http://thememorybank.co.uk/2007/07/15/127/ A New Commonwealth — Ver 5.0 Sat, 10 Dec 2011 18:56:16 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 http://thememorybank.co.uk/2007/07/15/127/comment-page-1/#comment-73 The Memory Bank 3.0 » Interview with Patrik Aspers Mon, 19 Nov 2007 20:01:12 +0000 http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/2007/07/15/127/#comment-73 [...] 4. Though the following quote from your homepage is taken out of context, I see many similarities with sociology: “Economic anthropology should aim to show that the numbers on people’s financial statements, bills, receipts, and transaction records constitute a way of summarizing their relations with society at a given time”. Could you clarify what you mean by this? (http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/2007/07/15/127/ ). In general my approach aims to go beyond the 20th century dualism of structure and agency. That is why I emphasise money’s ability to span the universal and the particular, abstract and concrete, collective and individual. Although I do not develop the argument in the piece you refer to, I hope to emulate Kant in developing a cosmopolitan anthropology ‘from a pragmatic point of view’. I understand by this the search for what we need to know about humanity as a whole if we want to build a world fit for everyone. But, beyond that, to make what we discover available to people in a form that they can use for practical purposes. The method I advocate is summarized in a trio of sentences. The one above is followed by: “The next step is to show where these numbers come from and how they might be manipulated in the actor’s interest. Then it will become more obvious how and why ruling institutions need to be reformed for all our sakes.” In a highly compressed way, I am outlining a programme for economic anthropology as a kind of political education and perhaps also as a sociology in Durkheim’s sense of making our connections to society more visible. The issue is how money might be approached in a less alienated way. This includes not just the money fetish, but a number fetish also (here I draw explicitly on Spengler). There is an obvious parallel with Marx’s argument in Capital I ch.1, except that I remove the illusion that the commodities relate only to each other and keep the ‘magic’ of seeing goods and prices as personalized powers, except that these powers are social as well as personal, a position I take from Mauss). I am glad that you picked on this sentence, since in many ways it is the crux of the essay. In order to have a conversation about it, a lot more needs to be unpacked on both sides. [...] [...] 4. Though the following quote from your homepage is taken out of context, I see many similarities with sociology: “Economic anthropology should aim to show that the numbers on people’s financial statements, bills, receipts, and transaction records constitute a way of summarizing their relations with society at a given time”. Could you clarify what you mean by this? (http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/2007/07/15/127/ ). In general my approach aims to go beyond the 20th century dualism of structure and agency. That is why I emphasise money’s ability to span the universal and the particular, abstract and concrete, collective and individual. Although I do not develop the argument in the piece you refer to, I hope to emulate Kant in developing a cosmopolitan anthropology ‘from a pragmatic point of view’. I understand by this the search for what we need to know about humanity as a whole if we want to build a world fit for everyone. But, beyond that, to make what we discover available to people in a form that they can use for practical purposes. The method I advocate is summarized in a trio of sentences. The one above is followed by: “The next step is to show where these numbers come from and how they might be manipulated in the actor’s interest. Then it will become more obvious how and why ruling institutions need to be reformed for all our sakes.” In a highly compressed way, I am outlining a programme for economic anthropology as a kind of political education and perhaps also as a sociology in Durkheim’s sense of making our connections to society more visible. The issue is how money might be approached in a less alienated way. This includes not just the money fetish, but a number fetish also (here I draw explicitly on Spengler). There is an obvious parallel with Marx’s argument in Capital I ch.1, except that I remove the illusion that the commodities relate only to each other and keep the ‘magic’ of seeing goods and prices as personalized powers, except that these powers are social as well as personal, a position I take from Mauss). I am glad that you picked on this sentence, since in many ways it is the crux of the essay. In order to have a conversation about it, a lot more needs to be unpacked on both sides. [...]

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