Representing Value and the Value of Representation: A Different Look at Money

Domínguez, Virginia R.

doi:10.1525/can.1990.5.1.02a00020

Cited by 26 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“… 20. On how situations of “monetary disunification” call “into question much of what we usually take for granted about money as an object—what it is, what its value is, and what it stands for,” engendering discourse on “the fake” and “the real,” see Dominguez 1990:19.…”

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confidence: 99%

THE FACE OF MONEY: Currency, Crisis, and Remediation in Post-Suharto Indonesia

Strassler

2009

Cultural Anthropology

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In the period of transition following Suharto's resignation as president of Indonesia in 1998, the image of the 50,000Rp bill bearing his face became a visual shorthand for the corruption and abuse of power that had characterized his regime. Accessible, decentralized consumer technologies enabled people to alter money's appearance, transforming it from a fetish of the state into a malleable surface available for popular reinscription. As the medium of money was “remediated”—absorbed into other media, refashioned, and circulated along new pathways—it became a means by which people engaged questions of state power, national integrity, political authenticity, and economic relations opened up by the crisis of Reformasi (Reform). The essay argues that remediations of public forms play a crucial role in times of political transition by enabling people to materialize alternative visions of political authority and authenticity. Moreover, remediated forms have become a characteristic modality of political communication in the post‐Suharto period under conditions of democratization and an increasingly diversified media ecology.

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confidence: 99%

THE FACE OF MONEY: Currency, Crisis, and Remediation in Post-Suharto Indonesia

Strassler

2009

Cultural Anthropology

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“…That abundant potential exists in the here-and-now is likewise a function of the ongoing turbulence in global finance. As a number of studies have shown, there is a discernible and important historical relationship between the extent of social uncertainty about money's value and the conspicuousness of money's social and cultural embeddedness (eg, Carruthers and Babb, 1996;Dominguez, 1990). At times when the value of money, in all its forms, is most taken-for-granted, its naturalisation seems most absolute; when, by contrast, the value of certain monies is called into question, as it certainly has been in recent years, money's social construction typically becomes clearer to see.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Follow the Thing: Money

Christophers

2011

Environ Plan D

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In an attempt to resist and surmount the mystifications of commodity fetishism, scholars have gone to great lengths to trace the social and spatial pathways of various physical, consumable commodities. By contrast, there have been relatively limited efforts to similarly defetishise what Marx called the “god of commodities”—money—and there has been no systematic, theoretically informed consideration of what the defetishisation of money might actually entail. From an explicitly Marxian perspective this paper aims to make a modest contribution in such a direction. It has two central objectives: To demonstrate why money merits defetishisation and to explore, at a largely theoretical level, how such an exercise might proceed, what primary challenges it would confront, and where the main opportunities for progress are likely to lie.

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“…98-99) suggests that Brazilians and Argentines have learned to live with "sick currencies" and monetary instability in part by learning how to use numerical devices like "index numbers" (for example, indicators of price changes) to protect themselves from infl ation and depreciation. Nonetheless, even if people become accustomed to monetary instability and adept at negotiating multiple currencies, questions about the "real value" of money or the tangible ground of the relationship between money and value often persist (Dominguez, 1990 ). Here money becomes a vehicle for concerns about representation per se.…”

Section: Money and Symbolmentioning

confidence: 99%

Materiality, Symbol, and Complexity in the Anthropology of Money

Nelms

Maurer

2014

The Psychological Science of Money

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The invitation to review anthropological studies of money offers an opportunity not only to revisit the history of anthropologists' investigations into money's objects, meanings, and uses but also to refl ect on the intersections of such work with recent psychological research. In this review essay, we survey the primary fi ndings of the anthropology of money and the central challenges anthropological work has posed to assumptions about money's power to abstract, commensurate, dissolve social ties, and erase difference. We summarize anthropologists' historical concern with cultural difference and recent work on money's materialities, meanings, and complex uses. We emphasize the pragmatics of money-from earmarking practices and the use of multiple moneys to the politics of liquidity and fungibility. In the fi nal section of the paper, we fi nd inspiration in recent psychological studies of money to indicate new trajectories for inquiry. Specifi cally, we point to three potentially fruitful areas for research: money use as a tool and infrastructure; the politics of revealing and concealing money; and money's origins and futures as a memory device. We end with a brief refl ection on ongoing monetary experiments and innovations.Money has long been a topic of anthropological interest. From the giant Yap rai stones to the global diffusion of cowrie shells for use in trade to the creation of elaborate transactional archives in clay, string, and paper in places where physical money-stuff did not circulate, the ethnographic and archival record is rich with a diversity of money-objects: all manner of shells,

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Representing Value and the Value of Representation: A Different Look at Money

Cited by 26 publications

References 8 publications

THE FACE OF MONEY: Currency, Crisis, and Remediation in Post-Suharto Indonesia

THE FACE OF MONEY: Currency, Crisis, and Remediation in Post-Suharto Indonesia

Follow the Thing: Money

Materiality, Symbol, and Complexity in the Anthropology of Money

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