Chapter 1 The Economic Anthropology of Africa Jane I. Guyer, Jane I. GuyerSearch for more papers by this author Jane I. Guyer, Jane I. GuyerSearch for more papers by this author Book Editor(s):Roy Richard Grinker, Roy Richard GrinkerSearch for more papers by this authorStephen C. Lubkemann, Stephen C. LubkemannSearch for more papers by this authorChristopher B. Steiner, Christopher B. SteinerSearch for more papers by this authorEuclides Gonçalves, Euclides GonçalvesSearch for more papers by this author First published: 14 January 2019 https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119251521.ch1 AboutPDFPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShareShare a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Summary The economic anthropology of Africa was founded on the European, nineteenth century, social evolutionary theory of general stages of development, the "earlier" stages of which still co-existed on the African continent: hunting and gathering, pastoralism, shifting cultivation, settlements with intensive agriculture, merchant trade over long distances, and urban-based city states with craft-guilds. This introductory chapter presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book is devoted to the ways in which cattle and people live together in what he calls symbiosis: in ecological zones, in time and in spatial movement. It describes social organization, particularly based on segmentary patrilineal kinship rather than on any form of hierarchical governance. The book focuses on how kinship as lineal descent, as distinct from the hunter-gatherer small networked groups, manages property that passes through social transactions and inheritance from one generation to the next. A Companion to the Anthropology of Africa RelatedInformation

This chapter outlines the findings and discusses their application to the problem of analyzing agricultural decision-making. It suggests that a rigorous means of assessing the interaction between agricultural and gender factors may depend on developing a complementary research endeavor, namely a study of the longer-term processes of agricultural change. The chapter examines the practical, time-cost considerations involved in incorporating anthropological methods into rapid rural reconnaissance surveys. Agricultural intensification is perhaps the single most important process, ecologically and economically, occurring in Africa today; yet it is poorly described and understood. The questions asked about intensification are, therefore, about the gender factor: questions about men's and women's agricultural practices, social organization, work patterns and income control. Food sales and purchases appear to be increasing in rural Africa. The food sales process is structured by exchanges and transfers within families. Collinson has argued for more open-ended methods to increase the efficiency of the rapid survey approach.

Of the several forces reshaping West African rural societies and economies in the post-colonial period, one of the most pervasive is the rapid growth of urban demand. This book studies a Yoruba community in the supply hinterland of Ibadan over twenty years. It tells the social and agricultural history of its various producers, from the Nigerian civil war, via the oil boom and bust, to structural adjustment. It argues that principles of occupational organisation inherited from the past are now being applied to the creation of a competitive and responsive regional market that promises to be one of the most important social forms in West Africa's future.

This article reconsiders Sidney W Mintz’s classic 1964 chapter ‘Currency problems in eighteenth century Jamaica and Gresham’s Law' in light of the forms and uses of money in the colonial Caribbean slave economies and the utility of Mintz’s approach to understand today’s globalizing multicurrency economy. In considering Gresham’s Law that ‘bad money drives out good', Mintz showed how, in colonial Jamaica, money’s four functions – medium of exchange, means of payment, unit of account, and store of value – were transformed by the enslaved themselves as they worked with and in currencies circulating locally and via colonial financial networks. Further, Mintz’s ethnographic work suggests an approach to the financial practices of the poor and marginalized that highlights how their uses of money, paralleled in other arenas of their lives, confront and complicate dominating political–economic power. Directions provided by Mintz’s insights are used to analyze creative uses of money in the present world economic order.

Abstract African peoples have managed multiple currencies, for all the classic four functions of money, for at least a thousand years: within each society’s own circuits, in regional exchange, and across the continent’s borders with the rest of the world. Given the materials of some of these currencies, and the general absence of formalized denominations until the colonial period, some early European accounts defined certain transactions as barter. The management of multiplicity is traced through four eras: a) the precolonial period, with some monies locally produced and acquired, and others imported through intercontinental trades, such as the Atlantic slave trade, and eventually under the expansion of capitalism to Africa; b) the colonial period, when precolonial monies, in some places, still circulated with official monies; c) postcolonial national monies for the new African states; and d) the most recent phase of multiplicity in use, due to migration and sales across borders as well as to the use of new technologies, such as mobile money. The management of multiplicity thereby has a long history and continues to be an inventive frontier. History and ethnography meet on common ground to address these dynamics through empirical study of money in practice, and broader scholarship has drawn on a large variety of original sources.

In this special section of Hau (part II), we present four texts that allow us to go further with the objective to provoke the real, ethnographically. We explore the empirical and conceptual program involved in the making of an ethnographic theory of the “real economy,” a critical concept shaping contemporary public debates about the present and future of our collective existence. In this cooperative exploration of a concept that holds varied and shifting places, we are particularly interested in questioning how assemblages of vernacular and scientific realizations and enactments of the real economy are linked to concepts of truth and to moral values; how these multiple and shifting realities become present, and entangle with historically and socially situated lives; and how the formal realizations of the real in the governance of economies engage with the experiential life of ordinary people.

Over the last few decades, and especially following the 2008 crisis and the current period of turbulence and uncertainty, “the real economy” has been transformed into one of the most critical concepts shaping public debates on the present and future of our collective existence. In this special section of Hau, we propose an ethnographic theory of the “real economy” by questioning how assemblages of vernacular and scientific realizations and enactments of the real economy are linked to ideas of truth and moral values; how these multiple and shifting realities become present, and entangle with historically and socially situated lives; and how the formal realizations of the real in the governance of economies engage with the experiential life of ordinary people. In this cooperative exploration of a concept that holds varied and shifting places across different disciplines, and is applied under varying conditions in the world, what comes to the fore is the huge potential of the ethnographic method. The special section, the outcome of a Wenner-Gren Foundation workshop held in Rio de Janeiro in June 2016, will be published in two parts.

The Frazer Lecture was launched in 1921, with the support of scholars from all over Europe, explicitly in the context of the “meeting on common ground” after World War I. In the spirit of anthropologists examining postdisaster processes of any kind, to meet with scholars from other disciplines for mutual illumination, and to revisit its own rich intellectual and empirical archive, my lecture explored processes of recuperation. Recuperation is selective of elements rather than rescuing whole systems, then followed by creative reconfiguration. Sources from classics, recent philosophically inspired anthropology, new ethnography of Africa, and postwar Vietnam are examined as examples that pick up the spirit of the Frazer Lecture itself.

Journal of the Royal Anthropological InstituteVolume 23, Issue 4 p. 841-842 Book review Appadurai, , , Arjun. Banking on words: the failure of language in the age of derivative finance. viii, 180 pp., bibliogr. Chicago: Univ. Press, 2016. $22.50 (paper) Jane I. Guyer, Jane I. Guyer Johns Hopkins UniversitySearch for more papers by this author Jane I. Guyer, Jane I. Guyer Johns Hopkins UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: 02 November 2017 https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.12731Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume23, Issue4December 2017Pages 841-842 RelatedInformation

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewsHow Would You Like to Pay? How Technology Is Changing the Future of Money. Bill Maurer. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015, 176 pp. $19.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8223-5999-9.Jane I. GuyerJane I. GuyerJohns Hopkins University Search for more articles by this author Johns Hopkins UniversityPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreBill Maurer’s short, pocket-sized, succinct, lively, and sharply clear book on a vast and varied topic—the history and practice of monetary payments, worldwide—works like a skillfully cut gemstone. Keep turning, keep noticing new facets of the complexly brilliant entity that is money, as perceived and crafted for accessible view by an expert in reaching a wide and varied audience. In 151 short pages of text (5 × 7 in., 28 lines each), the author conveys a sense that he and the reader are collaborating in an ongoing exploratory enterprise, on the move through the present world. Maurer backs away from older theoretical debates to argue that monies have not developed through evolutionary replacement of older forms by new ones—that is, from physically based value (gold and silver) through state-backed fiat currency to bitcoin, M-Pesa, and other digital forms, each of which forms a system. Rather, monies have developed by additions to repertoires of multiplicity, producing a “complex delta of rivulets” (p. 136) whose convergences, divergences, conversions and flows are continually rebuilt, and the architecture continually redesigned. Often, Maurer suggests, the larger infrastructures remain invisible, so the people create visibility through social practices in their own spaces, which he illustrates.Rather than focusing on a single overall interpretation or theory, then, the book focuses on questions to be asked about the coexistence and mobility of monetary forms, ideas, and practices: from the past, in the present, and into the future imagined world of digital monies. Since Maurer’s method focuses on people’s practices as they create them, he argues for, and exemplifies, an ethnographic approach to the whole spectrum of monetary practice, from official to popular realms and intimate, mundane contexts. The title is a question, as are the titles of three of the nine chapters. And the last sentence of the final chapter is also a question: “So: how will we reimagine money?” The many intriguing photographs, each with its own story in the text, provoke their own questions. To answer them, or simply to define their terms, Maurer occasionally reaches briefly into the worlds of theory and philosophy—for example, with a reference to Geertz and Ryle (p. 114) on the importance of gestures. However, he returns immediately to the observational attentiveness of ethnographic method to explore what people are actually doing with gesture in the world of digital money and communication.The main evidence in the book concerns worldwide popular practices with the new digital money, many of which have taken off more rapidly outside of Euroamerica than inside it. The study of M-Pesa in Kenya, for example, is no longer reaching back to previous stages of monetary evolution. Maurer turns to Kenya and elsewhere, to ritual uses as well as economic payments, to envision the future, as indicated in the opening statement of purpose: “to spur innovative thinking in anyone interested in the future of money.” This opens up the horizon for the reader, giving instruction and incentive to be attentive everywhere: in both observational and participational modes. The many riveting photographs provoke thought, as do the many short examples of transactions in the text. In the last chapter, entitled “Monetary Repertoires,” the photographs show technologies in Kenya and Haiti, and the final image is a coconut-water seller on the beach in California, with a barely visible IPhone and Square reader tucked into his belt. In this way, all the evidence is illustrative of Maurer’s point about monetary repertoires and multiplicity, without being held answerable to a massive theoretical debate.The book seems crafted to be (a) a source of provocation for questions and imaginative engagement for scholars of the monetized domains of social and economic life, everywhere, and (b) a very creative teaching and learning source for those entering this complex topic for the first time. In chapter 6, readers are invited to start by searching their own wallets, to ask how the contents all work together, and thereby to encourage new questions to arise.This is a brilliantly practical guide to being an ethnographer of money, day to day, in our historical moment when payments are being made in many forms, in many places, for many purposes. By size, format, and clarity of vision and expression, this is a book to put in your pocket or backpack, consult the rich index when a question arises, and make notes on the blank pages at the end, which, one senses, are there to allow the reader to accept Maurer’s invitation to participate in this study. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Journal of Anthropological Research Volume 73, Number 1Spring 2017 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/690530 © 2017 by The University of New Mexico. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.