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Liquidate: How Money is Dissolving the World
How Money is Dissolving the World examines the emergence of money and its social and ecological repercussions. It views money as a new phenomenon in the evolution of life that has fundamentally transformed ecosystems and human social relations.
The appearance of coined money around 600 BCE coincided with the first abstract philosophies and religions. The book shows how changes in human-environmental relations have reflected changes in social relations generated by money. The detached modern view of nature mirrors the socially detached modern individual. However, the abandonment of animism has not diminished the human propensity for fetishism – the perception of artifacts such as money tokens as indexes of what they represent. Market prices obscure the asymmetric global resource transfers that make increasingly advanced technologies possible where there is enough money. Our fetishized understandings of money and technologies cannot deal with the escalating production of entropy underlying climate change. They also drive the dramatic reduction of biological and cultural diversity under globalization. Given these problems, many people reassess premodern and indigenous societies in search of more sustainable ideas on how to organize exchange.
How Money is Dissolving the World will be of interest to scholars working in anthropology, sociology, economics, history, semiotics, comparative religions, and indigenous studies.
The appearance of coined money around 600 BCE coincided with the first abstract philosophies and religions. The book shows how changes in human-environmental relations have reflected changes in social relations generated by money. The detached modern view of nature mirrors the socially detached modern individual. However, the abandonment of animism has not diminished the human propensity for fetishism – the perception of artifacts such as money tokens as indexes of what they represent. Market prices obscure the asymmetric global resource transfers that make increasingly advanced technologies possible where there is enough money. Our fetishized understandings of money and technologies cannot deal with the escalating production of entropy underlying climate change. They also drive the dramatic reduction of biological and cultural diversity under globalization. Given these problems, many people reassess premodern and indigenous societies in search of more sustainable ideas on how to organize exchange.
How Money is Dissolving the World will be of interest to scholars working in anthropology, sociology, economics, history, semiotics, comparative religions, and indigenous studies.
280 pages, Hardcover
Published November 12, 2024
10 people want to read
About the author
Alf Hornborg
26 books21 followersAlf Hornborg, Ph.D. (Cultural Anthropology, University of Uppsala, 1986), is an anthropologist and Professor of Human Ecology in the Department of Human Geography at Lund University, Sweden. Previously he taught at Uppsala University and University of Gothenburg. He serves on the editorial boards of The Journal of Ecological Anthropology, Signs,, Journal of World-Systems Research, and Ecological and Environmental Anthropology.
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