The social sciences are dominated by a paradigm that views human behavior as instrumental exchange. It is not surprising that consumer research on gift giving has also been dominated by this exchange paradigm. The present research on dating gift giving among American college students finds support for two variants of this paradigm, but it also reveals an alternative paradigm of gift giving as an expression of agapic love. It is suggested that agapic expressiveness is a needed addition to exchange instrumentalism for understanding gift giving and perhaps for understanding consumer behavior in general.

Gift Giving as Agapic Love: An Alternative to the Exchange Paradigm Based on Dating Experiences

Classic interpretations of the development of the modern world portray money as a key instrument in the rationalization of social life. Money is reductively defined as the ultimate objectifier, homogenizing all qualitative distrinctions into an abstract quantity. This paper shows the limits of such a purely utilitarian conception of "market money." A model of "special monies" is proposed to examine the extraeconomic, social basis of modern money. The article argues that, while money does indeed transform items, values, and sentiments into numerical cash equivalents, money itself is shaped in the process. Culture and social structure mark the quality of money by institutionalizing controls, restrictions, and districtions in the sources, uses, modes of allocation, and even the quantity of money. The changing social meaning and structure of domestic money, specifically married women's money in the United States, 1870-1930, are examined as an empirical case study of a special money.

The Social Meaning of Money: "Special Monies"

1. The Meaning of Social Anthropology2. Structure and Organization in a Small Community3. Social Change in Peasant Communities4. The Social Framework of Economic Organization5. The Social Framework of Primitive Art6. Moral Standards and Social Organization7. Religion in Social Reality

Elements of Social Organization

This review surveys anthropological and other social research on money and finance. It emphasizes money’s social roles and meanings as well as its pragmatics in different modalities of exchange and circulation. It reviews scholarly emphasis on modern money’s distinctive qualities of commensuration, abstraction, quantification, and reification. It also addresses recent work that seeks to understand the social, semiotic, and performative dimensions of finance. Although anthropology has contributed finely grained, historicized accounts of the impact of modern money, it too often repeats the same story of the “great transformation” from socially embedded to disembedded and abstracted economic forms. This review speculates about why money’s fictions continue to surprise.

/pdf/the-anthropology-of-money-injg8yr17x.pdf

The Anthropology of Money

1. Introduction Part I. The Genesis of Coined Money: 2. Homeric transactions 3. Sacrifice and distribution 4. Greece and the ancient near East 5. Greek money 6. The preconditions of coinage 7. The earliest coins 8. The features of money Part II. The Making of Metaphysics: 9. Did politics produce philosophy? 10. Anaximander and Xenophanes 11. The many and the one 12. Heraclitus and Parmenides 13. Pythagoreanism and Protagoras 14. Individualisation 15. Appendix: was money used in the early near East?

Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy

This paper questions the popular anthropological assumption that all purpose money rules in the West today. Contrary to the followers of Karl Polanyi in anthropology, modern as well as primitive money is special purpose money. It is argued further that serious difficulties and confusions arise from indiscriminate use of the term money to refer both to (1) media of exchange and means of payment and (2) units of account. Lastly, the scholarship and perspicacity of the Polanyist verdicts about economists' views in the area of money is disputed.

https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1525/aa.1970.72.5.02a00020

Jacques Melitz

Papers

The Polanyi School of Anthropology on Money: An Economist's View

The Polanyi School of Anthropology on Money: An Economist's View