HUMSS - Enrique Martino

When economics met ethnology: The concepts of "commercial" and "social" money around 1900.

This presentation draws on the introductory chapter of my ongoing book manuscript project and will detail how early anthropological studies of "primitive currencies" conceived different types of monetary media or payment tokens as they were seemingly disappearing or being absorbed during an age of colonization. I critically locate the emergence of the conceptual divide between "commercial" economies based on commodity exchange and "non-market" or "social" or "human" economies based on gifts and reciprocity as theorised by economic anthropology or comparative ethnology from Marcel Mauss and Karl Polanyi onwards but also in the earlier foundational and often sidelined strand of the German Historical School of economics of the late 19th century, in particular Karl Bücher's Die Entstehung der Volkswirtschaft published in 1893 and revised in a third edition 1900 with two new chapters on "originary" or "primitive" economies based on the book Grundriss einer Entstehungsgeschichte des Geldes by Heinrich Schurtz published in 1898.