Money Matters

Overview & Synopsis

This volume examines ways of dealing with money as social and cultural forms. Empirical examples from the discipline of European Ethnology encompass modified bank notes, regional monies, Deutschmark-nostalgia, the role of pocket money in parenting, pawned money, money gifts and remittances. In all of them, money can be read as a means of social positioning, as a way of negotiating belonging, as biographical self-emancipation and as social inclusion and exclusion. The case studies share one aim: by deconstructing economic as social practices, the economy as such can be anthropologized (Paul Rabinow), i.e. stripped off its allegedly self-evident universal claim and revealed in its culturally, socially and historically specific functions.