Only Means, No More Ends?
Iara Cury
Week 7
Few Western people would spontaneously characterize their social lives as cold, distant
and calculating. This phenomenon might be taken to be enough evidence that consumer
based lifestyles, centered on ever-present monetary transactions, are not qualitatively
different from the variety of traditional socioeconomic arrangements found around the
world. Yet capitalism, commoditization, and particularly money, have been strongly
identified within Western discourses as the root of individualism, rationality, and
alienation. The recognition of crucial changes, adaptive or transformative, in non-Western
societies through their encounter with Western power, markets and money, engenders the
question of what is the role of money in these changes, and whether it is as disruptive as it
is portrayed.
Jonathan Parry and Maurice Bloch, in their introductory chapter to the book, Money and the
Morality of Exchange (1989), work hard to debunk the individualizing and alienating
powers they see ascribed to money by social scientists. For them, money attains an
incredible variety of meanings and functions across different cultures, and can never exert
the same effects—namely the breakdown of community solidarity—because of this variety
(pp.1-2). These authors argue that the idea of money and market exchange as modern
artifacts is a serious misrepresentation of historical and anthropological evidence. The
lesson from Parry and Bloch is that the Western conception and implementation of money
is not the first and is not automatically hegemonic. In non-Western social frameworks
money and exchange acquire a variety of undetermined symbolic loads, each rooted in a
local cultural matrix. Better yet, they are not interpreted or leveraged in the same way
within cultures because they can be used for maintaining or subverting social orders (Parry
and Bloch, 1989, p.22), as in the case of the Tiv, where elders disparage the insubordinate
potential of money while younger men achieve greater freedom from the commoditization
of marriage (pp.13-14).
Another example of the social malleability of money emerges in the book chapter, “Your
money, our money, the government’s money”, by Robert Foster. Here he argues that people
in pre-capitalist societies—groups of Papua New Guineans, have developed very particular
interactions with money. Despite the colonial and independent national governments’
attempts at educating local people about the monetization of the economy, native islanders
continue to act from their very own symbolic understandings of money objects and
traditional wealth items, switching functions and subverting ‘modern’ principles of money
usage. The Anganem use twenty kina notes, associated with masculinity and strong bodies,
in ceremonial exchanges for other wealth items (1998, pp.84-85). The Tolai and Duke of
York islanders use strings of shells to pay taxes and for small commercial exchange as well
as for ceremonial, ‘cosmic’ order events (pp.86-88). Throughout the historical intertwining
of capitalist and local valuations, money remains a material object susceptible to personal
and collective fetishism, for purposes other than impersonal, neutral economic
transactions (state-building, religiosity, sociality).
Other anthropologists have produced evidence that money and monetary transactions
have rich social meanings and functions in our own culture, above and beyond the
economic functions it performs. Viviana Zelizer, in the last chapter of her book, The Social
Meaning of Money, clearly expounds how people come to personalize an impersonal,
anonymous, fungible medium such as money. What she calls ‘earmarking’ is the
differentiation of ‘monies’ by spatial separation, specific uses, specific sources, and the use
of objects that are not money but serve for similar purposes (food stamps, gift certificates)
(p.209). She exemplifies this process by talking about ‘monies’ that the poor receive, which
are interpreted both by givers and receivers in different ways, ranging from gifts, tips,
rightful benefits, payment for services (p.203). According to Zelizer, people always find
ways to contest dominant systems of symbolism, to impose their own control over
resources, and to turn money into an instrument of social connection; consequently, she
agrees with Parry and Bloch that, “money has not become the free, neutral and dangerous
destroyer of social relations” (p.215).
These examples make it clear that in addition to their economic functions, monetary
transactions take on a variety of sociocultural meanings and are certainly part of the
constant reproduction, negotiation and alteration of social and cultural systems. People
make instrumental use of money, commodities, and monetary transactions to strengthen,
create and maintain social relations. The crux of the matter, though, is whose interests are
at the top of the list—the individual or his community’s? While Parry and Bloch attempt to
theorize an interplay of “transactional orders” to explain this (1989, p.29), it seems that the
question is not whether money itself fundamentally changes things, but whether money is
the tip of the iceberg of paradigmatic changes that do transform social relations.
In his essay, “Money in Modern Culture”, Georg Simmel makes the case for what he sees as
a fundamental change brought about by the whole array of social and economic changes of
which money is the primary sign. Simmel proposes that the problem lies in people coming
to see money as the means of attaining all other things (both material and immaterial), “in
getting stuck in the labyrinth of means” (1991, p.26) instead of focusing on the ultimate
purpose of money, on the goals themselves. A second problem, for Simmel, is that the
“punctuality and exactness…which the spreading of the monetary system has conferred on
the external relationships of people, is by no means accompanied by an equivalent
increased inner consciousness in the ethical sphere” (p.28). Because of its ultimate
anonymity, money never conveys to us the detailed ethical ramifications of its production
and circulation.
Parry and Bloch’s theory of “transactional orders” does not address the forceful influence
of “mature capitalist ideologies” (1989, p.30) towards disengaging or suppressing the
“cosmic” from the “subsistence” order in local cultures. Capitalism itself is a steady,
insubordinate push towards a world of one transactional order based on self-interest
rather than cosmic views. Simmel’s argument, in this respect, is much more relevant to
understanding clashing cross-cultural orders. A fusion of systems of values is taking place
in present day societies around the world, and capitalism is permeating both “cosmic” and
“subsistence” orders, obscuring “means” from “ends”, “moral” from “immoral”. The
accumulation of wealth becomes as much a sign of divine favor as of negligence of the
cosmic order; perceived changes in cognitive and behavioral patterns—the calculating
attitude—simultaneously elicit moral evaluation from onlookers and attempts at
concealment from participants.
The ethnographic article, “Migration, Money and Masculinity in Kerala”, by Filippo Osella
and Caroline Osella, suitably demonstrates the tentative, and sometimes manipulative,
coupling of money with social activity and relations. The authors present a cultural
environment where abundant money is an important marker of status, masculinity and
maturity. Young Kerala migrants leave to work many years in the Gulf countries, hoping to
accumulate wealth and return to fulfill the ideal role of householder (p.118). Yet upon their
return, they must carefully balance saving and spending accumulated resources, avoiding
the both social stigma of avarice and disaffection and of weakness and vulnerability to
indiscriminate demands for loans and gifts (p.125).
In this sense, the authors discover a situation where the individual must be calculating in
order to use his money to create and maintain social relations, to find the ideal balance of
self-perpetuating provider and patron. But the dynamics and meaning of social relations
partly maintained through money and gifts surely differ from those of social relations
entirely built upon non-commoditized exchanges, reciprocal services, and local social
activities, and say nothing about one’s conception of the “cosmic” order. The very image of
an individual having to personally decide on whom to bestow gifts or grant loans delineates
the precarious morality of self-interest and of the deliberative construction of social bonds
where community formation is substantially predicated on spending and consumption.
This essay has explored the ways in which money deviates from being an impersonal basis
of market exchange, attaining a richness of symbolism and meaning in social relations and
activities. In a way it is clear that modern money is easily embraced, neutralized and made
useful in widely different ways for cultures everywhere. Yet money comes accompanied by
a strong and unique ideology of individualism, centered on self-interest, and by a
consumption driven market system that may not be so easy to resist or manipulate for local
“cosmic” orders. To say that people in capitalist and hybrid economies live within a
powerful current of atomized, calculating attitudes is an accurate statement, but we must
really ask whether our fate is to become thoroughly alienated from social relations.
Human beings are social beings above all else; either it will be possible to create new
modes of connectivity from this new set of circumstances and constraints, or we will reach
a crisis. The anthropological role is to focus on studying how our evolving systems of values
foster or hinder social cooperation and integration. Social relations will always exist, but as
long as we believe that humans have agency, we can discern desirable outcomes—probably
something other than “cold, distant, and calculating” behavior—and contribute to
constructive rather than conflictive and antagonistic social interaction.
References
Foster, R. 1998. Your money, our money, the government’s money. P. Spyer (ed.) Border
Fetishisms. New York: Routledge.
Hart, K. 1986. Head or Tails? Two sides of the coin. Man, 21(4), 637-656.
Osella, F. & Osella, C. 2000. ‘Migration, Money and Masculinity in Kerala’. The Journal of the
Royal Anthropological Institute 6, 1: 115-131.
Parry, J. and M. Bloch. 1989. Introduction. Money and the Morality of Exchange. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Simmel, G. 1991. Money in Modern Culture. Theory Culture Society, 8, 17-31.
Zelizer, V. 1997. What does money mean. The Social Meaning of Money. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.