. 5 July 2008

.........

Malinowski’s heirs 1 July 2008

One Saturday morning in 1980, I found myself addressing a large, mainly black working class audience in Detroit on the subject of the Atlantic slave trade. I was claiming that, before the industrial revolution, relations between Europeans and Africans on the Guinea Coast were relatively equal. The Africans supplied the slaves and the Europeans bought them. At this point, a huge man sitting on the front row suddenly stood up:

Man: You sayin’ we slaved our own people, motherfucker?
Keith: Well, yes, I suppose…yes.
Man: How you know?
Keith: Oh, historical records – Portuguese, Dutch, French, British records.
Man: Any black people write them records?
Keith: Ah yes, good point. We do rely mainly on what white people wrote then.

He sat down and, rather shaken, I continued with my lecture. I start with this story because, although the contributors to this workshop have brought up the scientific, forensic and self-referential dimensions of evidence in a variety of media, I miss an explicit engagement with the politics of evidence, outside as well as inside the universities. (more…)

Conversation about money 24 June 2008

A Conversation on Money’s Politics, Pragmatics, and Promise

Keith Hart and Bill Maurer

Marina Del Rey, August 2007

KH: There are quite profound similarities and differences between us. My version of the dialectic is that, if we want the quite significant differences to remain under control, we have to establish a framework of sameness to start with, because I really think that we’re very different in style. So I would like to start by trying to establish how some of the questions that we’re posing are the same or similar, how we came to invest so much in the study of money as anthropologists.

BM: There is one similarity that struck me in reading all your work in advance of this meeting. Both of us refuse, as you put it, to demonize money. There’s no reason why it can’t be remade anew by us for some other ends. I’ve been very frustrated by the anthropological literature. It often presents a familiar story: capitalism comes to town and then all of a sudden all that is solid melts into air; things fall apart. It’s the end of the world. And we know what happens: the story is written as if we already know the end of it: dispossession, exploitation, wealth will flow up and so on. On the one hand, yes, that’s what happens. But on the other hand, if we say that it is what always happens when there is the kind of monetization or commoditization associated with “capitalism,” then we’re never going to see the unintended effects of it when they are right in front of our noses. (more…)

The human economy 10 January 2008

The new human universal

Magellan’s crew completed the first circumnavigation of the planet some thirty years after Columbus crossed the Atlantic. At much the same time, Bartolomé de las Casas opposed the racial inequality of Spain’s American empire in the name of human unity. We are living through another ‘Magellan moment’. In the second half of the twentieth century, humanity formed a world society – a single interactive social network – for the first time. Our world too is massively unequal and the voices for human unity are often drowned. Emergent world society is the new human universal – not an idea, but the fact of our shared occupation of the planet crying out for new principles of association. (more…)

Interview with Patrik Aspers 19 November 2007

1. Professor Hart, could you please begin by telling me a bit about what you are currently working on?

In the last couple of years I have written several articles on money from different points of view. Four essays in press are ‘On money and anthropology: towards a new object, theory and method’, ‘The persuasive power of money’, ‘Money is always personal and impersonal’ and ‘Money in the making of world society’ (the last being the title of my inaugural lecture at Goldsmiths this coming October). I have also given keynote lectures at conferences and written several articles on the informal economy, a concept I contributed to development studies. (more…)

A short history of economic anthropology 9 November 2007

Economic anthropology is the product of a juxtaposition of two academic disciplines in the twentieth century. It would be wrong to speak of the relationship between economics and anthropology as a dialogue. From the beginning, economists in the ‘neo-classical’ tradition have rarely expressed any interest in anthropology and none at all during the last half-century, when their discipline has become the dominant ideological and practical arm of global capitalism. Anthropologists, on the other hand, when they have been concerned with ‘the economy’, have usually felt obliged to address the perspective of mainstream economists, sometimes applying their ideas and methods to exotic societies, more often being critical of the discipline’s claim to be universally valid. Since anthropologists in this period based their intellectual authority on the fieldwork method, discourse in economic anthropology has generally been preoccupied with the interpretation of economic ideas in the light of ethnographic findings. But civilization is often thought of as an economy these days; and some anthropologists, drawing on a variety of theories and methods, have offered alternative visions of the economy’s past, present and future. (more…)

Money in the making of world society 2 20 October 2007

Humanity formed a society for the first time in the last half-century. Universal ideas can now be expressed through universal means of communication. As the first generation for whom world society is a fact, we have the means to study it and are indeed obliged to do so. Anthropology is indispensable to the making of world society: not the current academic discipline as such, but rather in Kant’s cosmopolitan sense of what we need to know about humanity as a whole if we want to build a world fit for everyone.

Money is both the source of our vulnerability in society and the practical symbol allowing each of us to make an impersonal world meaningful. We must develop more effective public institutions at the level of world society as well as below. Money’s ability to sustain local meaning and universal connection at the same time is an indispensable means to that end.

A lot hinges on where in human evolution we imagine the world is today. I think of us as being like the first digging-stick operators, primitives stumbling into the invention of agriculture, but with no way of imagining its culmination in Chinese civilization. Future generations will be interested in us for the single interactive network linking all humanity that we formed. This has two striking features: it is a highly unequal market of buyers and sellers fuelled by a money circuit that has become progressively detached from production and politics; and it is driven by a digital revolution in communications whose symbol is the internet. So my research over the last decade has been concerned with how the forms of money and exchange are changing in the context of this communications revolution. (more…)

Money is always social, global and virtual 9 October 2007

Summary

The term “social money” suggests that some money, such as the form we are familiar with, is not social, even anti-social. With Mauss, I consider that money’s principal function, like that of the gift, is the extension of society, just as Simmel saw society’s potential for universality reflected in money. People have always made money personal and social by adapting it to their own special purposes, but this was in dialectical tension with its ability to reach the most inclusive levels of association. It is therefore mistaken for proponents of “Local Exchange Systems” (SEL) to imagine that the principles they wish to introduce are something new; and, by designing money as a closed local circuit, they have failed to harness money’s global potential. Too often, in unconscious mimicry of national currencies, these introverted initiatives stand alone and fail as a result. The movement to reform money needs to embrace the power of federation more wholeheartedly in future. This in turn requires us to engage with the virtual society opened up by the internet. Money’s ability to make social connection has been vastly expanded by the “network of networks” and those who wish to work for economic democracy cannot afford to turn their backs on these developments. Michael Linton, who founded LETS 25 years ago, is now pioneering this next phase — developing smart-card technology, new software and multiple domain naming systems as the means of sustaining money on an open source basis.  (more…)

anti-capitalism 16 August 2007

Extract from a recent exchange with David Graeber about an “anti-capitalist” conference on money.

 
KH: Just in case I never made it explicit, my resistance to the term anti-capitalist is as follows. First, it seems to me that capitalism has not yet fulfilled its historic task of bringing cheap commodities to the masses and undermining the insularity of traditional communities (when a third of humanity work with their hands in the fields and have never made a phone call in their lives). Second, when the grip of America and Europe over world economy is being loosened by a genuine globalization of capital accumulation in places like India, China, Brazil and Russia for the first time, anti-capitalism could be just the defense of white privilege in drag. Third, If Locke and Marx envisaged capitalism as a transitional phase between landed reaction and a future just society, we have to figure out where we are in that process and I think not all that far. Premature anti-capitalism leads to some nasty versions of social control. Fourth, for many parts of the world, such as Africa, the Middle East and Latin America, people languish under varieties of the Old Regime and are ripe for a liberal revolution. This to my mind usually involves some fractions of capital as well as progressive popular movements. Fifth, I never yet heard of a popular social movement with the capacity to launch communications satellites or to run a modern health service. So sixth, I would not wish to be against all capitalist firms. Some could be useful to a progressive movement (Red Hat Linux, HP’s 4 billion poorest initiative), while others are only concerned with developing neo-feudal monopoly (Microsoft, Halliburton). A lot of it has to do with timing. It's just that, after living through the last 60-odd years, I don’t get on particularly well with a bunch of rich white boys sounding off about being anti-capitalist. Individuals are a different case.

(more…)

Money: towards a pragmatic economic anthropology 15 July 2007

The mystery of money

The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.

(John Kenneth Galbraith)

Ours is an age of money. If human society has any unity at this time it is as a world ‘market’. There is nothing wrong with people exchanging goods and services as equals. Markets are indispensable to the extension of society. The problem is that they use money: some people have lots of it and most don’t have enough. Money marks social relations in capitalist societies. We think it makes a huge difference if a transaction involves payment or not. But we don’t ask why this should be so, even less where the power of money comes from. With the exception of a few whistle-blowers like Galbraith (1975), the economists prefer to keep us mystified; the media and the schools do little to enlighten us either. So we are sustained in our ignorance by vague beliefs and assailed by a mass of trivial facts, being left to build up our personal defenses against an impersonal system we regard as inevitable. (more…)

Money in the making of world society 1 1 May 2007

Je dois d’abord rappeler que la France ne vit ni en vase clos ni dans un monde immobile. Nous devons prendre conscience que nous vivons une communauté de destin planétaire, face aux menaces globales qu’apportent la prolifération des armes nucléaires, le déchaînement des conflits ethnico-religieux, la dégradation de la biosphère, le cours ambivalent d’une économie mondiale incontrôlée, la tyrannie de l’argent, l’union d’une barbarie venue du fond des âges et de la barbarie glacée du calcul technique et économique. Le système planétaire est condamné à la mort ou à la transformation. Notre époque de changement est devenue un changement d’époque.

Edgar Morin, Si j’avais été candidat…, Le Monde, 24^th April 2007

I explore here the formation of ‘world society’ in our time and the relationship of money to this process. Clearly, as ‘capitalism’, money is both a creative and an oppressive force driving globalization. I believe that money and markets are indispensable to the extension of society, even if their contemporary form often conflicts with humanity’s common interests. My main precedessors are Kant, Durkheim and Mauss, from whom I draw what might be understood as an ‘anthropology’. After an ‘Introduction’, I first consider the rupture between self and society that resulted from modern society’s reliance on impersonal institutions and the conditions for restoring a measure of unity to that relationship – to live as a whole person in harmony with society. Then I examine why ours is a special moment in the history of world society. As the first generation for whom world society is a fact, we are equipped with the means to study it and are indeed obliged to do so, if we can overcome the myopia of nationalism. Next, I present my principal conclusions on money. Money was a human universal long before its current apotheosis as the ‘money markets’. Although capitalism generates economic inequality and injustice worldwide, its historical mission to produce cheap commodities and to break down the insularity of traditional communities still has a long way to go. We must nevertheless explore the possibilities for economic democracy today; and I conclude with some brief reflections on method inspired by Mauss. (more…)

The Hit Man’s Dilemma 3 April 2007

Or business, personal and impersonal
Pamphlet No. 18 for Prickly Paradigm Press

Table of contents

“Don't take this personal, it's just business”
The moral dilemma in politics, law and business
Impersonal society as a modern project
Private property: a short history
The digital revolution
Intellectual property
The crisis of the intellectuals revisited
Conclusions

Further reading
(more…)

The persuasive power of money 12 January 2007

Money talks, it’ll tell you a story
Money talks, says strange things
Money talks very loudly
You’d be surprised the friends you can buy
with small change

J.J. Cale “Money Talks” (song)

In this essay, I try to account for money’s power to influence our minds and social relations. It would be easy, but misleading to argue that money’s ability to persuade is a universal characteristic. The way money persuades is historically relative – very different for Adam Smith than for Maynard Keynes and even more for us who live in the digital revolution and the expansion of virtual society it entails. Moreover, the fetishism that grants money a quasi-independent role in human affairs needs to be exposed for what it is. People make and use money, not the other way round; but sometimes it feels like we are more acted upon than acting. Money conveys meanings at the same time as it negates them; it has – or is thought to have — both structure and agency at once.

(more…)

On money and method in anthropology 17 October 2006

Introduction

This paper started out as an attempt to study the euro from an anthropological point of view; but it has ended up being more about anthropological method and money in general. Even so, a focus on the new European currency leads me to ask how we might study transnational or even global phenomena like this and still call ourselves anthropologists. For when ethnographers are not restricting their research to fieldwork in a particular place, they still tend to be limited in scope to working in one country. Social anthropology was once remarkable for the unity of its object, theory and method; but this disappeared along with “primitive” societies. Anthropologists still cling to “fieldwork-based ethnography” as their professional calling, but the study of money needs more than this. I propose as anthropology’s new object the making of world society, adopting provisionally an eclectic approach to theory and method. Anthropologists must appropriate both common knowledge and that of other specialists, if we are to identify the “historicity” (Foucault, 1973) of our own intellectual practices. (more…)

The Hope and Reality of Money 14 June 2005

Death of a Salesman seems to underscore the inhumanity of money–the relentless calculus of debt, disregard for human life and worth, enslavement to branded machines, the impersonality of ‘business’. But Arthur Miller was also concerned in this play with the other side of money–the magic and alchemy of Goethe’s Faust, Benjamin’s idea of capitalism as a dream, the mysterious art of persuasion that is selling, the central role of human personality and luck. (more…)

Organic Trade: Towards a Global Green Currency? 15 September 2004

How can an economic democracy be built from the bottom up? One method is exchange circuits using community currencies of which the most widespread form is called Local Exchange Trading System (LETS).

The idea of LETS is to foster exchange within local communities. Conventional money is issued by an authority in limited supply to assure that it is generally accepted as valuable in itself, no matter who has it. Such money comes and goes, in, out and through communities. LETS money goes round and round, within the community of its users, because it has no value beyond the ongoing exchange relationships that it supports. It stays within the community. One type of money encourages people to act exclusively, the other inclusively.

Community currencies are thus issued by people themselves with no mediation of central authorities. Any group or network may constitute itself as a community of exchange with its own unit of account, thereby bringing a form of direct democracy to economic life. This movement to reform the character of money is very relevant to organic agriculture, especially since its goals are broadly similar – to integrate production and consumption in more accountable ways; to help people take responsibility for their own economic actions; to bring ecological principles to economic life; and to avoid the reckless inequality that is built into capitalist markets and national money. Above all, the two share the ‘organic’ principle in its extended sense of putting things together within functional wholes; and both privilege the local at present, although virtual association at distance is a growing possibility for each. (more…)