This chapter will not question the terms of comparison and analogy in abstract methodological models; instead, it will place actors and debates in their appropriate historical context in order to understand why they were interested in comparison and why, in a given context, they practised it in one particular way and not in another. Moreover, each context will be resolutely trans-regional and comparison will be identified as a cross-cultural practice. I will therefore take some distance from current arguments relating comparison only to European colonial expansion. Infra-European tensions and competition were no less important in justifying comparisons than encounters with non-European worlds.

Feminist anthropology has radically reworked the central terms and frameworks for how anthropology approaches the study of capitalism. Building outward from an ethnographic study of feminized microcredit loans, the argument of this chapter is that standard economic anthropology approaches to capitalism require radical reframing. This reframing calls attention to the persistent exclusions and erasures of gendered activities, spaces, roles, wealth, and work. Retheorizing capitalism from a gendered vantage point is part of a wider feminist project aimed at revealing the workings of power and domination. To do this, the chapter explores two thematic areas in the anthropology of capitalism: first, economic units such as the household, the firm, or the national economy, and, second, economic subjects such as the entrepreneur, the worker, or the consumer. Throughout, the chapter calls attention to fieldwork epistemologies in economic anthropology. The author suggests that we should recenter attention on complex and contingent ways sex powerfully shapes financial markets, and take seriously the erotic dimensions of credit on their own terms.

A gift, my grandmother used to say, is just a loan. And certainly in many parts of the world gifts, far from being merely free-will offerings, are what bind people together in relationships of felt indebtedness. As one traces the meaning and forms of gift-giving in the Middle East and North Africa, one appreciates that the lines along which gifts flow and the meanings that are attached to them are, like the traces of one’s passing, an indicator of the bonds of obligations formed. In a sense, the running imbalance of gifts thus underscores the nature of many social ties and their negotiation in this part of the world and with them a keener appreciation of how they inform the encounters that sustain the social order.

Clifford Geertz was undoubtedly the leading anthropologist of his generation, a broad-scale thinker whose influence extended far beyond his own discipline. His study of Islam in Indonesia, however, might appear not to have been reprised in his Moroccan work whereas, in fact, one could argue that it was. For in his study of the souk, the Moroccan bazaar, Geertz not only presented one of the most detailed and theoretically sophisticated studies of this form of economic structure but also showed how everyday Islamic assumptions and orientations suffuse that domain. In this sense, Geertz did do a study of Moroccan Islam, indeed one that demonstrates its connection to multiple domains of everyday life. In that sense, too, it is the encounters in this most important realm where religion lives and where it must be understood.

The 21st century has not been good to the science of economics. Economic crises such as the 2007–2008 mortgage crisis and subsequent recession were neither predicted by economists nor perceived to be the result of economic planning based on neoclassical models. This chapter combines insights from the history of economic anthropology and sociology to develop a theory of economic behavior that returns economic practice to its social and cultural contexts. It is less a critique of the science of economics than a synthesis of economic and social theory that speaks to the changes outlined in the previous chapters and questions of value raised in part two of this book.

Chapter 1 develops the notion of money as social technology which carries the analysis throughout the subsequent, more narrative chapters. The vivid case of a clandestine Catholic congregation in the east of the Netherlands, which used money to restore its social and material fabric, is placed alongside insights drawn from scholarship about Chinese, African, and Pacific history. The core idea is that technology is a relationship between people, objects, and meaning. Technology refers to a technique exercised within a social context which gives meaning to both the maker and the made object. In the present case this means that an object is turned into money when makers and users make it fungible, that is, when they imbue it with qualities that allow it to be reliably exchanged for something else. This technological approach brings into focus how money objects bring forth and change social structure; and, conversely, where social structures are techniques that create and transform money objects.

Exploring the vast anthropological and archaeological scholarship on money, this chapter lays out an approach to early money. Examining what it is we refer to when we talk about money, and what effect it supposedly has on society, it becomes clear that money can be diverse and does not have a set effect on society. Rather, the significance of money depends on the social and cultural logic in which its use is embedded. Arguing from this perspective, a distinction between primitive and modern forms of money – or equivalents, such as special-purpose and general-purpose money, or indigenous currencies and state money, with coinage representing modern/general-purpose/state-issued money – is rejected as arbitrary and not conducive to a better understanding of early money preceding coinage. Instead, money is conceptualized as being a commodity and a token at the same time. This is then applied to the material that is placed at the centre of this study – the cut and broken precious metal items generally known as hacksilber and hackgold – thereby substantiating an understanding of this material as a form of money, still preceding coinage.