01 / Reading Guide
Reading Guide
Who this book is for
For students of economic and political anthropology seeking an account of money that does more than describe prices and market exchange. Martin places moral, ritual and material practices in the same analytical frame. The lecture format makes individual arguments approachable while still requiring careful attention to how comparisons are constructed.
Prerequisites
Basic cultural anthropology and willingness to examine ethnographic examples closely are useful. Familiarity with gift exchange, Marx or Weber helps, but the lectures explain their main questions without advanced economics or mathematical models.
What it covers
Four lectures examine money and value, spirit currencies and prosperity in Chinese and American settings. A later introduction and afterword locate the original intervention within anthropological debate. Rural Taiwanese practices and an American prosperity-oriented religious setting are interpreted through the relations money makes possible, including obligations, kinship and imagined abundance. The comparison does not establish two timeless national cultures.
How to use it
Choose one object or practice described in each setting and list the different kinds of value attached to it. Distinguish an exchange calculation from an obligation or ritual transformation, then test whether the distinction itself fits the evidence. Reconstruct how a classical theoretical idea changes when used with the ethnographic example. Write a comparison that specifies the scale and period of each case, and identify a finding that would challenge it. Keep the book’s interpretation separate from assumptions about contemporary financial behaviour.
Edition and sources
HAU first published these edited 1986 lectures as a book in 2015; 1986 is not the publication year. The complete publisher-hosted PDF is free to read, while the stated identifier denotes the paperback. The file retains copyright notices and does not grant a blanket Creative Commons licence. Read the new framing alongside the older field material rather than treating every passage as a present-day report. Official complete reading route.
