Emily Martin is professor of anthropology at New York University and the author of many books
"An interesting bonus of the book is that in Martin's introduction
as well as in Guyer's and Mintz's Afterword, we get a glimpse of
the Anthropology Department at Johns Hopkins in the 1980s and the
struggles to find a bridge between materialist and symbolic
approaches. We also see the intellectual ferment there, with
luminaries such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Edmund Leach, and Fredrik
Barth passing through.In sum, by publishing these historic lectures
and reflections, HAU, Martin, Guyer, and Mintz have provided a
valuable service to the profession."--Beth E. Notar "American
Anthropologist"
"China has been going through drastic transformation during the
past 30 years since Martin's lectures were delivered. Undeniably,
the meaning of money has been quickly evolving, with a widespread
collapse of belief in collectivist values and other socialist
ethics among ordinary Chinese people caught up in the feverish
chase after moneymaking. The intended scholarship of this book
includes but is not limited to comparative cultural studies, the
anthropology of money, and Chinese studies. Martin's book will be
valuable to these areas for two reasons. Empirically, what she
observed is still useful for understanding today's China,
especially its less accessible peasant communities. More important,
theoretically, the contrasts she describes between the meaning of
money in China and in the United States directly relate to the two
distinct worldviews of limited good and unlimited good, from which
we might draw inspiration for sustainable development."--Xianghong
Feng "American Ethnologist"
"Martin's book gains much through its careful framing. She writes
of intellectual life at the Johns Hopkins anthropology department
in the 1980s, and how this shaped her approach. This led her to
combine the materialist and symbolic approaches popular at the
time, and to seek to uncover 'the traces of mind in matter'(7). In
doing so, Martin emphasizes the extremes of money's potential
meanings and uses. Although this illustrates her model well,
showing how money can function as socially integrating or socially
disintegrating, I would have enjoyed further discussion of how
these functions overlap, particularly in the latter two chapters.
Nonetheless, the book makes an important contribution as a
comparative work, and Martin's analysis speaks powerfully to recent
anthropological works on money and debt, as well as precarity and
neoliberalism. Finally, the book is clearly written to bespoken and
features many rich examples, making it immensely engaging and
readable."--Lara McKenzie "Anthropological Forum"
"Chaque année, depuis 1962, à l'Université de Rochester dans l'État
de New York, ont lieu les Conférences Lewis Henry Morgan. Des
anthropologues prestigieux s'y sont succédé notamment Meyer Fortes,
Victor Turner, Marilyn Strathern, Ulf Hannerz... Le présent ouvrage
reprend une communication d'Emily Martin faite en 1986 et qui
n'avait pas été encore publiée. Une introduction et une postface
ajoutées en 2015, réactualisent l'ensemble en soulignant
l'expansion du capitalisme en Chine et son influence sur la scène
publique, le monde du travail et la sphère privée. Emily Martin a
réalisé deux terrains: l'un dans des villages chinois et taïwanais,
notamment dans la région de Fujian, au cours de plusieurs séjours
entre 1969 et 1975 (p. 14); l'autre, aux États-Unis, dans les
années 1980. Des faits divers, des anecdotes de chefs d'entreprise
réputés et des observations faites dans une église méthodiste à
Baltimore, où se tenait un congrès sur le thème de la « pensée
prospère » (prosperity thought) (p. 7), alimentent ce second
terrain. Chez les méthodistes étudiés, l'argent est pensé de
manière positive, comme « un médium d'échange donné par Dieu » (p.
112) qui distribue santé, prospérité, richesse à ceux qui
l'honorent."--Patrick Gaboriau and Noël Laurence "L'Homme"
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