Defetishizing money: Perspectives from economic anthropology

Following up on Steve Gudeman’s insight that economic categories are fundamentally cultural, this lecture juxtaposes different perspectives on money that transcend the conventional society/nature divide. It considers money as a unique semiotic phenomenon that imperils life itself by accelerating the production of entropy. The “agency” of the money artifact extends beyond society into the physical metabolism of the biosphere. Money organizes and obscures asymmetric global transfers of biophysical resources, generating impoverishment as the flip side of accumulation. In attributing indexical value to money, the modern economy pivots on fetishism. To assume responsibility for the sign systems through which humans interact with the remainder of the biosphere, it would be theoretically possible to redesign money to create a “multicentric” economy that localizes social metabolism and mitigates global inequalities. The lecture briefly sketches a utopian vision of an economy that distributes a complementary currency for local use as a universal basic income.