This paper makes a very preliminary and provisional attempt to relate the discussion in Jane Guyer's Marginal Gains (2004) of disjunction, thresholds, and multiple scales of value characteristic of economies in the Atlantic zone with the disjunction, profusion, and fragmentation characteristic of artistic genres of the region, especially praise poetry. It suggests that their underlying common property is an intense focus on the making and unmaking of persons. In a region where social and political self-realization is open-ended and depends upon acquiring people, and where people are transactable, transitions between multiple conditions of personhood can take place, but some thresholds cannot be crossed. One of the key ethnographic examples in Marginal Gains—the Niger Delta—is revisited to suggest possible lines of further inquiry into this aspect of the originality of cultural production in the zone of the Atlantic trade.

This article seeks to refine conceptually the social study of finance and thus to extend the argument of Jane Guyer's Marginal Gains (2004). Using the case of the South African “grey money” amnesty, this article argues that social studies of finance have failed to pay adequate attention to social payments, as opposed to market exchanges, in their pronouncements about the extension of the calculative rationality and universal commensuration that are supposedly intrinsic to modern money. The amnesty, which allowed forgiveness for offshore tax evasion in return for a one-time payment, reconfigured “tax minimizers” as law-abiding and rational economic actors hedging against risk. Most took the opportunity; they were granted amnesty to repatriate their funds, which generated a significant boost in revenue for the South African state, with social and symbolic implications. This article reflects on what purchase is gained on the amnesty and the social study of finance generally by considering the amnesty as a series of payments, rather than cross-boundary financial transactions between individuals, trusts, and states.

This article replicates Guyer's finding in Marginal Gains (2004) of a social gradient in expenditure patterns of Ghanaian households using more flexible statistical techniques than those used in the book. We show that similar gradients are found in Cote d'lvoire and in Kagera, Tanzania, suggesting that Guyer's finding in Ghana is a manifestation of a more general phenomenon. In addition, we examine patterns of measurement error in household expenditure data from Ghana. This reveals a worrying possibility that survey reports of expenditure may reflect respondents' beliefs about what expenditures should be, as well as actual expenditures within the household.

This article engages with Jane Guyer's assessment (in Marginal Gains, 2004) of contemporary forms of capitalism from outside the bounds of two opposing logics: the universalization of capitalist arrangements versus the specificity of local forms of economic arrangement. Guyer's rejection of a priori definitions of economic categories leads to fertile analysis of measures and mediations as poly-semic modes of valuation. The author asks: what is the theory that would account for or accommodate this polysemy? Corollary questions of epistemology arise regarding distinctions between local conventions and formal procedures and about the criteria that establish such distinctions. Conceding that we attest to the efficacy of economic concepts through practice, the author questions whether these concepts are institutionalized through “experience.” Such concepts (e.g., equivalence) are not merely “economic” in nature; their genealogies disclose the extent to which their efficacy derives from their placement in many domains of life, as artifacts of a general epistemology.

This contribution to the special issue of ASR on Jane Guyer's Marginal Gains (2004) takes up two recent, and radically different, constructivist contributions to the field of economic sociology—those of Phillip Mirowski and Michel Callon. The article makes use of Marginal Gains to interrogate both these analytics, asking if they can meet the challenge posed by the diversity and multiplicity of African popular economic practice.

Marginal Gains (2204) has been described as a surprising and bold book. Since the articles in this collection, which take one or other of its arguments as points of departure, share certain similar qualities, they can be treated as a collective effort initiating new debate with non-African economic research and thinking. This article reviews the argument of the book, highlights the concept and phenomenon of ordinal ranking in both the book and the articles, and then uses the findings to begin an appreciative critique of the ideas of Michel Callon. Although Callon's approach intersects with that of Marginal Gains in many ways, the scalar ranking of people, and the use of rank to exclude and divert, finds more prominence in the book's approach, which also has more relevance for Europe than economists seem to have acknowledged so far. The article ends with a new instance of ordinal ranking, from Cameroon.