Chapter 13 Student Activities

What Can Money Reveal about Culture?

Chapter 9 focuses on the world’s economic systems and how they are inextricably intertwined with sociocultural contexts. It also describes a variety of currencies, from cash to cows. Presumably, students have had more experience with paper money than livestock exchange, but they might not have considered how much “paper money” itself can reveal about a culture’s values. Consider how much you could speculate about American culture based on a $1 bill. Let’s take that a step further to include some unfamiliar currencies.

• Students should visit http://www.banknoteworld.com/, a site that features detailed scanned images of world paper currencies—thousands of bills from past and present. Students will choose ten bank notes (preferably not all from one nation or region) and analyze them.
• In some cases, this will require additional research. A lot of bills have pictures of people on them. Who are these people? What kinds of people become immortalized on money?
• How do you interpret artistic motifs on the bills? For example, why does a US$1 bill have a pyramid on it? What does the eagle holding an olive branch and quiver and arrows symbolize? Try this kind of analysis on unfamiliar currencies.
• Are there any recurring themes that all ten of your bank notes, or most of them, have in common?

Have students write a short research paper (about three pages long) describing their bank note analysis and conclusions.

The Penny Game

The book Strategies in Teaching Anthropology (2d ed., 2001, Prentice Hall), edited by P. Rice and D. McCurdy has a useful exercise called the “penny game” in which students exchange pennies (or other small objects, like beans or corn kernels) and record on an index card the names of their exchange partners and the amounts they exchange.

Here is a summary of the game: Students can give zero, 1, or 2 pennies to anyone in the class who agrees to exchange objects. Students should decide, without telling their exchange partner, how many they want to give and then pass them to the other student. The partners should record on their index cards how many they gave to and received from that partner. After several rounds of exchange with different partners, students total the number of pennies they have, and the teacher pauses to ask who has the most and who has the least what their exchange strategies are, writing their strategies on the board. Then the teacher reports that a storm hit the village, and one-third of the class lost a lot of its wealth and must turn over all but one of its pennies to the teacher. These students turn to their index cards to realize they have social relations who can help them recover. If a student lists a situation of “negative reciprocity” (received more than gave), he or she cannot go to that same exchange partner to ask for any pennies. But he or she can ask for the equivalent number of pennies from a relationship of “balanced reciprocity” (gave and received the same amount) and double the number of pennies given to someone in a situation of “generalized reciprocity” (giving generously without reciprocation). Ask students to do a recount of their pennies. Quite likely, there has been a leveling so that extremes of wealth and poverty (measured in terms of pennies) have evened out somewhat. The teacher then asks students to analyze the experience and insights they gained about reciprocity, solidarity, and so on from the exercise.

Selling Culture in a Market Economy

Anthropologist Charlene Makley maintains a website called “Visions of Value” (rdc.reed.edu/c/econdev/home/), a searchable archive of print advertisements divided by topic into thirty-seven galleries. This can be used either as an in-class activity/discussion tool or as a take-home research project.

• In class, instructors can choose a gallery or galleries most relevant to their topical coverage and ask students to culturally interpret the advertisements. What are they trying to sell, whether a material product or a cultural ideal? What images are used, and why were those images chosen? Do students find them emotionally compelling?
• For a research project, instructors can assign each student a gallery and ask them to summarize it and respond to the questions above.