Introduction

Abstract

Abstract: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.Keywords: hysteresis, materiality, money, number, quantity, recursivity, set partitioning How can a modern social anthropologist … embark upon generalization with any hope of arriving at a satisfying conclusion? … By thinking of the organizational ideas that are present in any society as constituting a mathematical pattern. (Leach 1961: 2) Anthropologists rarely portray themselves as quantitative specialists or people who know about numbers. Instead, the adjective 'qualitative' plays a central role in our self-conception. We do qualitative fieldwork; we record and transcribe qualitative interviews; we are skeptical of quantifying methods-especially those of economists-which many anthropologists believe fall short of portraying rich lived worlds. In economic anthropology, this haste to distance ourselves from the disciplinary taboo-that-which-is-quantitative-has generated a division of (Bohannan 1959;Dalton 1965;Simmel [1907] 2011). If a form of money did not share this abstracting potential, it could be classified as special-purpose money, an object that seems money-like, but is not actual all-purpose money (Polanyi 1968). From this perspective, money's abstract potential must be tamed socially or culturally, in a realm that is positioned as outside of, or encompassing, economies (Parry and Bloch 1989;Graeber 1996;Karlstrøm 2014;Taussig 1980;Zelizer 1997). 2 The baby, money's quantity, has been thrown out with the bath water, money's abstracting potential.However, the social sciences as a whole are in the midst of a quantitative turn. In contemporary economic anthropology, quantities-and to a lesser extent numbers-are associated with algorithmic trading and high finance; macro-economic phenomena, such as global crises and economic policies; and the ontology and epistemology of homo oeconomicus. Reinvigorated interest in quantitative approaches is largely focused on increasingly complex models and techniques for analyzing colossal data sets, but we believe that thinking about quantitativeness predominantly in terms of Big Data is a failure of imagination. We take inspiration from anthropologists (Alme...

Beyond the Social Contract

“…This chapter owes more to recent discussions on 'the number frontier' than is immediately apparent. See, for example, Guyer et al (2010) and Ross et al (2017). 10.…”