Money Counts: Revisiting Economic Calculation / Edition 1

by Mario Schmidt, Sandy Ross

Overview

"Traditionally viewed as an abstraction, the quantative nature of money is essential in evaluating the relationship between monetary systems and society. On the Qualities of Quantity 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 cosmopolital Moscow, a Western Kenyan village, and socialist Havana, the chapters in this volume offer new theoretical and empirical interpretations of money's quantative nature as it relates to abstraction, sociality, materiality, freedom, and morality"--

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781789206845
Publisher:	Berghahn Books
Publication date:	01/16/2020
Series:	Studies in Social Analysis , #10
Pages:	142
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Sandy Ross has been a Senior Lecturer at Leeds Beckett University, and a Sociology Fellow at the Higher School of Economics. With Chris Swader, she is editing a forthcoming issue on post-socialist moral economies for the Journal of Consumer Culture, and her newest book, Weapons of the Geek: Moral Economies in the 21st Century, will be published in 2020 by Palgrave.

Table of Contents

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

Editorial Reviews

"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

From the Publisher