Money: Ethnographic Encounters (Encounters Experience and Anthropological Knowledge)

149 Pages·2007·1.29 MB·English

by  Stefan Senders

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Money
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Encounters: Experience and Anthropological Knowledge
ISSN: 1746-8175
Series Editor: John Borneman
The Encounters: Experience and Anthropological Knowledge series
examines the issues that affect all anthropologists in the field. These short
collections of essays describe and analyze the surprise and interest of the
fieldwork encounter, on topics such as money, violence and love. The
series aims to show that anthropological knowledge is based in experience,
bringing into the public realm useful and thought-provoking areas for dis-
cussion that previously anthropologists have been reluctant or unable to
highlight.
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Money
Ethnographic Encounters
Edited by
STEFAN SENDERS AND ALLISON TRUITT
Oxford • New York
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English edition
First published in 2007 by
Berg
Editorial offices:
First Floor, Angel Court, 81 St Clements Street, Oxford OX4 1AW, UK
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA
© Stefan Senders and Allison Truitt 2007
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form
or by any means without the written permission of Berg.
Berg is the imprint of Oxford International Publishers Ltd.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Money : ethnographic encounters / edited by Stefan Senders and Allison
Truitt. — English ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Papers first presented at the 2004 meeting of the American
Ethnological Society in Atlanta, Georgia, in a session on "Encounters
with Money."
ISBN-13: 978-1-84520-750-2 (cloth)
ISBN-10: 1-84520-750-5 (cloth)
ISBN-13: 978-1-84520-751-9 (pbk.)
ISBN-10: 1-84520-751-3 (pbk.)
1. Anthropology—Field work—Finance—Congresses. 2.
Anthropology—Research—Finance—Congresses. 3. Anthropology—
Research grants—Congresses. I. Senders, Stefan John, 1959- II. Truitt,
Allison. III. American Ethnological Society. Meeting (2004 : Atlanta,
Ga.)
GN34.3.F53M66 2007
306.4—dc22 2007023995
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 1 84520 750 2 (Cloth)
978 1 84520 751 9 (Paper)
Typeset by Avocet Typeset, Chilton, Aylesbury, Bucks
Printed in the United Kingdom by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn
www.bergpublishers.com
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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Notes on Contributors ix
Preface xi
John Borneman
Introduction 1
Stefan Senders and Allison Truitt
1 Equation Fixations: On the Whole and the Sum of Dollars in 15
Foreign Exchange
Julie Y. Chu
2 Changing Money in Post-Soviet Ukraine 27
J.A. Dickinson
3 Dollars and Dolores in Postwar El Salvador 43
Ellen Moodie
4 Hot Loans and Cold Cash in Saigon 57
Allison Truitt
5 The Smoking Wallet: An Anthropologist Meets Transnational 69
Tobacco Corporations in Malawi
Marty Otañez
6 What Do You Want Me to Do, Bang My Head Against the 83
Wall?: Reflections on Having and Not Having in the Field
Stefan Senders
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vi Contents
7 Circuits of Conversion: From 14,000 to 1 93
Naeem Inayatullah
8 Guide to Further Reading 109
Bibliography 119
Index 127
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Acknowledgments
This volume began as a series of papers first presented at the 2004 meeting
of the American Ethnological Society in Atlanta, Georgia, in a session on
“Encounters with Money.” We would like to express thanks to John
Borneman who first proposed the series and asked us to participate, and
who was always willing to help. We would like to thank the following
people for their assistance in putting this volume together: Bryan Lentz,
Tonia Saxon, Hannah Shakespeare, and two anonymous reviewers. Any
project of this sort requires the work and goodwill of numerous people,
some highly visible – reviewers, editors, writers – and some less so –
friends, partners, students. We can’t hope to thank individually everyone
who has helped us, but we offer our thanks nonetheless. We are particu-
larly grateful to the authors for working so hard to meet the many dead-
lines along the way, and for their understanding when hurricanes – both
atmospheric and institutional – prevented us from meeting our own dead-
lines.
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Notes on Contributors
John Borneman is Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. His
initial fieldwork was in Germany, and he has been working most recently
in Lebanon and Syria. He has written widely on political and legal anthro-
pology, kinship, European integration, and the socialism and post-socialist
transformations of East-Central Europe. His most recent book is Syrian
Episodes: Sons, Fathers, and an Anthropologist in Aleppo.
Julie Y. Chu is a sociocultural anthropologist whose book, Cosmologies of
Credit: Fuzhounese Migration and the Politics of Destination (Duke
University: forthcoming), examines transnational mobility and value
transformation in post-Mao China. She is currently Assistant Professor of
Anthropology at Wellesley College. Her broader interests include material
and visual culture, ritual life, state governmentality and the mediation of
social space and historical consciousness.
J.A. Dickinson is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of
Vermont. Her research combines linguistic anthropology and economic
anthropology of post-socialism, with a focus on rural Ukraine. Her most
recent project focuses on advertising, consumer culture and language in
contemporary Ukraine.
Naeem Inayatullah is Associate Professor of Politics at Ithaca College. His
main fields are international relations theory and the history of political
economy. He is co-author (with David Blaney) of International Relations
and the Problem of Difference (Routledge 2004), and co-editor (with Robin
Riley) of Interrogating Imperialism: Conversations on Gender, Race, and War
(Palgrave 2006). He is working on a manuscript titled Savage Economy:
Wealth, Poverty, and Capitalism’s Necro-Economics.