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Traditionally viewed as an abstraction, the quantitative nature of money is essential in evaluating the relationship between monetary systems and society. Money Counts moves beyond abstraction, exploring the conceptual diversity and everyday enactment of money’s quantity. Drawing from case studies including British jewelers, blood-money payments in Germanic law codes, and the quotidian use of money in cosmopolitical Moscow, a Western Kenyan village, and socialist Havana, the chapters in this volume offer new theoretical and empirical interpretations of money’s quantitative nature as it relates to abstraction, sociality, materiality, freedom, and morality.
“The book points to a domain of research that is still understudied by anthropologists, and is thus a stimulation to explore it further.” • Anthropological Forum
“This is a compelling collection that contributes rich case studies and sharp theoretical insights for more serious anthropological attention to money, number, and calculation.” • Anthropos
“This compact collection focuses on money as number, seen from a wide range of perspectives. The style is impressively dialectical, offering hope that anthropologists may soon be open to more promising ways of engaging with money.” • Keith Hart, University of Pretoria
“Why do anthropologists get so uncomfortable when it comes to working with (and on) numbers? This book provides answers and exemplifies what a quantity-embracing, yet ethnographically rich, economic anthropology can look like.” • Stefan Leins, University of Konstanz
Mario Schmidt is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School of the Humanities at the University of Cologne. He has published in journals including Africa, Ethnohistory, and HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. His research interests include the rise of behavioral economics in East Africa, the importance of part-whole relations for an understanding of money, and the impact of concepts from the natural sciences on the development of Émile Durkheim’s and Marcel Mauss’s thought.
Introduction: The Quality of Quantity: Monetary Amounts and Their Materialities
Sandy Ross, Mario Schmidt, and Ville Koskinen
Chapter 1. Is Gold Jewelry Money?
Peter Oakley
Chapter 2. Injury and Measurement: Jacob Grimm on Blood Money and Concrete Quantification
Anna Echterhölter
Chapter 3. Five Thousand, 5,00, and Five Thousands: Disentangling Ruble Quantities and Qualities
Sandy Ross
Chapter 4. “Money is Life:” Quantity, Social Freedom, and Combinatory Practices in Western Kenya
Mario Schmidt
Chapter 5. Money and Morality of Commensuration: Currencies of Poverty in Post-Soviet Cuba
Martin Holbraad
Chapter 6. ‘Money on the Street’ as a Hoard: How Informal Moneylenders Remain Unbanked
Martin Fotta
Chapter 7. What is Money? A Definition Beyond Materiality and Quantity
Emanuel Seitz
Afterword
Nigel Dodd