Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- 1 Introduction: Money and the morality of exchange
- 2 Misconceiving the grain heap: a critique of the concept of the Indian jajmani system
- 3 On the moral perils of exchange
- 4 Money, men and women
- 5 Cooking money: gender and the symbolic transformation of means of exchange in a Malay fishing community
- 6 Drinking cash: the purification of money through ceremonial exchange in Fiji
- 7 The symbolism of money in Imerina
- 8 Resistance to the present by the past: mediums and money in Zimbabwe
- 9 Precious metals in the Andean moral economy
- 10 The earth and the state: the sources and meanings of money in Northern Potosí, Bolivia
- Index
2 - Misconceiving the grain heap: a critique of the concept of the Indian jajmani system
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 February 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- 1 Introduction: Money and the morality of exchange
- 2 Misconceiving the grain heap: a critique of the concept of the Indian jajmani system
- 3 On the moral perils of exchange
- 4 Money, men and women
- 5 Cooking money: gender and the symbolic transformation of means of exchange in a Malay fishing community
- 6 Drinking cash: the purification of money through ceremonial exchange in Fiji
- 7 The symbolism of money in Imerina
- 8 Resistance to the present by the past: mediums and money in Zimbabwe
- 9 Precious metals in the Andean moral economy
- 10 The earth and the state: the sources and meanings of money in Northern Potosí, Bolivia
- Index
Summary
The exchange of produce, goods and services within the Indian village community, executed without the use of money, has long featured prominently in the literature of economic anthropology. It has served as a clear example of a socio-economic institution that is not subject to the operation of market forces, but is instead regulated by customary rights and privileges as these are expressed and enforced by the hereditary caste division of labour. From the nineteenth-century reports of British administrators in India to the modern literature of anthropology, the enduring symbol of this moneyless institution has been the grain heap divided into shares on the village threshing floor.
In the contemporary ethnography of India, the village exchange system is usually referred to as the ‘jajmani system’. Few of the more perceptive writers on this topic have confined themselves to empirical description alone. They have looked too at the morality or values associated with exchange within the jajmani system and, especially in the work of Dumont, the argument has been powerfully put that these values, characteristic of ‘traditional’ Indian society, are fundamentally different from those of modern, Western society, dominated by its monetised, capitalist market economy. In other words, the village jajmani system has exemplified the radical opposition between traditional and modern economic systems and ideologies. Moreover, the argument has often been extended so that the pre-colonial Indian economy as a whole has also – if not always explicitly – been firmly consigned to the traditional side of the dichotomy.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Money and the Morality of Exchange , pp. 33 - 63Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1989
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