The social meaning of money

by Viviana A. Rotman Zelizer

A dollar is a dollar is a dollar - or so most of us believe. Indeed, it is part of the ideology of our time that money is a single, impersonal instrument that impoverishes social life by reducing social relations to cold, hard cash. Arguing against this conventional wisdom, Viviana A. Zelizer shows how people have invented their own forms of currency, earmarking money in ways that baffle market theorists, incorporating funds into webs of friendship and family relations and otherwise varying the process by which spending and saving takes place. The Social Meaning of Money shows that people everywhere are constantly creating different kinds of money-gift certificates, Christmas savings accounts, food stamps, and other kinds of vouchers. "People segregate, differentiate, label, decorate, and particularize money to meet their complex social needs," the author writes. Zelizer, a distinguished social scientist and prizewinning author, offers the first full treatment in nearly a century of wh