Money Matters

Economic practices as cultural identity formation

Abstract

This article examines dealing with money as a social and cultural form of dealing with the self and with others. Based on empirical case studies from the discipline of European Ethnology, money and consumption are contextualized as a means of self-positioning between frugality and generosity, biographical self-emancipation, and social inclusion and exclusion. The examples have one aim: by deconstructing economic practices, the economy as such can be ‚anthropologized‘ (Paul Rabinow), i.e. stripped off its allegedly self-evident universal claim and revealed in all its culturally and historically specific functions.