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Mutual Life, Limited : Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason / Bill Maurer.

By: Material type: TextTextPublisher: Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, [2011]Copyright date: ©2005Edition: Course BookDescription: 1 online resource (240 p.) : 5 halftones. 5 line illus. 3 tablesContent type:
Media type:
Carrier type:
ISBN:
  • 9780691121970
  • 9781400840717
Subject(s): DDC classification:
  • 332.1091767
LOC classification:
  • HG3368.A6 .M378 2008
Other classification:
  • online - DeGruyter
Online resources: Available additional physical forms:
  • Issued also in print.
Contents:
Frontmatter -- Contents -- List of Illustrations and Tables -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- A Note on Transliteration -- INTRODUCTION. Lateral Reasons for a Post-reflexive Anthropology -- CHAPTER 1. In the Matter of Islamic Banking and Local Currencies -- CHAPTER 2. Of Law and Belief -- CHAPTER 3. Of Monetary Alternatives and the Limits of Values Past -- CHAPTER 4. Innumerate Equivalencies: Making Change with Alternative Currencies -- CHAPTER 5. Wiseman's and Fool's Gold -- CHAPTER 6. Mutual Life, Limited: Insurance, Moral Value, and Bureaucratic Form -- CONCLUSION. Restaging Abstraction and Adequation -- Notes -- References Cited -- Index
Summary: Why are people continually surprised to discover that money is "just" meaning? Mutual Life, Limited spends time among those who, in acknowledging the fictions of finance, are making money anew. It documents ongoing efforts to remake money and finance by Islamic bankers who seek to avoid interest and local currency proponents who would stand outside of national economies. It asks how alternative moneys both escape and reenact dominant forms of money and finance, and reflects critically on their broader implications for scholarship. Based on fieldwork among participants in a local currency system in Ithaca, New York, and among Islamic banking practitioners in the United States, Indonesia, and elsewhere, this book exploits the convergence between the reflexivity of monetary alternatives and social inquiry by questioning the equivalence between money and ethnography. Can money ever be adequate to the value backing it? Can social description ever be adequate to messy and contingent realities? Bill Maurer's ethnographic discovery is that ethnography as such--the holistic description of a way of life--cannot be sustained when faced with a set of practices that anticipates and incorporates it in advance. His fluently written book represents an unprecedented critique of social scientific approaches to money through an ethnographic description of specific monetary alternatives, while also speaking broadly to the very problem of anthropological knowledge in the twenty-first century.
Holdings
Item type Current library Call number URL Status Notes Barcode
eBook eBook Biblioteca "Angelicum" Pont. Univ. S.Tommaso d'Aquino Nuvola online online - DeGruyter (Browse shelf(Opens below)) Online access Not for loan (Accesso limitato) Accesso per gli utenti autorizzati / Access for authorized users (dgr)9781400840717

Frontmatter -- Contents -- List of Illustrations and Tables -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- A Note on Transliteration -- INTRODUCTION. Lateral Reasons for a Post-reflexive Anthropology -- CHAPTER 1. In the Matter of Islamic Banking and Local Currencies -- CHAPTER 2. Of Law and Belief -- CHAPTER 3. Of Monetary Alternatives and the Limits of Values Past -- CHAPTER 4. Innumerate Equivalencies: Making Change with Alternative Currencies -- CHAPTER 5. Wiseman's and Fool's Gold -- CHAPTER 6. Mutual Life, Limited: Insurance, Moral Value, and Bureaucratic Form -- CONCLUSION. Restaging Abstraction and Adequation -- Notes -- References Cited -- Index

restricted access online access with authorization star

http://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_16ec

Why are people continually surprised to discover that money is "just" meaning? Mutual Life, Limited spends time among those who, in acknowledging the fictions of finance, are making money anew. It documents ongoing efforts to remake money and finance by Islamic bankers who seek to avoid interest and local currency proponents who would stand outside of national economies. It asks how alternative moneys both escape and reenact dominant forms of money and finance, and reflects critically on their broader implications for scholarship. Based on fieldwork among participants in a local currency system in Ithaca, New York, and among Islamic banking practitioners in the United States, Indonesia, and elsewhere, this book exploits the convergence between the reflexivity of monetary alternatives and social inquiry by questioning the equivalence between money and ethnography. Can money ever be adequate to the value backing it? Can social description ever be adequate to messy and contingent realities? Bill Maurer's ethnographic discovery is that ethnography as such--the holistic description of a way of life--cannot be sustained when faced with a set of practices that anticipates and incorporates it in advance. His fluently written book represents an unprecedented critique of social scientific approaches to money through an ethnographic description of specific monetary alternatives, while also speaking broadly to the very problem of anthropological knowledge in the twenty-first century.

Issued also in print.

Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.

In English.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 29. Jul 2021)