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Winner of the 1996 Culture Section Book Award, American Sociological Association.
A dollar is a dollar—or so most of us believe. Indeed, it is part of the ideology of our time that money is a single, impersonal instrument that impoverishes social life by reducing relations to cold, hard cash. After all, it's just money. Or is it? Distinguished social scientist and prize-winning author Viviana Zelizer argues against this conventional wisdom. She shows how people have invented their own forms of currency, earmarking money in ways that baffle market theorists, incorporating funds into webs of friendship and family relations, and otherwise varying the process by which spending and saving takes place. Zelizer concentrates on domestic transactions, bestowals of gifts and charitable donations in order to show how individuals, families, governments, and businesses have all prescribed social meaning to money in ways previously unimagined.
Foreword to the 2017 Edition, by Nigel Dodd ix
Acknowledgments xiii
1 The Marking of Money 1
2 The Domestic Production of Monies 36
3 Gifted Money 71
4 Poor People’s Money 119
5 With Strings Attached: The Earmarking of Charitable Cash 143
6 Contested Monies 170
7 What Does Money Mean? 199
Afterword to the 2017 Edition 217
Notes 229
Index 285
Description
Winner of the 1996 Culture Section Book Award, American Sociological Association.
A dollar is a dollar—or so most of us believe. Indeed, it is part of the ideology of our time that money is a single, impersonal instrument that impoverishes social life by reducing relations to cold, hard cash. After all, it's just money. Or is it? Distinguished social scientist and prize-winning author Viviana Zelizer argues against this conventional wisdom. She shows how people have invented their own forms of currency, earmarking money in ways that baffle market theorists, incorporating funds into webs of friendship and family relations, and otherwise varying the process by which spending and saving takes place. Zelizer concentrates on domestic transactions, bestowals of gifts and charitable donations in order to show how individuals, families, governments, and businesses have all prescribed social meaning to money in ways previously unimagined.
