Common cents: situating money in time and place

Abstract

This paper engages with a wide range of social theories to argue for a more nuanced understanding of money that is attuned to its spatial and scalar dimensions. The paper begins with a brief overview of modernist and postmodernist accounts, including the works of Karl Marx, Georg Simmel, Max Weber, Jean Baudrillard, Marc Shell and Jean-Joseph Goux. These theories have provided a useful corrective to neoclassical economic accounts that distil the economic from society and culture, but they reinforce an understanding of money that is homogenizing, in that it is said to annihilate space by time. By contrast, network theories of money, which are reviewed in the following section of this paper, offer a more contextualized understanding of money's embeddedness in social relations, in particular vis-à-vis the trust that is invested in money forms and institutions that help to knit together the networks through which money circulates. The spatial dynamics of monetary circulation are intrinsic to this model, but there is little sense of the geopolitical dimensions of money's role in the territorialization of space. The studies of money that are reviewed in the penultimate section of this paper begin to address the dimensions of power at work in money's production and circulation, largely in terms of the rise of the state and national currencies, with particular attention to the particularities of money forms. As I argue in the conclusion to this paper, these various epistemological approaches are not easily reconciled. But I suggest that the aim should not be to resolve the paradoxes that emerge, but to foreground them. In so doing, not only will it be possible to think more carefully about the scales through which money circulates and which it helps to produce and reproduce, but to invest our understanding of money with a little more life and dynamism.

Keywords:

• money
• modernity
• time
• place and space
• social theory
• networks
• states
• power

Notes

Emily Gilbert is currently Assistant Professor in the Canadian Studies Program and in the Department of Geography at the University of Toronto. She is co-editor, with Eric Helleiner, of Nation-States and Money: The Past, Present and Future of National Currencies (Routledge, 1999) and author of several papers on money, culture and place. Her current research examines the social, cultural and political implications of the proposals for deepening North American economic integration, including a possible North American Monetary Union.

Compare to ‘primitive’ or limited-purpose monies, such as cowrie shells and yap stones, which are both more heterogeneous in their form and more limited in their function. These monies have also been studied at length, but largely by anthropologists (Dalton 1965; Melitz 1970).

Economic theory assumes a ‘rational’ subject, usually a man, who makes economic decisions in terms of a self-interest calculated in terms of maximum economic gain. Dodd (1994) provides an especially useful critique of this logic of rationality (see especially 1994: 129–36), but see also DiMaggio (1994), Ingham (1996a, 1999) and Zelizer (1989, 1994).

For some other helpful reviews of the literatures on money, see Dodd (1994), Doyle (1992), Gilbert and Helleiner (1999), Ingham (1996b, 1996c), Leyshon and Thrift (1997), Mizruchi and Stearns (1994) and Zelizer (1994).

Anthropologists have also presented similar schemas of monetary development. In The Great Transformation (1971) [1944]) – a title which itself illustrates the point I am trying to make – Karl Polanyi provides a ‘sweeping’ narrative of modern monies in which ‘all-purpose money was an essential ingredient in a great transformation that shook the West during the nineteenth century’ (Melitz 1970: 1023; Polanyi 1971 [1944]; see also Dalton 1965).

Parsons was neither the first nor the last to draw analogies between money and language. There is the not the space here to do justice to these comparisons but see, for example, Goux 1990a [1973], 1990b, 1994 [1984]; Hutter, 1993; Luhmann 1979; Marx 1974 [1867]; Polanyi 1958, 1966; Shell 1982.

The important connections between anthropology and the new economic sociology are usually quickly passed over (and sometimes overlooked completely) even in the sizeable reviews that introduce Leyshon and Thrift (1997), Dodd (1994) and Zelizer (1994); but see Baker (1987) and Goux (1990b).

Zelizer's is the most concerted effort to theorize the place of alternative money forms, but there are a range of other substantive studies on monies such as travellers cheques, LETS and other community currencies, merchant and bank notes, electronic currencies, and even stamps (see, for example, Altman 1991; Booker 1994; Gilbert 1998a, 1998b; Hewitt 1995a; Hoey 1988; Judovitz 1993; Lee 1996; Seyfang 2003; Leyshon and Thrift 1997; Rotstein and Duncan 1991).

Callon also makes clear the links between actor-network theory and Granovetter's seminal piece on the embeddedness of the economy referred to above (Callon 1998).

Some similar research is emerging on the euro currency, but it resonates with this work on national currencies in that the transnational money is being treated much like a national currency transposed into a trans-national space (Unwin and Hewitt 2001).

One of the most fascinating aspects of money is that it can and has assumed multiple forms – which has led many to think that these forms cannot thus be important to how money circulates or to how people think about money (but see the debates between metallists and cartelists or metallists and greenbackers in Zelizer 1994; Ingham 1999; O'Malley 1994).

But at the same time that anthropologists have examined the embeddedness of pre-modern monies, they have largely reinforced generalizations about the transformation to a modern money economy that can be traced back to Marx (but see Parry and Bloch 1989a). In Polanyi's The Great Transformation (1971) [1944]), for example, pre-modern monies are identified as socially and culturally embedded and are contrasted with modern money, which is characterized as a pure instrument of exchange – hence the evolutionary pattern of development is retained.

In the mid-1550s a number of very important numismatic books were published in France, Germany, Italy and Flanders; scholars stressed the importance of studying coins for their historical value and, while inscriptions were used for this information more than images, allegorical interpretations began to dominate after Enea Vico published his interpretations of illustrations of ancient coins (Haskell 1993: 20–1).

Some comparable studies of the introduction of the euro have begun to emerge, with attention to the resistance that it faced, but also to the kinds of ‘imagined communities’ that have been created (see Pointon 1998; Verdun 1999; Robinson et al 2001; Unwin and Hewitt 2001; Pollard and Sidaway 2002).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Emily Gilbert

Emily Gilbert is currently Assistant Professor in the Canadian Studies Program and in the Department of Geography at the University of Toronto. She is co-editor, with Eric Helleiner, of Nation-States and Money: The Past, Present and Future of National Currencies (Routledge, 1999) and author of several papers on money, culture and place. Her current research examines the social, cultural and political implications of the proposals for deepening North American economic integration, including a possible North American Monetary Union.