Marginal Gains: Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa (review)

Abstract

Jane I. Guyer. Marginal Gains: Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004. xvii +207 pp. Marginal Gains: Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa is slim volume that bursts with originality and illuminating insights about matters anthropological and economic. Jane Guyer crafted the book's chapters from the Lewis Henry Morgan lectures, which she presented in 1997. The assumptions with which Guyer begins her discussion undermine purely substantive as well as neoclassical approaches to economies. With considerable empirical ammunition and thoughtfulness, she recommends that wide range of concepts that anthropologists and economists alike have taken for granted be subject to re-analysis. She has firm grasp of the history of Atlantic Africa (West and Equatorial Africa) and of the archival material that reveals what we can know of how economic transactions-of slaves, guns, currencies, sacrificial objects, and food-actually worked from precolonial times to the present. This material is not easy to work with, and she is careful to place it in context and consider what is missing from it. Central to Guyer's reasoning is that economies of Atlantic Africa are neither wholly distinctive nor utterly subsumed by Western economic logic. They are enmeshed but not in dualistic fashion. Let me expand on some of her major findings and contributions to economic anthropology. Guyer concentrates on what she calls bewilderments, puzzles in how the popular economies of Atantic Africa work: Is there logic (or logics) that can be discerned from the of what served as currencies, their flows and directions, registers, and scales? Why is it that as total expenditures increase, the same proportion, roughly, is expended on food in the personal budgets of poor and rich households alike in Ghana? Or, how does commodity exchange in Atlantic Africa work, given that, even today, most currency that goes into circulation in Nigeria, never returns again to such formal institutions as banks? She reviews the history of economic exchange within and between regions in Atlantic Africa and draws the following conclusions in her first chapter: one must assume that Atlantic Africa and European history and culture are part of the same complex, a co-production of Africa and Europe over centuries of economic and political engagement (14). The same item, such as brass manillas (ankle and arm bracelets), could be viewed as barter items between regions, tradable goods within particular sphere or general purpose currency, depending on who held them, how they were exchanged, whether they were for purposes of export, regional trade, or local barter, and where. Relatively worthless commodities originating from Europe (outdated guns and cowries, for example) could be used to transact purchases of highly valuable items, such as funerary statuary or slaves in Atlantic Africa. Guyer discusses at length multiplicity and the astuteness with which Africans were able to make marginal gains, dependent upon the manner in which conversions took place in exchange. She argues that asymmetrical exchange was fundamental to African monetary practices and explains how margin(s) that Africans hoped to obtain through their exchanges are constituted and conventionalized in popular economies. In Atlantic Africa, many different kinds of currencies circulated simultaneously, inflationary processes were at work, and one currency might come to dominate at particular moment in time, only to lose its status eventually as new kinds of goods entered the system. Each moment of transaction entailed threshold, and it was both the directional flow of transactions and the threshold that participants sought to manipulate or control for purposes of marginal gain. She sets herself an enormous challenge, first because she asumes that multiple scales, rather than single scale or set of equivalences, such as neoclassical notions of supply and demand, embedded in utility, or Marxian notions of value, such as labor, characterize transactions. …