Chinese (Mandarin)

Spanish

English

Hindi

Arabic

Portuguese

Bengali

Russian

Japanese

Punjabi

German

Javanese

Malay

Telugu

Vietnamese

Korean

French

Marathi

Tamil

Urdu

Turkish

Italian

Chinese, Yue / Cantonese

Thai

Gujarati

Chinese, Jin

Chinese, Min Nan

Persian, Dari

Persian, Western

Polish

Pashto

Kannada

Chinese, Xiang

Malayalam

Sundanese

Hausa

Odia

Burmese

Chinese, Hakka

Ukrainian

Bihari, Bhojpuri

Tagalog

Yoruba

Bihari, Maithili

Uzbek

Sindhi

Amharic

Fula

Romanian

Oromo

Igbo

Azerbaijani

Chinese, Gan

Dutch

Kurdish, Central

Kurdish, Northern

Kurdish, Southern

Malagasy

Lahnda, Saraiki

Nepali

Sinhalese

Chittagonian

Zhuang

Khmer

Turkmen

Assamese

Madurese

Somali

Marwari

Bihari, Magahi

Haryanvi

Hungarian

Chhattisgarhi

Greek

Chewa

Dakhini

Akan, Twi

Akan, Fante

Kazakh

Chinese, Min Bei

Sylheti

Zulu

Czech

Kinyarwanda

Marwari, Dhundhari

Haitian Creole

Chinese, Min Dong

Ilocano

Quechua

Kirundi

Swedish

Hmong

Shona

Uyghur

Hiligaynon

Mossi

Xhosa

Belarusian

Balochi

Anthropology

<OpenstaxParagraph>
	In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, many shops witnessed a scarcity of hard currency, prompting them to put up signs requesting people to use credit or debit cards or mobile payment apps to make purchases. This episode is part of a larger shift over the past several decades away from coins and bills and toward more abstract forms of payment such as chip cards and “fintech,” the mobile debit apps accessed through smartphones. And even more abstractly, now there are even virtual currencies such as bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin is a currency generated by a computer dedicated to solving complex mathematical problems. How is that even money?
</OpenstaxParagraph>
<OpenstaxParagraph>
	What is <OpenstaxTerm>money</OpenstaxTerm>? In the formulation of classical philosophy, money is defined by three functions: it serves as a medium of exchange, a unit of account, and a store of value. Imagine that two friends from neighboring groups, one a pastoralist group and the other a horticultural group, meet in town. The pastoralist has a freshly slaughtered goat slung over their shoulder. The horticulturalist is carrying a small sack of vegetables. They decide they’d like to trade. The farmer wants all of the meat, but the herder wants only a small portion of the vegetables. Each person wants the trade to be equal; that is, they both want to give and receive the same value. How can they conduct this transaction? How do they know the value of the things they want to trade?
</OpenstaxParagraph>
<OpenstaxParagraph>
	It seems natural to imagine these two trader friends attempting to negotiate some sort of barter. The swapping of goods on the spot, however, was never a dominant form of exchange in any culture in the past. Instead, many anthropologists argue that precapitalist peoples relied more on gift exchange, redistribution, and debt to circulate goods through society. So it’s more likely that the pastoralist would make a good-faith gift of the whole goat to their gardening friend, knowing that both would remember the gardener’s obligation to return the favor with more vegetables (or something else of fairly equal value) in the future. If this seems complicated, it probably was. Individuals would have been involved in many such relationships simultaneously – whole communities of people all mutually entwined in relations of credit and debt.
</OpenstaxParagraph>
<OpenstaxParagraph>
	The other possible solution is money. If these two traders live in a society that uses some arbitrary other thing to enumerate value, they would know that all of the meat has the value of 50 units (or shekels, cowrie shells, tally sticks, bones, animal skins, brass rods, gold coins, bank notes, or any one of the myriad other objects used as money in the past). A small portion of vegetables might have the value of only 10 units. If these two have come with their wallets, they can use money to make two separate transactions for items of different value rather than trying to negotiate one swap. They can make the exchanges and walk away without entanglement.
</OpenstaxParagraph>
<OpenstaxFigure id="fig-00003" src="https://openstax.org/apps/archive/20240226.174525/resources/5bc6e40369c97e1f83bed530624bca3a5a93a348" alt="Various different types of paper currencies." mediaType="image/jpeg" width="800" height="486" />
<OpenstaxFigureText width="800">
	<strong>Figure 7.16</strong> Examples of local currencies. Local currencies are designed to be used only within designated geographic areas, with the goal of enhancing the economy of the community. (credit: Mune/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)
</OpenstaxFigureText>
<OpenstaxParagraph>
	There are two kinds of money, general purpose and special purpose. The transaction described above is an example of <OpenstaxTerm>general-purpose money</OpenstaxTerm>—that is, money that can be exchanged for a wide variety of goods and services. Dollars, euros, pesos, yen, and bitcoin are all forms of general-purpose money. General-purpose money is portable, divisible, and easily available. <OpenstaxTerm>Special-purpose money</OpenstaxTerm> is currency that is used to purchase one particular kind of thing. In some pastoral societies of West African, cattle have been used as forms of bridewealth, or the payment made by a groom to the family of his prospective bride. The <OpenstaxTerm>Tinputz</OpenstaxTerm> people of Papua New Guinea had two forms of special-purpose money, strings of flying fox teeth and strings of shell disks. These were used for marriages and other socially important occasions. Special-purpose money is generally more difficult to obtain, transport, and/or measure precisely. In American society, many grocery stores now offer special-use “points” for loyal shoppers that can be used to buy gas at particular gas stations. Credit card companies, airlines, and other businesses offer similar forms of special-purpose points. Such special-use currency illustrates the arbitrary nature of money.
</OpenstaxParagraph>

7.6.2 Money

1 What Is Anthropology?

1.1 The Study of Humanity, or "Anthropology Is Vast"

1.1.1 The Heart of Anthropology: Central Narrative and Commitments

1.1.2 Central Commitment #1: Exploring Sociocultural Diversity

1.1.3 Central Commitment #2: Understanding How Societies Hold Together

1.1.4 Central Commitment #3: Examining the Interdependence of Humans and Nature

1.2 The Four-Field Approach: Four Approaches within the Guiding Narrative

1.2.1 Biological Anthropology

1.2.2 Archaeology

1.2.3 Cultural Anthropology

1.2.4 Linguistic Anthropology

1.2.5 How the Four Fields Work Together: The Example of Race

1.3 Overcoming Ethnocentrism

1.3.1 Enculturation and Ethnocentrism

1.3.2 Primitivism and Orientalism

1.4 Western Bias in Our Assumptions about Humanity

1.4.1 Primitivism and Orientalism in Popular Culture

1.4.2 The Bias of Backwardness

1.5 Holism, Anthropology’s Distinctive Approach

1.5.1 Society as an Integrated Whole

1.5.2 Sources of Contradiction, Conflict, and Change

1.6 Cross-Cultural Comparison and Cultural Relativism

1.6.1 Relativism Is Not “Anything Goes”

1.6.2 Morality, Activism, and Cultural Relativism

1.7 Reaching for an Insider’s Point of View

1.7.1 The Challenge of Representing Others

1.7.2 Collaborative Methods of Representation

1.7.3 Working across Cultures toward Common Goals

1.7.4 Suggested Readings

2 Methods: Cultural and Archaeological

2.1 Archaeological Research Methods

2.1.1 Archaeological Techniques

2.1.2 Archaeological Dating Methods

2.2 Conservation and Naturalism

2.2.1 Early Efforts

2.2.2 Salvage Anthropology

2.2.3 Museum Collections

2.2.4 Interpretation and Voice

2.3 Ethnography and Ethnology

2.3.1 The Development of Ethnography and Ethnology

2.3.2 Perspective and Interpretation in Ethnography

2.4 Participant Observation and Interviewing

2.4.1 Participant Observation

2.4.2 Interviewing Informants

2.4.3 Ethical Considerations

2.5 Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis

2.5.1 Differences between Quantitative and Qualitative Information

2.5.2 Modeling

2.5.3 The Science of Anthropology

2.6 Collections

2.6.1 Archives

2.6.2 Three-Dimensional Collections

2.6.3 Ownership

2.6.4 Suggested Readings

3 Culture Concept Theory: Theories of Cultural Change

3.1 The Homeyness of Culture

3.2 The Winkiness of Culture

3.3 The Elements of Culture

3.3.1 Culture Is What We Make

3.3.2 Culture Is What We Do

3.3.3 Culture Is What We Think

3.4 The Aggregates of Culture

3.4.1 Symbols

3.4.2 Ritual

3.4.3 Social Structure

3.5 Modes of Cultural Analysis

3.5.1 Evolution, Adaptation, and Historical Particularism

3.5.2 Functionalism

3.5.3 Structuralism

3.5.4 Ontology

3.6 The Paradoxes of Culture

3.6.1 Paradox 1: Culture Is Continuous, but It Changes

3.6.2 Paradox 2: Culture Is Bounded but Mobile

3.6.3 Paradox 3: Culture Is Consensual but Contested

3.6.4 Paradox 4: Culture Is Shared, but It Varies

3.6.5 Suggested Readings

4 Biological Evolution and Early Human Evidence

4.1 What Is Biological Anthropology?

4.1.1 Looking to the Deep Past

4.1.2 Exploring What It Means to Be Human

4.2 What’s in a Name? The Science of Taxonomy

4.2.1 Defining the Science of Taxonomy

4.2.2 Defining a Species

4.3 It’s All in the Genes! The Foundation of Evolution

4.3.1 The Units of Life

4.3.2 Gregor Mendel and the Laws of Heredity

4.3.3 Mendelian Inheritance in Humans

4.4 Evolution in Action: Past and Present

4.4.1 Early Evolutionists and the Fixity of Species

4.4.2 Charles Darwin’s Role in Changing Views of the Natural World

4.4.3 Understanding Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection

4.5 What Is a Primate?

4.5.1 What Is a Primate?

4.5.2 Primate Behavioral Variation

4.5.3 Explaining Primate Success

4.5.4 Primate Classification and Taxonomy

4.6 Origin of and Classification of Primates

4.6.1 Understanding Concepts of Time

4.6.2 Fossils and Dating Methods

Question	Answer
money that can be exchanged for a wide variety of goods and services.	general-purpose money
a medium of exchange, unit of account, and store of value.	money
money that is exchanged for specific items or services.	special-purpose money