic research in Havana over the past two decades, this article examines how Cubans’ experience of poverty, or ‘need’, is linked to the increasing dollarization of the Cuban economy. Dollars, I argue, are not just the emblem of a new moral disorder, but also its main catalyst, inasmuch as they expand the realm of ‘need’, as defined by a socialist paradigm of consumption rooted in the era before the introduction of the dollar, by stripping it of its (socialist) moral essence through acts of quantitative commensuration. This account of Cubans’ experience of poverty since the end of the Soviet era, I suggest, provides more general insights about the power of the money form itself as a catalyst of moral transformation.

The resilience of the communal life of Calon Gypsies of Bahia, whose primary occupation is moneylending, lies in their treatment of money that individual men have in circulation as composing ‘inalienable personal hoards’. Calon ‘money on the street’ is viewed as a set of all the money a Calon man can hope to receive at various points from his existing loans. As a singularized totality, this whole is considered by other Calon as potentially knowable, encompassed by Calon morality and thus subject to people’s claims and evaluations. The dynamic relation between these two specific sums—the temporary whole that constitutes a man’s reputation and any expenditure indexically related to it—turns expenditures into events through which Calon manhood is forged and sovereignty from calculatory reason is declared.

This article seeks a definition of money by bringing the approaches of Spengler, Plato, Aristotle, and Keynes into dialogue. All four promote alternative views of the ontology of money as anchored either in supra-individual thought or in actual behavior, scrutinizing its relationship with mathematics. This discussion leads to an understanding of money as originating in human action and as a numerical tool that can only be understood from its ends in use. The essence of money is therefore ethical. The article concludes with a novel combination of Aristotle’s and Keynes’s ideas: the crucial element of money is learning good money practices in order to form society. This can be achieved by harmonizing money’s material part as mere actuality with money’s mathematical part as potentiality.

This article discusses various challenges to the classical view of money as primarily a quantitative medium that contributes to the spread of a calculative attitude in our relations. Often associated with Georg Simmel and other social thinkers such as Weber, this somewhat dystopian view of money has more recently been given fresh impetus by a number of ‘post-crash’ publications that cast money as a root cause of increasing debt, greed, and irresponsible banking. Against this, I argue for a more nuanced, qualitatively rich perspective on money, one that is evident in this collection, which undertakes what might be called a ‘qualitative’ analysis of money’s quantitative features. This special issue presents an approach to money that treats it as a pluralistic phenomenon, with many different sides.