The impending fiftieth anniversary of the African Studies Association offers the occasion for a historian to reflect on the maturation of the field as a historical process. The essay employs metaphors from human development to highlight the inevitably incremental, always partial, steps by which people—including professional Africanists—accomplish significant change. For African studies these steps have moved from an initial social-science orientation and reliance on the abstractions of the high modernity of the mid-twentieth century to more experiential ways of understanding that have opened the door to new epistemologically African sensibilities. Africanists based in the United States are already moving beyond the limits of the external and objectifying tendencies inherent in “studying” anything and instead are listening to and learning from their full partners and collaborators in and from Africa.

This Special Issue is the condensation of an author-meets-critics double panel organized for the African Studies Association meeting in Washington, D.C., in November 2005, on Jane Guyer's challenging book Marginal Gains—Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa. The book was published in the first half of 2004, and when the three of us met in the fall of that year, we all felt it was a text that lent itself especially well to such a session. One of the elements that makes the book so compelling is Guyer's particular style of theorizing: Starting from a painstaking effort to discover regular patterns in empirical data, she moves to the positing and testing of theoretical notions—but in a way that does not strive to produce closure or systematicity. On the contrary, the book can sometimes be confusing because it leaves so much open. But precisely because Guyer continues to create new openings, it is an inspiring piece of work, constantly offering novel starting points for further research and reflection.

This article addresses the question as to how Jane Guyer's seminal explorations of special traits of West African economies in Marginal Gains (2004) can help us understand variations within the region. This question acquires some urgency—for instance in the Cameroonian context, but elsewhere also—since the dimensions she emphasizes (reciprocity, gain, rank) play a crucial role in quite vicious ethnic stereotypes that increasingly dominate people's perceptions of economic developments. The challenge may be, therefore, to determine how an analysis in terms of disjunctures as an asset for marginal gains can steer clear of the ethnic stereotypes through which people themselves perceive discontinuities in everyday life. Starting from the historical example of the wild-rubber boom in southern Cameroon under German rule (1890–1913) and its chaotic effects at the local level, the article considers how Arjun Appadurai's notion of “tournaments of value” might help us understand such variations.

Inspired by Jane Guyer's insights in Marginal Gains (2004) into the distinctive logics and performative repertoires that animate economic life in Africa, this article offers a few reflections on the implications of African economic dynamics for conceptual debates about economic and social meanings of value. In particular, it is suggested that market values may be understood not simply as momentary quantitative indicators or measurements of opportunity costs, but as social processes in which people continually assess present circumstances and options in terms of their understandings of the past. Since history may always be read in more than one way, there is always an element of ambiguity in market values. Rather than a chronicle of exceptional responses to global forces and common human needs, African economic history may be read as an opportunity to reflect on how people and events come together in economically enabling or destructive ways in particular times and places, and what is historically specific about Africans' gains and losses from economic interactions with one another and with other parts of the world.

In Marginal Gains (2004), Jane Guyer traces the logic of African socioeconomic practices that have long confounded attempts by modern states to impose what she terms “formalization.” Nowhere is the tension between pragmatically “informal” economic life and putatively “formal” state structures more evident than in the domain of poverty interventions, which typically aim to bring state institutional power to bear precisely on those who are most excluded from the “formal sector.” This article offers a preliminary analysis of some new rationalities of poverty alleviation observable in recent South African political and policy discourse. I will argue that new sorts of programmatic thinking about poverty represent a new development within (and not simply against) neoliberalism, and that they seek, by abandoning the regulatory and normalizing functions usually associated with social assistance, to bring the formal and the informal into a new sort of relation.

Jane Guyer has clearly demonstrated in Marginal Gains (2004) that the ranking of people historically was linked to quantitative scales of money. Guyer's study focuses on the Igbo and Ibibio, two societies in which ranking was by achievement rather than ascription. How do ranking and money interface in other African societies with strong monarchical or centralized social systems? What impact does currency instability have on rank in such societies? This paper examines these questions. Focusing on the Yoruba of Nigeria and the Akan of Ghana, it evaluates the degree to which ranking has been affected by currency devaluation and economic instability since the mid-1980s.

This paper makes a very preliminary and provisional attempt to relate the discussion in Jane Guyer's Marginal Gains (2004) of disjunction, thresholds, and multiple scales of value characteristic of economies in the Atlantic zone with the disjunction, profusion, and fragmentation characteristic of artistic genres of the region, especially praise poetry. It suggests that their underlying common property is an intense focus on the making and unmaking of persons. In a region where social and political self-realization is open-ended and depends upon acquiring people, and where people are transactable, transitions between multiple conditions of personhood can take place, but some thresholds cannot be crossed. One of the key ethnographic examples in Marginal Gains—the Niger Delta—is revisited to suggest possible lines of further inquiry into this aspect of the originality of cultural production in the zone of the Atlantic trade.

This article seeks to refine conceptually the social study of finance and thus to extend the argument of Jane Guyer's Marginal Gains (2004). Using the case of the South African “grey money” amnesty, this article argues that social studies of finance have failed to pay adequate attention to social payments, as opposed to market exchanges, in their pronouncements about the extension of the calculative rationality and universal commensuration that are supposedly intrinsic to modern money. The amnesty, which allowed forgiveness for offshore tax evasion in return for a one-time payment, reconfigured “tax minimizers” as law-abiding and rational economic actors hedging against risk. Most took the opportunity; they were granted amnesty to repatriate their funds, which generated a significant boost in revenue for the South African state, with social and symbolic implications. This article reflects on what purchase is gained on the amnesty and the social study of finance generally by considering the amnesty as a series of payments, rather than cross-boundary financial transactions between individuals, trusts, and states.

This article replicates Guyer's finding in Marginal Gains (2004) of a social gradient in expenditure patterns of Ghanaian households using more flexible statistical techniques than those used in the book. We show that similar gradients are found in Cote d'lvoire and in Kagera, Tanzania, suggesting that Guyer's finding in Ghana is a manifestation of a more general phenomenon. In addition, we examine patterns of measurement error in household expenditure data from Ghana. This reveals a worrying possibility that survey reports of expenditure may reflect respondents' beliefs about what expenditures should be, as well as actual expenditures within the household.

This article engages with Jane Guyer's assessment (in Marginal Gains, 2004) of contemporary forms of capitalism from outside the bounds of two opposing logics: the universalization of capitalist arrangements versus the specificity of local forms of economic arrangement. Guyer's rejection of a priori definitions of economic categories leads to fertile analysis of measures and mediations as poly-semic modes of valuation. The author asks: what is the theory that would account for or accommodate this polysemy? Corollary questions of epistemology arise regarding distinctions between local conventions and formal procedures and about the criteria that establish such distinctions. Conceding that we attest to the efficacy of economic concepts through practice, the author questions whether these concepts are institutionalized through “experience.” Such concepts (e.g., equivalence) are not merely “economic” in nature; their genealogies disclose the extent to which their efficacy derives from their placement in many domains of life, as artifacts of a general epistemology.

This contribution to the special issue of ASR on Jane Guyer's Marginal Gains (2004) takes up two recent, and radically different, constructivist contributions to the field of economic sociology—those of Phillip Mirowski and Michel Callon. The article makes use of Marginal Gains to interrogate both these analytics, asking if they can meet the challenge posed by the diversity and multiplicity of African popular economic practice.

Marginal Gains (2204) has been described as a surprising and bold book. Since the articles in this collection, which take one or other of its arguments as points of departure, share certain similar qualities, they can be treated as a collective effort initiating new debate with non-African economic research and thinking. This article reviews the argument of the book, highlights the concept and phenomenon of ordinal ranking in both the book and the articles, and then uses the findings to begin an appreciative critique of the ideas of Michel Callon. Although Callon's approach intersects with that of Marginal Gains in many ways, the scalar ranking of people, and the use of rank to exclude and divert, finds more prominence in the book's approach, which also has more relevance for Europe than economists seem to have acknowledged so far. The article ends with a new instance of ordinal ranking, from Cameroon.