Donate
In June 1994 in Oslo, the third meeting of the European Association of Social Anthropologists was “taken by surprise by the unexpected interest in the ‘outmoded’ theme of ecology”, Alf Hornborg reports in his 2016 book, Global Magic: Technologies of Appropriation from Ancient Rome to Wall Street. The Swedish academic – along with the whole field of ecological anthropology – has been on a long and rich journey in the decades since, as is evident from his evocatively titled latest book.
World systems analysis might be understood as the cultural partner to Earth systems science. Turning the anthropologic lens on two millennia of human activity, in societies driven by money, and those that are not, offers a rich frame informed by but more theoretical than that of anthropologists David Graeber and James C. Scott. Hornborg starts with the premise, as in his earlier book, that the claims of mainstream economics are every bit as much arbitrary social constructs as any so-called “primitive magic”.
Hornborg writes: “In relativising the language of Wall Street, we can use anthropology to question the assumptions that are propelling humankind towards ever deeper inequalities and ecological disaster.” This opens up a clear view of late neoliberal globalised capitalism, contrasting it and its money-guided predecessors with traditional gift economies that express and confirm a continuing social relationship between giver and recipient. By contrast, transactions with “all-purpose money” (which can be exchanged for anything at all) involve no such relationship – or responsibility – after payment is made. “Money thus serves as a negation – a dissolution – of social relations.”
Presaging some aspects of Tao Leigh Goffe’s Dark Laboratory, Hornborg shows how this irresponsibility underpins the massive transfer of resources, as well as the social and environmental destruction, of the Industrial Revolution and subsequent global developments. This contrasts with some traditional cultures in which only food can be exchanged for food, prestige goods only for other prestige goods.
But Hornborg also brings in a thermodynamics approach through the understanding of the climate emergency as an expression of entropy. That is an approach that can only ultimately lead to a demand for a degrowth (or I would rather say a postgrowth) future. He draws on the insights of Indigenous economics, ecofeminism and ecological Marxism to see this too as a fundamental alienation of humans from their character as part of Nature. But he makes the crucial point that none of this is merely material: that “living systems are no less constituted by flows of signs and meanings than by flows of matter and energy” – echoing Jakob von Uexküll’s semiotic approach to ecology.
The final chapter, ‘Meaningful Money?’, for all that I love Hornborg’s embrace of universal basic income, is the weakest. Understandably, in the face of the climate and ecological crises, he falls for the trap of solutionism, trying to design a new model of money tied to place to tackle the systems problem that his work identifies. But I agree it’s best to aim for new thinking rather than simply charting disasters – an approach that risks descending into despair.
Liquidate is not, I must confess, an easy read, but it does have the virtue of relative brevity. It is one of those texts that leaves the reader with a delightful list of future reading across multiple fields. With so many different academic lenses now being applied to the great problem of the Anthropocene, it is a worthwhile if challenging guide. It is the product of decades of a generally open-minded academic approach (if with a minor obsession with disagreeing with Bruno Latour), which is great to see. So often, still, I encounter stacks of sealed-off academic silos, faculties unable or unwilling to talk to even their nearest neighbours.
Liquidate: How Money Is Dissolving the World by Alf Hornborg. Routledge, 2024. ISBN: 9781032679969
