Category: Money
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
The two great memory banks are language and money. Exchange of meanings through language and of objects through money are now converging in a single network of communication, the internet.
We must learn how to use this digital revolution to advance the human conversation about a better world. Our political task is to make a world society fit for all humanity.
