Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
The idea of culture has become a creative framework in Marshall Islanders’ quest to realise a community based on communality, meaningful work, and self-reliance. These values are consciously pitted against selfishness, wage-labour, and money dependency, which are values commonly deemed to belong to the realm of “the economy”. Culturing Money analyses what sort of conceptual and practical work that the dialectics of culture and economy can do for Marshall Islanders in their quest for a meaningful life where self-reliance is the ultimate goal.
“This is an unusually brilliant contribution to general anthropological theory. It is clearly argued and brings back the concept of culture in engagement with material and social practices in a way that makes it highly relevant to anthropologists at large.” • Ingjerd Hoëm, Professor, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo
Ola Gunhildrud Berta is an MSCA postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen. He has done ethnographic fieldwork in the Marshall Islands since 2013. His ongoing research project is part of the interdisciplinary SEAS program and explores ocean-centered pursuits of sovereignty and development in the Marshall Islands.
List of Illustrations
List of tables, figures, and maps
Preface
Acknowledgements
Notes on the Text
Introduction: M̗anit and M̗ani, Culture and Money
Chapter 1. Connections: The Local Economy as an Ethnographic Field
Chapter 2. Legacies: Copra, Craft, and Passports
Chapter 3. Mutual Aid: How Work Brings Kinship into Being
Chapter 4. Helping the People: Marshallese Fundamentals for a National Economy
Chapter 5. Be Marshallese, Buy Marshallese: Marketing Culture
Chapter 6. Emergent Authenticity: The Ambivalence of Cultural Commodities
Conclusion: Culturing Money
References
Index