Money Counts : Revisiting Economic Calculation

Traditionally viewed as an abstraction, the quantitative nature of money is essential in evaluating the relationship between monetary systems and society. Money Counts moves beyond abstraction, exploring the conceptual diversity and everyday enactment of money’s quantity. Drawing from case studies including British jewelers, blood-money payments in Germanic law codes, and the quotidian use of money in cosmopolitical Moscow, a Western Kenyan village, and socialist Havana, the chapters in this volume offer new theoretical and empirical interpretations of money’s quantitative nature as it relates to abstraction, sociality, materiality, freedom, and morality.

Mario Schmidt is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School of the Humanities at the University of Cologne. He has published in journals including Africa, Ethnohistory, and HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. His research interests include the rise of behavioral economics in East Africa, the importance of part-whole relations for an understanding of money, and the impact of concepts from the natural sciences on the development of Émile Durkheim’s and Marcel Mauss’s thought.

Sandy Ross has been a Senior Lecturer at Leeds Beckett University, and a Sociology Fellow at the Higher School of Economics. With Chris Swader, she is editing a forthcoming issue on post-socialist moral economies for the Journal of Consumer Culture, and her newest book, Weapons of the Geek: Moral Economies in the 21st Century, will be published in 2020 by Palgrave.