The Social Meaning of Money

"People tend to think that a dollar is a dollar. That money is interchangeable and impersonal. At least this is the argument that economics makes. What Viviana showed is that, in fact, people divide currencies in different ways, according to the social purposes for which they’re used. For example, if a holiday is coming people will sit down and put a bunch of money aside to spend on gifts. That money becomes segregated so it isn’t spent in some other way. The book reviews how different social strata differentiate, earmark and even decorate the dollar. She shows how people really save and spend. By going back to different kinds of archival sources, she recovered how people really thought and talked about money. One of the things she’s very interested in is how household money gets used for different purposes. By going through old periodicals she saw how people wrote about money and therefore how they thought about it. She’s interested in the fact that the way people thought about organising their lives affected the way they organised their money. She uses these sources as an insight into that. Many economic historians engage in the technical labour of, for instance, reconstructing wheat prices over 200 years. They’re not thinking about history in anything other than economic terms. What Zelizer is trying to do, and other people in economic sociology are trying to do, is show how social life itself affects the way people engage in economic transactions. That’s the division of labour between sociology and economics. Economic historians apply theory to history whereas sociologists see that in different times and places there are different sets of cultural understandings regarding economic activities."