Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason

by Bill Maurer

Why are people continually surprised to discover that money is just meaning? Mutual Life, Limited spends time among those who, in acknowledging the fictions of finance, are making money anew. It documents ongoing efforts to remake money and finance by Islamic bankers who seek to avoid interest and local currency proponents who would stand outside of national economies. It asks how alternative moneys both escape and reenact dominant forms of money and finance, and reflects critically on their broader implications for scholarship.



Based on fieldwork among participants in a local currency system in Ithaca, New York, and among Islamic banking practitioners in the United States, Indonesia, and elsewhere, this book exploits the convergence between the reflexivity of monetary alternatives and social inquiry by questioning the equivalence between money and ethnography. Can money ever be adequate to the value backing it? Can social description ever be adequate to messy and contingent realities?

Bill Maurer's ethnographic discovery is that ethnography as such--the holistic description of a way of life--cannot be sustained when faced with a set of practices that anticipates and incorporates it in advance. His fluently written book represents an unprecedented critique of social scientific approaches to money through an ethnographic description of specific monetary alternatives, while also speaking broadly to the very problem of anthropological knowledge in the twenty-first century.

Genres: Anthropology

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Bill Maurer is Dean of the School of Social Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of How Would You Like to Pay: How Technology Is Changing the Future of Money and other books.

Reviews

[Dagezi · Rating 1 out of 5]

I should be loving this book, but I'm not. It's like anthropology written in toothpaste or as G.O.B. Bluth put it, it's half in English and half in "squibbly".

Could not finish it; a great project written by someone who has lost all faith in the communicative potentiality of language.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Awful theoretical introduction ... Made up for by seriously interesting theoretical conclusions and twists along the way. The anecdotes and empirical stories - told against the background of questioning why DOES money work? - are what drives the book and makes it interesting. Maurer has chosen such a fascinating set of topics, and kept such an open, enthusiastic
mind about them over the five years he learned Islamic banking and used alterntive currency, that these fascinating tangibles (so to speak) make this book well worth the read.

I liked the theory. But skip it and it's an even better read!

[Heather Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderfully written book. The subject matter is especially interesting. This is a great book for individuals interested in economic anthropology. The author does a great job exploring the ways folks understand money in alternative economic systems.