Finger counting money

Abstract

Through a discussion of a novel design concept for an embodied currency, this paper inquires into gesture and number. In so doing, it underscores the importance of attending to the phenomenological character of number and money. It speculates on the creation of an embodied currency lived in and through community. Now you shall believe what you would deny could be done; In your hands you hold eight, as my teacher once taught; Take away seven, and six still remain. -a Roman riddle (from Menninger, 1969: 201) In the fall and winter of 2008, I participated remotely in a tutorial at the Royal College of Art titled 'The Future of Money'. Interaction and user interface designers and engineers were charged with redesigning money. I was their anthropological interlocutor, commenting on their projects as they developed and offering suggestions for reading and discussion. Several of the projects explored the possibilities of designing technologies around gestures in order to recreate currency and solve particular problems that physical currency can pose -not just the cost of producing currency objects, the clumsiness of coin and cash, or the possibility of loss or theft, but also the issues raised by illiteracy and innumeracy, as well as issues of access to one's money in social contexts rife with crime, fear, violence, or physical or social distance from reliable banking institutions. I focus here on one of these projects, a proposal for a gestural currency by the designer Will Carey. Will and I were in conversation over a period of about a year, off and on, about his project. We are each trying to work out separate, though related, issues in each of our projects. This short essay asks what Will's project can offer anthropologists interested in new ways of thinking about numbers. 1 Will's proposal re-imagines the relationship between numbers, money and embodiment. This process, I believe:(1) brings to the fore the difference between the abstract numbers of mathematics and counting numbers; this difference is captured in the distinction in German between zahl and anzahl or English approximations number and count or tally. at Bobst Library, New York University on May 14, 2015 ant.sagepub.com Downloaded from(2) highlights the embodiment of number through gestural language; this embodiment does not so much 're-ground' numbers in the materiality of human bodies but rather helps reveal what was always there: the finite limits of number as embodied (Rotman, 1993), or number as always tally or anzahl, and never purely zahl.(3) brings us to a phenomenology of number, its iconicity and indexicality rather than its symbolic referentiality, which (4) suggests the possibility of a reimagined 'embedded' economy in the embodied community of traders/transactors, etc. This can take the form of either or both the free market imagined by exponents of Adam Smith, who forget his moral argument, and the market as a human institution insisted upon by Keith Hart (on Smith's moral arguments see Elyachar, 2006;Hart, 2000).Will's project helps ...

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