Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dlnhk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-26T02:57:20.446Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

From Locke to Slots: Money and the Politics of Indigeneity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 March 2018

Jessica R. Cattelino*
Affiliation:
Anthropology, UCLA

Abstract

With ongoing consequences for American Indians, the New World Indian has been a pervasive figure of constitutive exclusion in modern theories of money, property, and government. This paradoxical exclusion of indigenous peoples from the money/property/government complex is intrinsic to, and constitutive of, modern theories of money. What is more, it haunts the cultural politics of indigenous peoples’ economic actions. In Part I, I establish that, and how, indigeneity has been constitutively present at the foundation of modern theories of money, as Europeans and settlers defined indigenous peoples in part by the absence of money and property (of which money is a special form). In turn, and more to the point here, they defined money and property in part as that which modern non-indigenous people have and use. These are not solely economic matters: the conceptual exclusions from money/property were coproduced with juridical ones insofar as liberal political theory grounded the authority of modern government in private property (and, in turn, in money). To show how this formation of money and indigeneity has mattered both for disciplinary anthropology and for American public culture at several historical moments, Part II traces how the dilemmas expressed by these texts haunt subsequent debates about the function of wampum, the logic of potlatch, and the impact of tribal gaming. Such debates inform scholarship beyond the boundaries of anthropology and, as each case shows in brief, they create harms and benefits for peoples in ways that perpetuate the (il)logics and everyday practices of settler colonialism.

Type
Slow Violence
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Arnaquq-Baril, Alethea, dir. 2016. Angry Inuk. Documentary (1 hour 22 minutes). National Film Board of Canada.Google Scholar
Arneil, Barbara. 1996. John Locke and America: The Defense of English Colonialism. Oxford: Clarendon Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baker, Lee D. 1998. From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896–1954. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Banner, Stuart. 2005. How the Indians Lost Their Land: Law and Power on the Frontier. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barker, Joanne. 2005–2006. Recognition. American Studies / Indigenous Studies Today 46, 3/4: 133–61.Google Scholar
Berkhofer, Robert F. 1978. The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present. New York: Knopf.Google Scholar
Boas, Franz. 1897. The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, Government Printing Office.Google Scholar
Bracken, Christopher. 1997. The Potlatch Papers: A Colonial Case History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Bracken, Christopher. 2007. Magical Criticism: The Recourse of Savage Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Brander Rasmussen, Birgit. 2012. Queequeg's Coffin: Indigenous Literacies & Early American Literature. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Byrd, Jodi A. 2011. The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carpenter, Kristen A., Katyal, Sonia K., and Riley, Angela R.. 2009. In Defense of Property. Yale Law Journal 188, 6: 1022–25.Google Scholar
Cattelino, Jessica R. 2008. High Stakes: Florida Seminole Gaming and Sovereignty. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Cattelino, Jessica R. 2010. The Double Bind of American Indian Need-Based Sovereignty. Cultural Anthropology 25, 2: 235–62.Google Scholar
Ceci, Lynn. 1982. The Value of Wampum among the New York Iroquois: A Case Study in Artifact Analysis. Journal of Anthropological Research 38, 1: 97107.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ceci, Lynn. 1993. Native Wampum as a Peripheral Resource in the Seventeenth-Century World. In Wherry, James D. and Hauptman, Laurence M., eds., The Pequots in Southern New England: The Fall and Rise of an American Indian Nation. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 4863.Google Scholar
Comaroff, Jean, and Comaroff, John L.. 2000. Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming. Public Culture 12, 2: 291343.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Coulthard, Glen S. 2007. Subjects of Empire: Indigenous Peoples and the “Politics of Recognition” in Canada. Contemporary Political Theory 6, 4: 437–60.Google Scholar
Darian-Smith, Eve. 2002. Savage Capitalists: Law and Politics Surrounding Indian Casino Operations in California. In Sarat, Austin and Ewick, Patricia, eds., Studies in Law, Politics, and Society. Amsterdam: JAI, 109–40.Google Scholar
Darian-Smith, Eve. 2003. New Capitalists: Law, Politics, and Identity Surrounding Casino Gaming on Native American Land. Belmont: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning.Google Scholar
Day, Iyko. 2016. Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Debord, Guy. 1959. The Role of Potlatch, Then and Now. Potlatch, 15 July. http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/potlatch.html (accessed 12 Nov. 2013).Google Scholar
Deloria, Philip J. 2004. Indians in Unexpected Places. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Deloria, Vine. 1973. God Is Red. New York: Grosset & Dunlap.Google Scholar
Deloria, Vine. 1988. Custer Died for Your Sins. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.Google Scholar
Durkheim, Emile. 1997 [1893]. The Division of Labor in Society. Introduction by Coser, Lewis A.. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Engels, Frederick. 1972 [1884]. The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. Edited, with an Introduction by Leacock, Eleanor Burke. New York: International Publishers.Google Scholar
Erikson, Patricia Pierce. 1999. A-Whaling We Will Go: Encounters of Knowledge and Memory at the Makah Cultural and Research Center. Cultural Anthropology 14, 4: 556–83.Google Scholar
Espeland, Wendy Nelson, and Stevens, Mitchell L.. 1998. Commensuration as a Social Process. Annual Review of Sociology 24: 313–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Fenton, William N. 1971. The New York State Wampum Collection: The Case for the Integrity of Cultural Treasures. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 115, 6: 437–61.Google Scholar
Gelder, Ken, and Jacobs, Jane M.. 1998. Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation. Victoria: Melbourne University Press.Google Scholar
Goeman, Mishuana. 2013. Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Goldstein, Alyosha. 2008. Where the Nation Takes Place: Proprietary Regimes, Antistatism, and U.S. Settler Colonialism. South Atlantic Quarterly 107, 4: 833–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gordon, Avery. 2008 [1997]. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Graeber, David. 2001. Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value. New York: Palgrave.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Graeber, David. 2011. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Brooklyn: Melville House.Google Scholar
Harmon, Alexandra. 2010. Rich Indians: Native People and the Problem of Wealth in American History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Harris, Cheryl I. 1993. Whiteness as Property. Harvard Law Review 106, 8: 1709–91.Google Scholar
Hart, Keith. 2001. Money in an Unequal World: Keith Hart and His Memory Bank. New York: Texere.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hauptman, Laurence M. 1988. Formulating American Indian Policy in New York State, 1970–1986. Albany: SUNY Press.Google Scholar
Hirschman, Albert O. 1997 [1977]. The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Huhndorf, Shari M. 2001. Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Ince, Onur Ulas. 2011. Enclosing in God's Name, Accumulating for Mankind: Money, Morality, and Accumulation in John Locke's Theory of Property. Review of Politics 73, 1: 2954.Google Scholar
Johnson v. McIntosh, 21 U.S. 543, 1823.Google Scholar
Jefferson, Thomas. 1999 [1785]. Notes on the State of Virginia. Shuffelton, Frank, ed. New York: Penguin Books (Penguin Classics).Google Scholar
Kauanui, J. Kēhaulani. 2016. “A Structure, Not an Event”: Settler Colonialism and Enduring Indigeneity. Lateral 5, 1. https://doi.org/10.25158/L5.1.7.Google Scholar
Locke, John. 1988 [1690]. Two Treatises of Government. Student edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought).Google Scholar
Maurer, Bill. 2005. Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Maurer, Bill. 2006. The Anthropology of Money. Annual Review of Anthropology 35: 1536.Google Scholar
McClure, Kirstie Morna. 1996. Judging Rights: Lockean Politics and the Limits of Consent. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Millar, John. 2006 [1773]. Origin of Distinction of Ranks. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.Google Scholar
Mithlo, Nancy Marie. 2009. Our Indian Princess: Subverting the Stereotype. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research.Google Scholar
Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, Baron de, . 1949 [1748]. The Spirit of the Laws. Nugent, Thomas, trans., with an introduction by Neumann, Franz. New York: Hafner Publishing Company.Google Scholar
Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. 2015. The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Morgan, Lewis Henry. 1964 [1877]. Ancient Society. White, Leslie, ed. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (John Harvard Library).Google Scholar
Nadasdy, Paul. 2005. Transcending the Debate over the Ecologically Noble Indian: Indigenous Peoples and Environmentalism. Ethnohistory 52, 2: 291331.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nichols, Robert. 2017. Theft Is Property! The Recursive Logic of Dispossession. Political Theory, Published online, DOI: 10.1177/0090591717701709.Google Scholar
Pagden, Anthony. 1982. The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology. New York: Cambridge University Press (Cambridge Iberian and Latin American Studies).Google Scholar
Pagden, Anthony. 1993. European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Park, K.-Sue. 2016. Money, Mortgages, and the Conquest of America. Law & Social Inquiry 41, 4: 1006–35.Google Scholar
Pasquaretta, Paul. 2003. Gambling and Survival in Native North America. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pietz, William. 1985. The Problem of the Fetish, I. Res 9 (Spring): 517.Google Scholar
Reid, Joshua L. 2015. The Sea Is My Country: The Maritime World of the Makahs. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Robbins, Joel and Akin, David. 1999. Melanesian Currencies: Agency, Identity, and Social Reproduction. In Akin, David and Robbins, Joel, eds., Money and Modernity: State and Local Currencies in Melanesia. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.Google Scholar
Roth, Christopher Fritz. 2008. Becoming Tsimshian: The Social Life of Names. Seattle: University of Washington Press. http://muse.jhu.edu/books/9780295989235 (accessed 13 Nov. 2013).Google Scholar
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1987 [1754]. Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. In Cress, Donald A., trans. and ed., The Basic Political Writings. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 25109.Google Scholar
Rubin, Gayle. 1975. The Traffic in Women: Notes on the “Political Economy” of Sex. In Reiter, Rayna R., ed., Toward an Anthropology of Women. New York: Monthly Review, 157210.Google Scholar
Sahlins, Marshall. 1972. The Original Affluent Society. In Stone Age Economics. Hawthorne: Aldine de Gruyter, 139.Google Scholar
Sahlins, Marshall. 1993. Cosmologies of Capitalism: The Trans-Pacific Sector of “The World System.” In Dirks, Nicholas B., Eley, Geoff, and Ortner, Sherry B., eds., Culture/Power/History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 412–55.Google Scholar
Shell, Marc. 1982. Money, Language, and Thought. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Shell, Marc. 1995. Art and Money. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Shell, Marc. 2013. Wampum and the Origins of American Money. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Simmel, Georg. 1990 [1907]. The Philosophy of Money. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Simpson, Audra. 2014. Mohawk Interruptus. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Smith, Adam. 1976 [1776]. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Cannon, E., ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Smith, Adam. 1978 [1762–1763]. Lectures on Jurisprudence. Meek, Ronald L., Raphael, D.D., and Stein, Peter, eds. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Spilde, Katherine A. 2004. Creating a Political Space for American Indian Economic Development: Indian Gaming and American Indian Activism. In Checker, Melissa and Fishman, Maggie, eds., Local Actions: Cultural Activism, Power, and Public Life in America. New York: Columbia University Press, 7188.Google Scholar
Tully, James. 1980. A Discourse on Property: John Locke and His Adversaries. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Tully, James. 1994. Aboriginal Property and Western Theory. Social Philosophy & Policy 11, 2: 153–80.Google Scholar
Tweedie, Ann M. 2002. Drawing Back Culture: The Makah Struggle for Repatriation. Seattle: University of Washington Press.Google Scholar
Wilkins, David E. 1997. American Indian Sovereignty and the U.S. Supreme Court: The Masking of Justice. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Wilkins, David E. and Lomawaima, Tsianina K.. 2001. Uneven Ground: American Indian Sovereignty and Federal Law. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.Google Scholar
Williams, Robert Jr. 2005. Like a Loaded Weapon: The Rehnquist Court, Indian Rights, and the Legal History of Racism in America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Wolfe, Patrick. 1991. On Being Woken Up: The Dreamtime in Anthropology and in Australian Settler Culture. Comparative Studies in Society and History 33, 2: 197224.Google Scholar
Wolfe, Patrick. 1999. Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event. New York: Cassell.Google Scholar
Woodward, Ashbel. 1878. Wampum. Paper presented to the Numismatic and Antiquarian Society of Philadelphia. Albany: J. Munsell.Google Scholar
Zelizer, Viviana A. 1997. The Social Meaning of Money: Pin Money, Paychecks, Poor Relief, and Other Currencies. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar