Core frameworks/tensions

Overarching debate

• Does money have a universal social impact or does its meaning depend on cultural context?

Problem of convertability

• Traditional systems maintain social hierarchy partly by keeping different kinds of wealth incommensurable.

• When a new currency allows conversion across previously separate domains, it dissolves the social architecture underpinning that hierarchy.

• E.g Tiv case study

Three overarching conclusions

1. Money is always culturally embedded/never neutral

2. People are active agents who earmark and channel monetary meanings

3. The gift/commodity opposition underlying Western anxiety about money is itself an ideological construction,

Hart’s (2001) challenge to the ethnographic tradition

• The ethnographic tradition insists money is always culturally embedded.

• La financial system operating almost entirely detached from production, trade, and human relationships, beyond the reach of the social mechanisms that normally give money meaning.ate 20th-century finance capital may represent