Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2020. 148 pp. US$160.00, cloth. ISBN 9780367180072.
Wealth as a concept is usually defined in material ways. In this collection, however, it encompasses much more: “primarily as a question of reproduction, relational flows, and life vitality” (1). In their introduction, the editors set a promising stage by setting wealth in the nexus of three instituted, dynamic concepts: capital, commons, and power. Wealth is more than the money, land, or other assets that we accumulate; it is what gives us opportunities to share and enhance our social networks. Rather than purely economic, wealth “works as a conceptual hinge between past, present, and future; between a good life and a bad life; and between communal and individual values” (2).
Today, wealth is usually linked to capital, synonymous with “riches,” yet the older semantic links are helpful to conceptualize the many life forms that use it as a “magical increment” (7). Wealth is entwined in social relations, linked to prestige and influence, visible in community ownership (the commons), or in shell valuables of Melanesia and the branding of products.
The volume asks important questions: Who benefits from valuables—individuals or communities? How are the stakes set when it comes to resource distribution? Why are commons mostly—tragically—converted into individual profit? What are the flows of wealth? Can wealth be hidden? In seven chapters, these questions are elaborated on to show that valuable ideas and resources as substances of wealth are, and have been, embedded in larger economic systems.
Foster’s analysis tackles three ways that respond to the problem that wealth derived from labour is always subject to gradual decline, like the farmer’s products that need to be consumed or shared before they decompose. He argues that debt, fame, and brand names are attempts to secure and conserve wealth into the future. He suggests that it is time to reconsider our bias of “productionist fundamentalism” and work on politics that reflect the fact that manual labour is not the ultimate source of well-being.
Gregory’s discussion of the complexity of wealth in central India shows that the underlying value system differs in significant ways from that in Europe, as different staples require different resources. Rice needs water flows; wheat needs land—these differences are reflected in co-existing cosmologies and moralities that are defined by history, geography, and social relations of power. In central India, wealth is based on relations with family, gods, politics, and the environment.
Sneath’s paper takes the perspective of status generation through inalienable possessions for his analysis of aristocracy order and landed estates. Moving away from the notion of universal reciprocity, he argues that the existence of nobility, whether in Europe, Melanesia, or Africa, provides common grounds for a comparison of aristocracy and commoners. In the case of the Trobriand Islands, kula exchange became a common activity around 1900 due to colonial influences. The chiefs of the Nuer, equally underreported as aristocrats, were valued much more than commoners and held inherited land rights, quite comparable to the propertied gentry of early modern Europe. Among nomads, aristocracy also exists—for example in the steppes of Mongolia, where pastures were protected by the nobility for commoners’ use. Functionalists have typically failed to highlight such similarities, so this is a welcome nudge to think outside the theoretical box of one’s time. In all three cases, historic processes are privileging capitalist tendencies—kula valuables, land, and grazing rights can become commodities and that tends to lead to a loss of commoner access. Inalienable wealth, as economic and political status, is a feature of aristocratic societies.
Muehlebach gives a recent example of the loss of commons, capitalist take-overs, and the limited power of commoners in the struggle of Italians to free water supplies. Water, a historically freely available basic right, is now often metered and those who cannot pay their bills are getting disconnected. This “gift of nature” has been transformed into a commodity, but according to activists, the last word is not yet spoken and various small communities have resisted the law, based on moral values of water as an element of the commons.
Ben-Yehoyada’s article tries to unravel the flows of money within, and in relation to, the Sicilian Mafia by analyzing texts from various courts. Defining the people behind certain economic and social activities as criminal led to stigmatizing mafiosi as greedy, lawless individuals—although without corrupt politicians and law enforcement, no mafia would be successful—as money flows between these groups based on social contracts that are part of the system.
Rakopoulos, studying urban Greeks and their acceptance of conspiracy theories in the light of austerity and the national shame of bankruptcy, tells the story of an antisemitic text that is influential and disturbingly read as a true document, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1890s, 2003). The book claims that Jewish wealth is both hidden and politically influential (benefiting only Jews). A culture of suspicion has opened doors for more suspicion and discrimination of Jews. This is a door that can be used for antisemitic propaganda, so-called alternative truths/historicities as history repeats itself.
Martin’s paper is concerned with tabu, a form of shell valuable in the Tolai speaking part of Papua New Guinea. After demonstrating that both Substantivists and Formalists had a limited and limiting view of the use of tabu, he argues that its uses are mostly in the symbolic sphere of exchange. The treatment of tabu like “primitive money” of Formalists has now led to attempts to use it as such. A tabu bank was established to bring the mostly hidden tabu to light, into circulation, as economic assets that can promote economic development and further the well-being of Tolai people. Martin argues that this is not the actual effect of the monetization of tabu, as well-being and social networks are most likely to suffer from a loss of tabu as a means of re-creating bonds, building status, and providing for relatives.
This book presents Towards an Anthropology of Wealth as a way out of the difficult notion of value (which refers to both morality and materiality) that has been the focus of most recent approaches to giving and taking. Wealth, “the yet unmarked category of future value” (9), allows an analysis of values, both moral and material, giving space to temporality and emplacement as well as to political dimensions as a potential for capital accumulation.
Susanne Kuehling
University of Regina, Regina