Money is always personal and impersonal

Hart, Keith

doi:10.1111/j.1467-8322.2007.00536.x

Cited by 52 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…And if one of the effects of playing with currency today is a denaturalization of money's mystical qualities -often through a re-enchantment of money's numbers -then what would be the effects of play with finger counting money in the future? Would making money a tale not a number reground markets in a community of regard, a community economy akin to those envisioned by alternative currency proponents and discussed most vividly by Keith Hart (2007)? The equation of money and number mediated through the body, of course, has resonances with Marx on abstract labor; and yet, does 'everyone an ATM' inspire a market commerce beyond alienation?…”

Section: Gesture Number Bodymentioning

confidence: 95%

Finger counting money

Maurer

2010

Anthropological Theory

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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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Section: Gesture Number Bodymentioning

confidence: 95%

Finger counting money

Maurer

2010

Anthropological Theory

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“…With Keith Hart (2007), I am concerned that scholars and activists alike too often discard the baby with the bathwater: in trying to recuperate a social economy or a personal money, like Harvey's LETS in some future utopia, we cast aside the unanticipated potential (and, indeed, the necessity) of abstract, calculative agencies and impersonal institutions and moneys. Hart writes:…”

Section: Cultural Economy In Muftimentioning

confidence: 97%

Resocializing Finance? Or Dressing It in Mufti?

Maurer¹

2008

Journal of Cultural Economy

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“…This perspective also implicitly raises the question of what changes in monetary institutions would be desirable for the future. Third, this reformulation of Polanyi's framework leads to a more complex understanding of money: following Hart (1986Hart ( , 2007, money can be understood as both abstract and concrete, credit and debt. Money is both an abstract concept and a set of concrete practices and instruments.…”

Section: Distinguishing Between Concept and Practices: A Reinterpretamentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards a neo-Polanyian approach to money: integrating the concept of debt

Saiag¹

2014

Economy and Society

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This paper aims to reconsider Polanyi's approach to money. His best-known writing on money uses is deeply original and presents strong insights that dissociate money from the concept of the market. Polanyi also developed an interesting non-dichotomous understanding of money in his The great transformation. However, taken together, these two contributions lead to some unresolved questions: his critique of the orthodox approach to money is ambivalent; his argument to separate payment from account is weak; and, most important, he ultimately makes an incomplete break with the classical real/monetary dichotomy. This paper proposes a distinction between money as a set of instruments and practices and money as a concept, through the integration of John Commons's concept of debt into Polanyi's framework. This reformulation allows us to resolve Polanyi's unresolved questions while preserving his major contributions, and leads to a more complex understanding of money.

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Money is always personal and impersonal

Cited by 52 publications

References 13 publications

Finger counting money

Finger counting money

Resocializing Finance? Or Dressing It in Mufti?

Towards a neo-Polanyian approach to money: integrating the concept of debt

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