ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces students to anthropological literature on money. The concern has been less about money and more with how "encounters" with money produce anthropological understanding. While people transact with money all the time, not all such transactions generate an "encounter". For ethnographers, money is often a source of both knowledge and trouble; because money tends to be deeply symbolic and subtly coded, it offers ethnographers remarkable insights into local cultures. At the same time, it also offers numerous opportunities for failures - of reading, of acting, of responsibility. Ethnographic studies of money have, by and large, focused on non-Western societies. One of the challenges in contemporary anthropology is to differentiate between money as a concept elaborated by philosophers and economists and money as a symbol that participates in specific processes. Money is a source of creativity in other contexts as well. If money is a medium for global interconnectedness, then those connections are hardly uniform.
