Muddle Wrestling: Grappling for Conceptual Clarity in Archaic Greek Money
Muddle Wrestling: Grappling for Conceptual Clarity in Archaic Greek Money
In recent years, the global trends towards currency homogenization and monetary diversification have attracted the attention of sociologists Nigel Dodd, Geoffrey Ingham, and Viviana Zelizer, each of whom has explored at length not just contemporary monetary practices, but also the nature of money and its long history. In the course of their debates over how to define money, to trace its origins, and to outline the theoretical approaches towards the production and consumption of money in various fields of study, including economics, sociology, and politics, they have worked towards achieving greater clarity where previously there has been what Ingham has called “category errors” and Dodd a “conceptual muddle.” Largely overlooked by those who work on ancient monetary problems, their efforts to disentangle money’s abstractions and materiality offers a path out of some of the thorniest pitfalls in discussions of the development of money in the ancient Mediterranean world, particularly in the archaic period. This chapter demonstrates how Ingham’s and Dodd’s clearly defined, hierarchical units of analysis – money idea, money of account, and currency – can be profitably employed to map and isolate problems in approaches to archaic money that hitherto have been plagued by their own conceptual confusions, not least of which is how to define “money” in an archaic context.
Keywords: Coinage, Money, Numismatics, Archaic Greek History
Edinburgh Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
