Emergent Conversation 20

The Politics of Inflation

Moderated and Edited by Charles Dolph

To consider the current dynamics of inflation anthropologically, Charles Dolph facilitated a virtual discussion with Federico Neiburg and Myriam Amri, edited and compiled here in three parts. This is Part I.

Charles Dolph

Thank you both for joining me for this discussion. I want to begin by situating current inflationary phenomena historically and relative to existing anthropological discussions of the topic. What can we glean, theoretically and ethnographically, from an anthropological literature of geographical, historical, and cultural breadth that documents specificities and commonalities with respect to experiences of inflation across contexts? Do you see parallels and resonances between previous historical moments or varied geographical and cultural settings that make extant scholarship illuminating with respect to our current moment? Conversely, what might stand out to you as especially new and different about the present dynamics of inflation that challenges or highlights potential limitations of previous scholarship?

Federico Neiburg

I am grateful for the opportunity to participate in this conversation. It raises a crucial matter regarding contemporary collective life and brings up to date the discussion points of the anthropology of economy/ics and money, temporalities and crises, and the relationships between economy and life (particularly what concerns the concept of the “cost of living”). In my view, these are the central issues that pervade the theme of inflation.

Contrary to possible first impressions based on the monopoly economics has over the conceptualization and public debates on the value of currency, the anthropological archive on inflation is quite rich. It is markedly inter-disciplinary, maintaining close conversations with history, and, more recently, with science and technology studies through ethnographies of the economic sciences, of numbers, and of calculative devices.

A temporal mark for our discipline’s interest in inflation is Paul Bohannan’s (1959) work on West African monetary pluralities and disequilibria. Bohannan inscribes the “monetary revolutions” (503) he observed between World War II and the eve of decolonization within a long history of global fluxes of monies, merchandises, and people. These fluxes were locally modulated by myriad forms of ever-tense entanglements between currencies with multiple and specific uses, between strong and weak currencies, between more or less local or global currencies. I find that the nature of the opposition between these terms, which for so long vainly held the attention of anthropologists, is less interesting than the pragmatist and historical perspective on monetary universes that this approach anticipated.

Bohannan (1959) suggested that the meanings of money should be explored through monetary practices, by observing the daily manipulation of various currencies, thus distancing himself from the functionalist perspective dominant in the economic sciences, according to which the true currencies (or the healthy currencies, see Neiburg 2010) were those that functioned, at the same time, as a unit of measurement, a means of exchange, and a reserve of value. The anthropologist suggested that the disentangled and complex articulation of these functions in the monetary landscapes that he studied were by no means anomic. On the contrary, they were constitutive of these very landscapes, which were cut across by inflationary outbreaks as in the market of enslaved peoples and the fluxes of cowrie shells that linked the Indian Ocean, West Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Historians shed light on these global markets of shells and people, and on the relations between the formation of cowrie shell bubbles and inflationary outbreaks in West Africa (particularly in the second half of the nineteenth century). The African monetary (dis)orders of the twentieth century were thus also a legacy of colonialism.

A few decades later, the confluence of a series of global processes stimulated and renovated anthropological interest in the economy, leading to an even more explicit interest in inflationary processes and monetary instability. Chris Gregory (1997) pinpointed the end of the backing of the US dollar by gold in 1971 as the first point of inflection, giving rise to the world of “savage money,” one expression of which was the intense inflation experienced by the United States in the last years of the 1970s and the early 1980’s.

As of 1989, with the end of the Soviet Union, Central and Eastern Europe and much of the African continent witnessed an accelerated transition of economic regimes. New ways of organizing the economy and new currencies were implemented in contexts of great uncertainty, motivating sharp monetary turbulences. At the same time, the national currencies of various African countries (such as Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and South Africa) and South America (such as Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela) underwent intense processes of loss of value and hyperinflationary outbreaks, always associated with the implementation of stabilization plans and monetary reforms driven by international agencies, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

These transformations (alongside the monetary unification of the European Union) prompted the rebirth of anthropology’s interest in the economy, money, and monetary disequilibria.[1] Fernando Coronil (1997) on Venezuela, Gabriel Kessler and Silvia Segal (1997) on Argentina, Maureen O’Dougherty (2002) on Brazil, Claudio Lomnitz (2003) on Mexico, and Federico Neiburg (2006) on Brazil and Argentina, carried out some of the pioneering work on Latin America.[2] But it was in the West African context, and more specifically in the work of Jane Guyer, that the anthropology of inflationary processes assumed an unprecedented density. In 1995 Guyer published the edited volume Money Matters. Instabilities, values and social payments in the modern history of Western African communities. In her introduction, she formulated a powerful research agenda on how people navigate inflationary processes, dealing with the political effects of ongoing monetary stabilization plans, particularly in Nigeria. Guyer showed that the ethnography of processes of price formation was part of the anthropology of value and of valuation processes.[3] She also revealed the benefits of analyzing ordinary or vernacular monetary practices and ideas alongside the practices and ideas of specialists in order to understand the long history of “currency interfaces” proper to the pluri-monetary universes that characterize inflationary processes.

There are three further studies, complementary to the above works, which seem to me to be central to this output, and which we will be able to discuss later: the revolution caused by the work of Viviana Zelizer (1996) in the sociology of money, the research program triggered by the work of Michel Callon, situating the social study of the economy in the field of the social study of science and technology, and the comparative and inter-disciplinary enterprise of Bruno Théret (2007) on monetary crises.

The perspective on inflation which seems to me most promising at the moment is built in dialogue with these studies. As I will show later, from my point of view it traces two articulated paths: that of a pragmatist anthropology of money, and that of a phenomenological anthropology of the economy, attentive to its experiential and sensory dimensions.

Myriam Amri

What is inflation the name of?

I’m grateful to be part of this conversation and to think collectively about the terms of our inflation era. Federico Neiburg took us through a comprehensive and critical genealogy that informs the basis of our scholarly reckoning with today’s politics of inflation.

I want to begin by taking a detour into the very meaning of the word “inflation.” The notion of “inflation” now conjured across mainstream press, scholarly debates, and even protest slogans is not as straightforward as we have come to use it. ​​Despite the generalization of discourses on inflation, from the perspective of economics for example, inflation is not a forthright measurement. Rather, inflation is an aggregate, meaning it condenses a set of dimensions: the rise of prices, the relation between the purchasing power of consumers within a territory, and the rate of the national currency. The International Monetary Fund defines inflation as “the rate of increase in prices over a given period of time. Inflation is typically a broad measure, such as the overall increase in prices or the increase in the cost of living in a country. […] Whatever the context, inflation represents how much more expensive the relevant set of goods and/or services has become over a certain period, most commonly a year” (Oner 2017). Inflation is as such defined in the relation between price and currency and as a measure indexed to time.

I am struck by the tenets of inflation brought by this orthodox perspective; that inflation is an aggregate and that it is a measure of an increase in a particular space and for a given time. It means that behind inflation as a fixed category, there is actually plurality and motion.

Inflation lumps a set of observations on price, currency fluctuations, and even people’s consumption habits underneath an “aggregate.” Like Callon and MacKenzie (Callon 2007; MacKenzie, Muniesa, and Siu 2007) tell us, economies are shaped by economics, which bears the question of the kind of lifeworlds produced by inflation measurements. Sarah Muir (2021) offers a response in the conversations, affects, strategies, and anti-strategies—of waiting, of hopelessness—that have occurred during Argentina’s enduring inflation crises. She shows how lasting inflation processes produce a sense of crisis as everyday routine, where the return to “normal” is indefinitely postponed. Inflation then invokes a relation to space, through the scale where inflation occurs:  national, regional, or even global today. Inflation tells us something about the enduring spatial categories of the economy, especially that of the national economy. As Hannah Appel (2017) notes, the national economy is a space of “as-if: misrepresentation, simplification, forgetting, longing,” meaning a category that holds so much valence (even statistical one) while “remaining contingent and contestable” (296). Finally, inflation is temporal, measuring change over time and which bears the question of what kind of temporalities get fixed through inflation? Perhaps Guyer’s prophetic “near-future” (2007), one where the rise of prices becomes an immutable prediction that alters present temporalities.

As such, social scientists of inflation complicate the many processes encompassed within the word inflation, to instead investigate its tenets. It means asking: what do we mean when we speak about inflation? How is economics’ definition of inflation complicated when we investigate the social worlds of inflation?

Inflation when taken apart almost becomes akin to a Maussian total social fact, an exponential curve carrying social practices, time, and space. Though I say this playfully, I believe we ought to reckon with the totalizing aspects of inflation. The geographer Derek McCormack (2015), for example, speaks of inflation in atmospheric terms. He locates how inflation produces an “atmosphere of emergency,” using the term “atmosphere” to hint at the affective intensity of price rises which alter the movements of bodies and the relations between objects and subjects, as “prices participate in the performative generation of affective spacetimes that can be grasped as atmospheres whose intensity and velocity increase as they become emergencies” (143). His usage of atmosphere pairs with Coronil’s (1997) sense of a “magical performance” that “depends on rendering invisible the artifice of its production” (3). Though Coronil’s magic invests first and foremost the state, the atmosphere of inflation, on the other hand, posits the market as the uncontrolled force for rising prices while central banks are turned into the “single agent endowed with the magical power” to reduce inflation (4).

In our current era, global inflation seems to indeed have atmospheric and magical qualities, the anxiety of rising prices and the looming threats of a recession hovering above consumers. While keeping the atmospheric nature of inflation in sight, we also ought to contextualize the various periods of inflation. The historian Rebecca Spang (2015) reminds us that “each episode of hyperinflation needs to be addressed on its own terms, as an economic manifestation of a specific political and social crisis” (218). Her work on France in the eighteenth century, along with Widdig’s (2001) work on inflation in Weimar Germany, locate different histories of inflation. They not only highlight how inflation processes are inextricable from moments of political and economic ruptures, but also how the experiences of inflation are entangled in the production of Western modernity.

The core of inflation is perhaps price. As a measure of the rise of prices, inflation covers in its shield, price as representative of a “real” equation of demand versus supply. Anthropologists have contested the notion of price as the basis of market laws, showing instead how prices are not determined by an offer versus demand equation but instead by a whole set of social rules which produces spheres of exchange (Bohannan 1955), “inalienable” goods that cannot be priced (Weiner 1992) and even modes of resistance that contest hierarchies through prices (Roitman 2005). As Polanyi noted (2001[1944]), prices are instead “fictions” which conceal in different ways compositions of labor and capital. I would add that prices are not only fictions but instead persuasive fictions, meaning that prices produce a sense of commensurability between things (Gregory 1996) that nevertheless remains contextual and open to social conflicts.

Anthropologist Jane Guyer (2011) has argued that the recognition of price as composite means that scholars ought to attend to elements of price that render its naturalization possible. Inflation plays a central role in naturalizing price as it scales up from price to price trend and therefore shifts the focus to the trend itself as if the basis—price—was already a given. As Guyer notes “an anthropology of value that fails to address prices is unsatisfactory, and so are studies of risk and reflexive categories that do not take account of the composition, levels, conditions, and consequences of price. Price is a major cultural as well as political-economic phenomenon” (203). How would anthropology, then, not only narrate the object price but also rising prices as emerging social processes? In other words, what does an anthropology of inflation look like?

Charles Dolph received his PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 2022. His dissertation, titled “The Cultural Battle Against the Dollar: Struggles over Hoarding and Democracy in the Twilight of Argentina’s Soy Boom,” examines state monetary policies and their legal entailments against the backdrop of the Argentina’s material transformation into a major producer and exporter of soybeans and ongoing debates over its post-Cold War democratic transition. He is currently a Research Fellow in the Anthropology Department at University College London, where he is researching a new wealth tax introduced in Bolivia in 2020.

Federico Neiburg is a professor of Social Anthropology at the National Museum, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, a principal researcher at the Brazilian and Rio de Janeiro Research Councils (CNPq and FAPERJ), and founder of the Center for Research in Culture and Economics (www.nucec.net). He has research experience in Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and the Republic of Haiti. His interests have focused on the anthropology of economy and money, economic emergencies and crises, inflation and monetary disequilibria. In addition to editing special issues and publishing articles in journals such as Comparative Studies in Society and History; Cultural Anthropology; Anthropological Theory; Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory; International Sociology; Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales; Genèses: Sciences sociales et histoire; Mana: Estudos de Antropologia Social; Etnográfica; and Social Anthropology, his more recent publications include the volumes The Real Economy: Essays in Ethnographic Theory (ed. with Jane Guyer), The Cultural History of Money in the Age of Empires (ed. with Nigel Dodd), and Conversas etnográficas haitianas.

Myriam Amri is completing her PhD in the joint degree in Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. Her scholarship investigates the articulations between money, the economy, and global capitalism from North Africa. Through ethnographic, multimodal, and archival research, her dissertation examines the making of Tunisia’s official currency – its institutions and policies – in relation to its subversions – the informal, illicit, and illegal. In addition, she has published on border economies, inflation, environmental degradation, photography and visual methods, and the colonial histories of fire and coral in the Mediterranean. Her recent writings have appeared in Anthropology of the Middle East, NiCHE, and Kohl Journal. She is also a filmmaker and visual artist and her related creative practice explores crises and dystopias using film, photography, and sound.

Notes

[1] Hart (1986) and Bloch and Parry (1989) were central references in the reconfiguration of these new conversations.

[2] It is worth drawing attention to another point of inflection in Latin American thought on inflation, a social and public problem that haunted the last decades of the twentieth century: the pioneering work of Albert Hirschman (1981).

[3] Price formation had only been marginally investigated in the anthropology of markets. See, for example, Geertz (2022 [1979]).

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