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

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Maurer, Bill, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Currency question.

Money.

Finance--Islamic countries.

Finance.

Finance--Religious aspects--Islam.

Banks and banking--Islamic countries.

Banks and banking.

Banks and banking--Religious aspects--Islam.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (239 p.)

Edition:

Course Book

Place of Publication:

Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, [2011]

Language Note:

English

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.

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

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 08. Jul 2019)

ISBN:

9786613137432

9781283137430

1283137437

9781400840717

1400840716

OCLC:

731646853