Money Is Life Quantity, Social Freedom, and Combinatory Practices in Western Kenya

This article focuses on how money’s quantity is enacted as multiple in Kaleko, a small market center in Western Kenya. Residents of Kaleko conceptualize money’s quantity as abstracting, concretizing, and recursive. Theorizing this ethnographic data allows us to understand money as a sign that stands...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inSocial analysis Vol. 61; no. 4; pp. 66 - 80
Main Author Schmidt, Mario
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Oxford Berghahn Journals 01.12.2017
Berghahn Books
Berghahn Books, Inc
Subjects
Anthropology
Economic aspects
Ethnography
Expenditures
Field study
Freedoms
Interpersonal relations
Liberty
Money
Property
Recursion
Semiotics
Social aspects
Symbolism
Kenya
Africa
Western Kenya
quantity
freedom
money
social relations
Luo
numbers
infinity
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Summary:This article focuses on how money’s quantity is enacted as multiple in Kaleko, a small market center in Western Kenya. Residents of Kaleko conceptualize money’s quantity as abstracting, concretizing, and recursive. Theorizing this ethnographic data allows us to understand money as a sign that stands against itself. The abstracting and concretizing properties of money’s quantity symbolize what it means to be coerced to do something, while its recursive property symbolizes what it means to act freely. The article scrutinizes how money’s recursive quantity thereby relates to one peculiar trait of free social encounters in Kaleko: it suspends the distinction between part and whole with the help of ‘combinatory practices’.
Bibliography:Original Article
Articles
ISSN:0155-977X
1558-5727
DOI:10.3167/sa.2017.610405