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Monnaie et Sociétés : Une socio-anthropologie des pratiques monétaires (Money and Societies: an anthropological sociology of monetary practices) Dr Lamine Sagna Editions l'Harmattan, Paris, 2001 |
I - INTRODUCTION A discussion about money is traditionally a concern of economists, some philosophers, psychoanalysts, sociologists and anthropologists pose crucial questions about its cultural and social meanings. The economic process, which aims to reify monetary, cultural and social flux in products hide many aspects of value. In this book, I try to describe and better understand the changing relations between the French Postal Bank (called La Poste) and the poor population of France. The institution La Poste is not only a Mail service it is also a Bank, where every individual in France can have an account. In France everyone has the right to own a Bank account regardless of his wealth. These individual rights are ensured through what the French call "public service", a kind of service delivered in the general interest. Indeed, since, the revolution of 1789, French people are very attached to the values of the Republic, and the central regulatory role of government, especially as expressed in the concept of "public service". By offering public service, the state is required to provide all French citizens access to services, which are deemed necessary to modern life. For example, even individuals who live in isolated villages have access to telephone, electricity, mail delivery, and public transport service. Given that my objective was to study how people in financial difficulties try to manage their uncertainties, I studied the behavior of the members of the low-income population, the norms that normally guide behavior of the representatives of La Poste, and the result of these interactions. In particular, I was interested in the way that the low-income members of the population draw on their cultural background to engage increasingly rational monetary systems. Through observations of, and interviews with, a low-income segment of the French population, I divided the low-income population into three categories: those with great financial difficulty, those in less difficulty, and those on the verge of having financial difficulty. This includes citizens of France, the French Islands and immigrants from North Africa, and Sub-Saharan Africa. For this presentation, I want to address the following themes: 1) The relation between the concepts of money, the monetary practices of low-incomes population, and the important French idea of "public service" in the economic market. 2) The economic value of money, in its presently troubled relation to social and cultural value. To this end, I will show how the cultural and social variables continue to influence the low-incomes customers' behaviors. My hypothesis is that if one can argue that monetary exchanges are a form of symbolic interaction, then one can show that money is - a medium that embodies many kinds of social values. It is a kind of ultimate symbol, since it (or the lack of it) can stand for almost anything. - Money as social symbolic object it has both personal and political value. A- Conceptualization Analyzing social order as it is realized through practices, I defend the idea that the value of money is not merely in its denotative exchange value, but more, in connotative social symbolic values. Following Durkheim and to some extent Marx I show that there are, in monetary practices, social values of commodities and a cultural explanation of the value of money. Even on the assumptions of methodological individualism, then, of course, in each personal monetary practice there are not only individual motivations but also more holistic social and cultural ones. From this theoretical point of view, the acceptance of money is a result of the trust individuals have in the regularity of others' behavior. Collective beliefs are thus materialized in money. As F. Simiand (social faith), and G. Simmel (trust in the monetary sign) pointed out, one pre-condition of contracts and exchanges is social trust. If not, why would people place their faith in, for example, paper money or in objects like gold? From the cultural and symbolic perspective, one practical question that emerges is: What are the values or habits of mind that allow for such practices of exchange? Drawing on E. Durkheim's, M Weber's, Marcel Mauss's, and Karl Polanyi's ideas, I also defend the idea that nothing ever happens for purely rational reasons alone. Rather, actions convey the meanings and values that people want to show and commit to in their interactions. To study money without these multiple perspectives, is to play into dominant economic theory games, which, like methodological individualism, asserts that the value of money depends on its utility as a mechanism of market exchange. More importantly, if one argues that monetary practices are constrained and supported by collective beliefs, one can say that monetary exchange constitutes a social link. B - Methodology: Using social sciences, and accounting and statistical methods for understanding the cultural and social impact of monetary practices of low-incomes In this study I combined various methods. These included sociological, anthropological, and economic techniques. I spent 2 years observing the everyday economic behavior of people in Paris, Normandy, Bordeaux, Montpellier, and Guadeloupe. These various sites allowed a cross cultural and cross class analysis of economic interactions between customers and La Poste employees (e.g. bank tellers). Some of the more prominent techniques that I used include: Statistical Data analysis: La Poste maintains extensive records on the frequency of visits, purpose of visits, and means of payment made to the bank by their customers. I analyzed this information in order to acquire a profile of the customer population. This provided me the basis for deciding upon a sample for later interviews and observations. Interviews: I conducted individual semi-structured interviews and focus groups. I collected information about the participants' lives, learned about how they perceive their own financial situation, how they perceived the role of tellers, how they understood the objects, services, processes, and meanings of Post services, and what they thought about official institutions. Participant Observation: I immersed myself in the neighborhood and workplace with tellers, and with post-men (on bicycle). I studied the verbal exchange rituals in the Poste workplace and in key social settings (e.g. in the cafe, in the discount supermarket). Finally, I participated in traditional rituals like births, weddings, and ritual celebrations to observe gift giving practices, and their implications for monetary exchange, in the greater community. Ethnography: In contrast to participant observation where the researcher acts as a community insider, in ethnographic scholarship the researcher maintains an objective distance from ongoing events. In this context, I observed the ways that low income members of the population presented themselves to bank tellers, held themselves in public, handled their money, and developed more general relationships between their bodies and money. II- DIALECTIC: FINDINGS AND CONCEPTUALIZATION Thinking about the issue of value, in my book Monnaie et Sociétés (money and Societies: An anthropological sociology of monetary practices), I try to show the cultural and symbolic dimension of money. Marx and Simmel have proposed two different philosophies that describe the role of money in contemporary societies. Marx has proposed a transcendental genesis of value, while Simmel has shown that the genesis of capitalist exploitation does not exhaust the power of money. Marx reveals the mechanism by which human beings exploit one another, while Simmel shows that money is a medium that establishes meaningful relationships between people and objects, but also between people. In my view, it is not the value of objects that determine the value of people. Indeed, on the one hand cash provides people with the power of conversion on the totality of objects. It allows people to acquire a large range of objects of value. However, more fundamentally money offers the power to acquire objects that have a social legitimacy and a general recognition to all participants in exchange. Taking into an account money as a ritual object, I demonstrate how monetary exchange never occurs for its purely rational characteristics alone, but also embodies a degree of the sacred. That is, the use of money is deeply embedded in oftentimes unspoken, habitual practices. The analysis of these practices establishes the meaningful limits imposed by culture upon exchange. An example of the way that money is embedded in habitual practices include the observation that many people put money close to their bodies (in the bra or around kidney) like a traditional talisman. These cultural attachments to money, as an object, stand as the basis from which I analyze financial exchanges. For example people do not expense in the same way their incomes, and the money coming from gift. Thus, I study money as a principal media of social interaction and interdependency in the exchange relationship. I analyze gestures, words, spaces, roles, rituals, and representations in current exchanges at local levels in everyday life in. At the Poste office, when people want to know if their allowance has been transferred into their account, they ask the teller "Is he here?" -- "he" represents money as an individual. Money has a quality that cannot be reduced to rational calculation alone. These facts allow me to show how the value of money does not merely exist in its denotative exchange value, but more importantly in connotative social symbolic values. Thus these values must be understood anthropologically, and not only theoretically, statistically or in terms of formal economics. For example, I show how some people join long lines at the bank, even while there is nobody in another line. These are actions that in purely economic terms are irrational. That is to say that within the modern context of financial institutions people regularly engage in non-rational ritual practices. A further example is found in Guadeloupe, where many people prefer to form a long line outside for the ATM machine, rather than to go to the teller. More generally, I argue that African people regularly draw on their cultural understandings to engage rational institutions. Their experience with invisible powers such as the magnetism of their talisman, equip them to uniquely engage new technologies such as credit cards. Credits cards, like the talisman, operate through unseen forces, and hence possess a magical quality. As such, these people are prepared by their cultural practices to use these credit cards. However, this is also to say that Africans do not engage the new, presumably rational financial technologies on purely rational terms, but rather through the cultural habits and meanings that they have initially used to make sense of these technologies. If exchanges depend on cultural beliefs, social experiences of individuals and collective representations, then a fuller understanding of financial exchanges requires us to analyze language use, social time and representations of power, in relation to systems of reference. In other words, it is necessary to understand how the particular example of money use captures more general cultural imperatives. In order to show us the importance of cultural values, I use the notion of "social totality." To understand this notion of total social fact, we need to return to Durkheim who talks about social facts, and Mauss, who discusses total social facts. For Durkeim, social facts are phenomena or situations that impose themselves upon individuals; these include language, relations of exchange, kinship and so on. For Mauss, total social facts encompass all social facts of any dimension, through which one can see the realities of social and cultural life. The analysis of monetary exchanges, thus become microcosmic representations of cultural values and social institutions. From yet another theoretical perspective, the problem is to link monetary practices and their representation of social orders within a broader symbolic economy. Here Karl Polanyi suggests that economic actions are always embedded within broader social relations. In principle one can identify in different symbolic units the principles of economic behavior found in all societies. I show then how economic social institutions are never the result of rational contracts. Rather, economic institutions are the result of the social evolution of symbolic representations. These claims can be broken down into several distinct points: 1 - The notion of symbolism of money makes it possible to work on the concepts themselves and also to understand their efficacy at the various levels of social life. Indeed, the analysis of symbolism helps us to understand the place of trust in monetary exchange. Conceived here, trust emerges out of shared symbolic representations of the world. On my view, money comes to stand in for those symbolic representations and thus acquires a trustworthiness. Efficient monetary exchange crucially derives from the institutionalization of such trustworthiness. Further, the notion of symbolism allows us to consider related issues such as the legitimacy and sovereignty of money. In this case we can see that in the symbolism of money there are ideological rifts among peoples, classes and nations. 2 - Studied as a part of a total symbolic system, money points to and is intertwined with all of the symbols in a given society. If this claim is correct, then we can proceed to study money using structuralist methods. That is, in the spirit of Saussure and Levi-Strauss we would investigate money as a participant in as a system of signs that is based on opposing meanings. 3- Studied as a total symbolic system we can understand how representations of money operate to impose and sustain poverty. In traditional studies of money, we only understand the problem of poverty through the analysis of economic capital (incomes, employment). This view neutralizes the importance of cultural capital (education, training), social capital (relationships) and psychological capital (health). Admitting, of course, that there are economic determining criteria of poverty (insufficient resources, precariousness, exclusion), within the symbolic perspective offered here we can establish a schema that will make apparent the different representations of cultural, social, and psychological capital as they bear on poverty. From this we can better understand the monetary practices of the poor. It demonstrates how poverty emerges not only for economic reasons, but also for symbolic reasons. Further, it allows us to investigate the rich ways in which members of a particular culture understand and engage their poverty. To return to questions posed at the outset of this review: How do low-income members of the population manage their uncertainties and engage La Poste? In order for their monetary practices to take on real forms, their ways of exchange should already be conceived/understood, represented, symbolized. To put together the issues of strategy, representation and background, I use the Pierre Bourdieu's definition of «habitus». For low incomes population, management of uncertainties, consists of organizing themselves with whatever means is at their disposal. CONCLUSION AND FURTHER APPLICATIONS In conclusion, Money and Societies, is an invitation to reflect on the issues of trust and financial ethics in the economy. I show how the relation of customers in trouble with « la Poste », is shaped by the search for a social answer to an economic crisis, and how the search for money is often an economic answer to a social crisis. Findings of this research allow me to make some suggestions as to how La Poste, and similar financial institutions can better engage their low-income customers. This largely consists in conducting a traditional auditing cost-analysis based in the cultural components of customer behaviors. To this effect, social sciences, sociology in particular can help to better identify the articulations between indices. For example, the social sciences can help management to ascertain the cultural and social variables that impact upon the interaction between La Poste employees and customers. One can construct a typology of demands as a function of cultural, and social skills. Aside from traditional measures of workplace efficiency and rational organization, this typology identities presumably irrational factors that impact on productivity and performance. Hence, it is in recognizing the configuration of production and demands that one can carry out the task of regulations, the scales economy, the flexibility of teller (ability to do many works at the same time). In the past, authors like Herbert Spencer tried to isolate the moral needs stressed by Adam Smith [Wealth of Nations, 1776]. Even as Smith valorizes the ideas of utilitarianism and productivity, he also emphasizes the moral considerations that could improve the situation of poor population. For Spencer, the exchange should be freely negotiated, and the social obligations would be only the results of conventions between people. Durkheim criticized this point of view and showed how in the long term, the multiplication of exchanges will require that people negotiate permanent forms of transaction. For Durkheim, the free contract is only possible if it is grounded in non-contractual elements such as social institutions (e.g. a Justice System). It is in understanding how these non-contractual elements of society regulate everyday economic exchange that we can identify and better understand the way that people engage impoverished situations. What can bring anthropology sociology in transactions analysis? 1 To explain economics phenomena through social relations. a- by identifying the social relations in economic actions. b- by analyzing the reproduction of social structure in the market relations. 2 - To integrate trust and ethics as elements of economic transactions I use the notion of anthropologic sociology, because, I think that is impossible to separate market relation to the social organization in which people operate. Contrary, to the cost transaction that analyzes the costs associated, this approach try to understand the reproduction of social structure in the market relations. Indeed, the internal transactions are more difficult to manage then the market relation. For example, from cost transactions point of view the firm minimizes the cost of transaction in order to dominate market, but they do not take into account that the process of these decisions often creates internal conflicts. One can see that the economics transactions are involved in social relations. Indeed, far from, minimizing the costs, these internal conflicts increase the cost, even if, this situation allow the management of the company to develop better policies of productivity and efficiency of employees. To conduct an efficient auditing cost-analysis for the service relation, one has to take into account the cultural components of customer. From this point of view, my book is an invitation to reflect on the issues of trust and financial ethics in the economy. I show how the relation of customers in trouble with « la Poste », is shaped by the search for a social answer to an economic crisis, and how the search for money is often an economic answer to a social crisis. |
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