The Efficacy of the Economy

Roitman, Janet L. (Janet Lee)

African Studies Review, Volume 50, Number 2, September 2007,

pp. 155-161 (Article)

Published by African Studies Association

DOI: 10.1353/arw.2007.0122

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/arw/summary/v050/50.2roitman.html

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Special Issue on Jane Guyer’s Marginal Gains:
Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa

The Efficacy of the Economy

Janet Roitman

Abstract: This article engages with Jane Guyer’s assessment (in Marginal Gains,
2004) of contemporary forms of capitalism from outside the bounds of two oppos-
ing 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 con-
cepts 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.

African Studies Review, Volume 50, Number 2 (September 2007), pp. 155–61
Janet Roitman is a research fellow with the Centre National de la Recherche Scien-
tifique (CNRS) and a member of the Institut Marcel-Mauss (CNRS-EHESS) in
Paris. She is an instructor at the Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques de
Paris. Her recent publications include Fiscal Disobedience: An Anthropology of Eco-
nomic Regulation in Central Africa (Princeton University Press, 2004); “Modes of
Governing: the Garrison-Entrepôt” (in Collier and Ong, eds., Global Assemblages:
Technology, Governmentality, Ethics [Blackwell, 2004]); “The Ethics of Illegality in
the Chad Basin” (in Comaroff and Comaroff, eds., Law and Disorder in the Post-
colony [University of Chicago Press, 2006]); and “The Right to Tax: Economic
Citizenship in the Chad Basin” (Citizenship Studies, 2007).
155
156 African Studies Review

In her most recent book, Marginal Gains (2004), Jane Guyer achieves a del-
icate and masterly balancing act, bringing the reader through highly com-
plex arguments by means of clear, straightforward language and detailed
illustrations. This book is particularly fertile because it brings together sev-
eral arguments and numerous periods of intensive field research con-
ducted by the author in various places on the African continent. For those
of us who have been avid followers of Guyer’s various research projects, this
book is particularly satisfying insofar as it is a fine representation of the
body of research and scholarship that she has developed, in original ways,
over the past years.
Steeped in, and with constant reference to, her fieldwork, Marginal
Gains is in dialogue with contemporary social theory. Most particularly, this
book offers many insights into manners of apprehending contemporary
forms of capitalism from outside the constricting bounds of two opposing
logics: the universalization of capitalist relations and arrangements versus
the specificity of local forms of economic arrangement. The latter narra-
tive, so dear to cultural anthropologists, is frequently reduced either to the
story of resistance to capitalism or else to representations of the particu-
larities of historical and cultural difference. This quest to demonstrate dif-
ference is often symptomatic of assumptions about the universalizing log-
ics of capitalism: despite its unrelenting efficacies, capitalism generally fails
to universalize human relations and economic arrangements. This obser-
vation compels us to reflect upon the tendency to assume, quite uncriti-
cally, that there is, on the one hand, Capitalism and then, on the other
hand, its alternative forms. In many significant ways, Guyer’s book docu-
ments this failure of capitalist arrangements to become universal forms of
economic life.
The merits of Guyer’s extremely thorough ethnographies and histori-
cal research lie in her documentation and accounting of various and vari-
able forms of economic rationality and modes of valuation; the chapters in
Marginal Gains entitled “Calculation” (chapter 3) and “Balances” (chapter
8) are noteworthy in this regard. I searched desperately for this kind of
invaluable research while working on similar subjects with respect to the
Chad Basin and am thus acutely aware of the scant work done in this vein,
despite the myriad books already published on the cultural logics of
exchange. The centrality of conceptual discussions on the topics of value
and modalities for qualifying objects and relations in their various eco-
nomic statuses is constantly situated with respect to the effects of colonial
interventions and the Atlantic trade, an approach that contributes to schol-
arship on the geographical and historical notion of “Atlantic Africa.”
Guyer’s point of departure is to posit that there is no essential or arche-
typical commodity transaction. The same is true for currencies or monetary
forms: she does not posit an essentialist definition; less concerned with
what money “is,” she inquires into how it signifies in particular historical sit-
uations. She notes that she has chosen to “work outward from the most
 The Efficacy of the Economy 157

characteristic generative element on both sides (Europe and Africa),

namely the expectation of gain.” The reason for this is that “gain is at the
center of microanalysis for monetary transactions, while also being the per-
sistent motive behind the macrohistory of European monetary engage-
ment in Africa. . . . To focus on gains empirically and ethnographically is
quite different from assuming them theoretically” (2004:17)
This rejection of a priori definitions or assumptions about the nature
of economic behavior is extremely important. It is the heart of Guyer’s
empirical research, the basis for her unique analytical problem: that is, the
“persistent possibility of a gainful margin in exchange, what people hope
and plan for. . . ” (2004:26). This potentiality of a margin seems to be a fairly
polysemic sort of gain—an idea of gain that is not merely economic, a
point to which I will return below.
Generally speaking, while Marginal Gains takes on many tasks, it is an
effort to describe multiplicity on the basis of ethnography so as to “incor-
porate the experience of multiplicity into the theory” (2004:18). Given this
preoccupation, I wonder about the status of this term: theory.
Theory is certainly not Guyer’s point of departure and her aim is not
necessarily to “theorize” her findings, or to lend them a systematicity that
belies the logics of the practices she describes. What, then, is the theory
that would account for or accommodate this multiplicity and polysemy?
Such a theory would have to respond to the critique of binarism as applied
to Africa—a critique that is set forth at the beginning of the book. It seems
useful to note here that this is a general critique—the dynamics of multi-
plicity in Africa are of course not specifically African, either in historical or
cultural terms. Indeed, Guyer refers to Marilyn Strathern and Nancy Munn
in her elaboration of the idea of multiplicity, which entails apprehending
exchange in terms of cultural processes of value definition and perfor-
mance—taking nothing as given or invariable.
One of the great achievements of Guyer’s scholarship (in Marginal
Gains and her other work as well) is to have described measures and medi-
ations as variable modes of valuation in specific historical configurations.
The section of the book entitled “Scales and Tropes” (part 2) is a particu-
larly fascinating account of this kind, with reference to tropic points (as
envisaged by Charles Piot [1999]), or linkages between different registers
and value scales that do not involve common denominators. This work, in
dialogue with research done by others (such as Piot) demonstrates that
numerical scales in Atlantic Africa were not and are not incremental;
rather, numerical scales contain tropic points that make them work in
intervals.
This demonstration is an important corrective to formalist analyses typ-
ical to economic history. The implications of this point for our ways of
apprehending fundamental categories, such as “number” itself, are elabo-
rated upon in the section, albeit with little reference to work in the
domains of epistemology or philosophy that has treated this matter (see,
158 African Studies Review

for example, Alain Badiou [1998] on the ontology of le multiple). Guyer’s

conclusion (2004:60) is that scales are repertoires of elements that are
pegged to each other in performance. There are no automatic derivations
between them; they involve enactments that establish particular proposi-
tions—for example, about the nature of “things” or about the nature of a
particular “good.” This is fascinating.
However, in some elaborations of this and other, similar points in the
book, there seems to be an assumed distinction between local conventions
and formal procedures. This is a speculative remark on my part, but this
point does seem to come through in the following statement: “Local con-
structs emanate from experience and not from modular principles, either
as these might be conceptualized in the Western model of a formal sector
or as they might derive directly from local cultural principles” (2004:6).
Probably, I don’t really understand what’s being said here, and there are
certainly very good reasons for making distinctions between conventions
and formal procedures. Nonetheless, it seems important to be explicit
about the criteria by which such distinctions are made.
Generally speaking, this book claims that certain economic presuppo-
sitions or concepts (e.g., equivalence) are held to emerge from “experi-
ence in the world.” In our everyday lives, there is certainly truth to the idea
that we attest to the efficacy of certain economic theories and concepts
through practice. Does this mean that these concepts emerge from our
experience of the world or of such practices? In some respects, one can
argue that it does. But first, it is important to note that many of these con-
cepts (e.g., equivalence) are not merely “economic” concepts. Their
genealogies disclose the extent to which such concepts are efficacious pre-
cisely because of their placement in many domains of life, as artifacts of a
general epistemology. Without dwelling on that point, and to return to the
question of experience, one wonders what methodology would allow us to
apprehend, seize upon, or assess such experience. Are we talking about a
phenomenology of economic practices? And, if so, how do we access this
experience of economic life? That is, can we posit forms of both direct and
indirect knowledge, as phenomenologists do? Or is this a matter of reveal-
ing “deep knowledge”? Guyer refers to “cognitive framing.” Does this sort
of hermeneutics of the economic subject allow us to make general com-
ments about “Atlantic Africa”? And, a more difficult question, does a
hermeneutics of the economic subject relate to some sort of hermeneutics
of entire communities, if we can even speak of the latter project in a sensi-
ble way?
In many ways, I imagine that Guyer’s responses to such questions
would resemble my own: the significant matter is the effects of multiple
and emergent registers of value (see Guyer 2004:21). Nonetheless, it is not
clear that this preoccupation with consequences and effects sits well with a phe-
nomenology of economic practices. Guyer proceeds in her analysis with
the idea that experience is both “of something” (an intrusion from the
 The Efficacy of the Economy 159

external world) and in something (an internalization by reflection)”

(2004:24). Her move from individual experience of economic principles to
the modes of valuation manifest in historical Atlantic Africa takes place by
aggregation. She seeks to locate emergent patterns of aggregate behavior.
As she asks: “What patterns of economic behavior emerge in aggregate
form from people’s routine recourse to these modes of reasoning”
(2004:21)?
Because, in Atlantic Africa (historically), the terms for establishing and
mediating value scales were not imposed by the authority of states, finan-
cial institutions, or religious bodies, one can only excavate their origins by
working “toward the aggregative process by which scales and performances
become institutions, institutions form into repertoires, and finally patterns
of action are discernable” (Guyer 2004:114). Do institutions arise out of
processes of aggregation? Are they merely the result of aggregations of
individual actions?
Let’s take the institution of the market.
Although one might not take issue with the point that, in Atlantic
Africa, exchanges “are simply disciplined through popular conventions
rather than formal regulation, constructed through market experience
rather than articulated models” (Guyer 2004:4), it seems worth reflecting
upon the distinction between “popular conventions” and “formal regula-
tion.” Clearly, one can delineate a distinction between such conventions and
the exercise of regulatory authority by state institutions or official financial
organizations, which seems to be the distinction Guyer wishes to uphold.
But what if some popular conventions arise from these very official domains
themselves? And, in the absence of such official institutions, such as is the
case in the region she refers to, what does one mean by “formal” when one
speaks of “formal regulation”? Are there nonstate or unofficial bodies and
agencies that nonetheless perform formal regulation? All this depends, of
course, on what we mean by “formal.” At one point, it is suggested that peo-
ple may experience or adhere to certain levels of formality in their lives
depending on the level of routinization of various practices or modes of
evaluation. But what does formality that is not routinized look like?
Guyer’s demonstration that there are no automatic derivations
between scales of value—noted above—is in part the basis for the claim
that Atlantic Africa experiences a proliferation of scalar criteria due to the
absence or lack of “formal-sector disciplines,” such as political intervention
and legal institutions. Does this situation of diverse, contending scales of
value that relate to one another represent a situation of formality that is not
routinized? I surmise that this is what she means, but I don’t quite under-
stand how such practices would perpetuate themselves without recourse to
routinization—even if some modes of linking scales or generating tropic
points were lost while others persisted. In any case, I want to hesitate on
this point about the nature of formal disciplines and the lack of regulatory
bodies.
160 African Studies Review

In an extremely rich part of Marginal Gains, Guyer describes how Igbo

and Ibibio communities developed a formalized and monetized scale of
ranking in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in a context
basically devoid of a central political authority. These ordinal rankings were
quantified and associated with acquisitiveness, or economic accumulation;
yet they were also “so deeply spiritually meaningful and religiously sanc-
tioned that continual conversions upward were intensely motivating to per-
sonal accumulation” (2004:69)—gain being then a concept that gives sense
to human exchange in several domains at once, a means of existing in a
relational sense rather than merely accumulating a monetary form, as she
notes. This situation could be construed as a religious-economic nexus, in
the way that would ring true for many substantivist economic anthropolo-
gists. But one could also raise questions about the nature of these “religious
sanctions.”
The process of ranking was integral to obtaining titles, and Guyer notes
that, especially in the nineteenth century, associations were formed to “reg-
ulate” this system of title-holding. Titles were relevant to many domains,
including the realms of politics and ritual. The system of titles established,
for instance, judicial and ritual authority; both of these, one would imag-
ine, entailed techniques and methods for disciplining the practice of rank-
ing in its economic, political, and ritual senses. Yes?
Ranking and the system of titles could perhaps be understood in terms
of methods for defining and enacting economic and social redistribution—
making them, all at once, a means of economic and social accounting.
Guyer attends to this question (2004:79), arguing that the Igbo monetiza-
tion of religious rank is “not one of redistribution, or of the charismatic
performative conspicuous consumption and destruction, or of accumula-
tion of wealth in people.” These are “secondary themes.” The “implication
of an economics of rank, by contrast with a consumption logic of spending
and maintaining monetary flow, is that rank encouraged an unusual level
of saving in currency”—which would then slow down the circulation of
money. Through meticulous and careful analysis, Guyer thus helps us
understand the emergence of the incentive to save (in Igbo communities,
for example). But could one not describe this “slowing down” of the circu-
lation of money and its translation into other value forms as a particular
mode of redistribution? That is, the logics of this situation provide for accu-
mulation or savings among some parts of the community and not others,
giving rise to a particular socioeconomic hierarchy. In an ideal world, redis-
tributive systems would take from the rich to give to the poor; but this is not
always their aim or effect.
Also, to return to the problem of the political, Guyer notes that there
were significant and widespread practices of saving that did not entail cen-
tral political control. Were they, however, devoid of political control? Does
one need to locate a centralized state to ascertain forms and modes of reg-
ulation? Evidently, valuation, ranking, and performance are eminently
 The Efficacy of the Economy 161

political engagements, as Arjun Appadurai (1986) demonstrates in his writ-

ing on the politics of value. What is the role of expertise in these situations?
Where does it lie? How is it defined and how is it transferred or maintained
between generations or between communities? Was there or is there con-
sistent agreement about conventions, or were there or are there critical
moments of dispute or disagreement that interrogate the efficacy and nat-
uralness of such conventions?
In significant ways, Marginal Gains and Guyer’s scholarship more gen-
erally further our understanding of the ways in which so-called crisis, such
as that associated with the introduction of colonial currencies, has been
negotiated and navigated, giving rise to unprecedented practices and insti-
tutions. At the same time, this work forces us to interrogate this very notion
of “crisis.” Today, that term is an obligatory adjective with reference to the
African continent (“in crisis”). This reference has prevailed since at least
the mid-to-late 1980s, which means that crisis is not a punctuated event, but
rather an ongoing state. But perhaps stasis is not crisis.
In Marx’s usage, crisis is something internal to a system—certain logics
inherent to a particular system inevitably produce crises. Is this sense
intended by the use of this word with respect to Africa, be it with regard to
the alleged “crisis of the state” or with regard to monetary history? Crises
can of course be thought of in other terms (non-Marxian), although the
specific context of economic history is significant to the use of the term. Its
etymology is Greek: krisis, signifying “decision” (from krinein, decide).
Crises in this sense are decisive moments. However, in most of our com-
mentary on the state and the economy in Africa, “crisis” signifies “chaos,”
chaotic moments, or moments when regulatory authority or regulatory
regimes appear to no longer exist or to no longer apply. Is this the case?
Can one even posit a historical situation in which there is no regulation of
social relations and economic production, consumption, and exchange?

Acknowledgments

I thank the participants in the panel devoted to Marginal Gains at the

Annual African Studies Association Meeting, Boston, November 2005,
Peter Geschiere and Charles Piot for insisting, and Jane Guyer for her
inspiration.

References
Appadurai, Arjun, ed. 1986. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspec-
tive. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Badiou, Alain. 1998. Court traité d’ontologie transitoire. Paris: Seuil.
Guyer, Jane. 2004. Marginal Gains: Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Piot, Charles. 1999. Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa. Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press.