Becoming like money: Proximity and the social aesthetics of “moneyness”

Abstract

In this article I take the scene of a group of South Indian villagers perceiving and counting a heap of collective money as a starting point to look at qualitative, subjective, and contextual variations through which money manifests itself as valued properties, circuits, performances, acts, repertoires, and capacities in social and personal life. As I argue, this requires us to scrutinize the shifting proximities between money objects and money subjects. I trace these through the notion of “moneyness,” and more precisely through the relational property of being (or getting) “in,” “at,” and “out” of what money is, becomes, and represents.