Gregory approaches this from the perspective of values.

He never makes clear exactly what values are, but reading between the lines, I understand it as the things we do to obtain the approval of others. Implicit in this definition is the hope of personal gain from holding particular values. This is not an obvious definition, because it comes with tricky consequences, like the non-existence of true altruism as a value. There are a few ways to resolve this apparent contradiction and Gregory chooses the simpler one: he assumes the contradiction away by postulating that anything humans do that isn’t directly about survival is about maintaining human relationships, that true altruism does not exist.

In other words, the theory of value Gregory develops in the book starts off from the assumption that values are born out of human relationships. He contrasts this to many alternative theories of value, such as

• Friedmanism: things are valuable because individuals desire them.
• Marxism: things are valuable because they require labour to produce.
• Physiocracy: things are valuable to the extent food can be grown on them.
• Mercantilism: things are valuable to the extent they are gold.

Gregory’s interpersonal relationship theory of value does not really falsify these other theories of value – it attempts to generalise over them.

The difficult thing about values is that, broadly speaking, we share them with our neighbours. They quickly become part of the invisible fabric of the society we live in, so we rarely make note of them.

Gregory happened to be in the perfect place to notice them. His fieldwork started in the Trobriand Islands, which has a rich culture around gifts. Relationships are signified and maintained through the giving and receiving of gifts. When Gregory later moved to Bastar, he was met with a stark contrast to Trobriand: Life in Bastar was incredibly commercialised. Even death was bordered by commercial transactions.

This ritual is performed ten days after the death of a relative to lift the taboos that follow death. The family members concerned set up a symbolic market (a “mock bazaar”) at cross-roads in their village where they pretend to buy and sell. In these rituals old clothes, bits of wood, seeds and beans are laid out for sale on the ground as if in a real market. For money broken pieces of an earthen pot are used.

This commercialisation came as a surprise, because in everything Gregory had done to prepare for his fieldwork in Bastar, the focus was always on Brahmic purity and caste-based organisation – things unique to India. Nobody had bothered to write about the commercialisation of life in Bastar because it’s not unique to Bastar, after all. But this is also what makes it a powerful object of study.

Gregory did not find just commercial values in Bastar. He divides the social life into three major spheres:

• The State is a relatively modern invention which concerns itself with large-scale appropriation of resources, a monopoly on violence within its borders, and being delegated to exercise foreign policy on the behalf of the people within its borders.
• The Market is where people come together and exchange commodities at rates which both parties to the transaction agree on.
• The House is a loosely defined institution that preserves something across time through reciprocal relationships. The values a person holds are to a large extent part of what this something is.

Gregory believes the House continually reproduces the reigning values, rather than them being a remnant of history.

I question the claim that the roots of a value system are to be found in the values of long dead ancestors and that they somehow leapfrog a century of history to bear down on the minds of the living. The values of goods establishes a link between the dead and the unborn by means of the living, and it is the struggle for prestige among the living that determines what standard of value reigns supreme.

Things like friendships are part of the House, as they are based on reciprocal relationships.

Gregory hypothesises that there are, generally, three ways in which a thing can be valued.

• As a commodity,
• As a gift, and/or
• As a good.

Commodities are fungible, or alienable, in the lingo. If I give you a bowl of rice, and you throw it in a pan with your other rice, you don’t care specifically which of the rice grains came from me. You accepted the rice for its commodity value – and hopefully that was the spirit in which I gave it to you, too. (But a difference of opinion of this kind can be the source of serious conflict.) The commodity value of a thing is the Market value or the use value of it.

In contrast, if I give you a fancy bottle of wine, you might put it away in a cupboard and wait for a special moment to uncork it. In the meantime, you’ll think of me when you see the bottle. If the bottle breaks, you can buy a new one, but it won’t quite be the same. The identity of that specific bottle is tied to the identity of the giver. This signifies the bottle is valued as a gift rather than a commodity.

The distinction between detachment (something leaves its previous owner) and alienation (something is no longer associated with its previous owner) is most clearly illustrated by Gregory in a story of a young girl. She cuts a few strands of her hair off and gives her best friend as a token of her commitment to their relationship, and her friend treasured this gift. The next day (she planned this well, you see) the giving girl has an appointment with her hairdresser, where much more of her hair is cut off. Many theories of value would lead one to believe that the more laborious and skilled work of the hairdresser, which resulted in more hair being cut off, would give the hair on the floor more value than the gift to the friend. That, Gregory claims, is conflating commodity value for gift value. They are different, and alienation – not detachment – is what sets them apart. The hair on the barbershop floor is not a gift to the hairdresser, and neither is the friend meant to treat the gift of hair as a commodity to be used or sold.

Both commodities and gifts are detachables, but what sets them apart is alienation.

Goods are opposite to gifts, in a way. Whereas gifts are inalienable detachables, i.e. things that are transferred between people, goods are also inalienable, but they are keepsakes, i.e. things people hold on to. Gifts gain their value when they are given away, whereas goods gain their value when their guardian successfully prevents their transfer. The longer the royalty has held on to the crown jewels, the more highly they become valued.

The idea that a good is something to be guarded against transfer is a recurring theme in Savage Money. Gregory often speaks of the owner of a good not as an owner, but a guardian. The guardian of a good merely protects it for the next generation. Whereas a commodity can change owner, we might say that a good stays put, but a new guardian succeeds the old one. Goods can take diverse forms; examples include land, heirlooms, heraldic coats of arms, and family fortune.

A good does not necessarily have just one guardian – sometimes multiple people consider themselves guardians of the same good. This often leads to conflict, as in the historic case of Hopi Indians and European settlers who both considered themselves guardians of the same American land. It can also happen in everyday inheritance or divorce disputes, which is part of why they get so heated. Disputes over goods are disputes over our self-worth; what good are we when we fail to be responsible guardians over our goods?

Goods are a common type of value, but since we started by saying that values are the things we do to gain the approval of others, we can suspect that guarding goods is not the only value we might encounter. I value charitable giving. Some people value arranging celebrations. I have known people who value maintaining a very clean home – they tie a surprising amount of their self-worth to the amount of clutter and dirt other people can find in their home. I have had managers who have appeared to value authority highly – it seems that way because they attempted to accrue authority even when it came at the expense of effective operation of the business.

A common value that sits on the edge of being a good is territory. This is an important value in many cultures, although it takes different shapes in each. For a farmer, land is territory. For a hunter, an entire forest can be considered their territory, and they consider themselves the guardian of that forest. Mafiosi are famously territorial.

A case of territorial value Gregory learned about in Bastar was that of the Rajasthani merchants. The Rajasthani merchants have a strong territorial network spanning most of India that makes it very hard for outsiders to break into the rural trade where they are active. The Rajasthani case is particularly interesting because their territory takes an unexpected shape. It is a mercantile territory, marked not by physical borders, but by credit arrangements and business deals.

But this should not be surprising. Human territoriality often comes with a set of relationships, traditions, and norms that determine who is part of the group and can get access to the territory, and the prestige and benefits it brings.

The pervasiveness of values in our acts means we cannot look at another person’s choice and claim it is stupid without first asking by what values it was governed.

Glass bangles are a big business in large parts of India. They are “as much a necessity as rice”, but for cultural rather than biological reasons. It would be silly for me to spend large amounts of money on glass bangles, but it makes sense for a Bastari woman, because different value systems shape our actions. As much as I prefer my value system, it would be silly of me to claim it to be superior to anyone else’s.

These differences can lead to misunderstandings that have grave effects on people’s lives. Gregory spends some time explaining how the World Bank failed to improve economic conditions in Bastar. The international community had noticed the poor in Bastar often take out village loans at – what the World Bank considered to be – indefensible interest rates. So the World Bank got together with Indian authorities and arranged a program for providing loans at more reasonable rates to the rural poor in Bastar. The rates for these loans were set such that if the capital was used to improve agriculture along industrial patterns, the increased productivity of farming would make it easy to pay off the loan. It was a good deal.

The idea was that market-based lending would outcompete village lending, and the economic standards of people would be improved through industrialisation. Some people were convinced to take these new loans, and one of two things happened:

• Either they failed to industrialise their farms for technical reasons (lack of consolidated land, lack of knowledge, lack of raw materials, etc.); or
• They didn’t care about industrialisation and used the money to throw a kick-ass wedding or funeral instead.

Gregory does not know a single case in which agricultural productivity actually did improve. However, the loans were due none the less. Some people had their land – their only source of income – foreclosed. Since land is a good in Bastar, this was humiliating in addition to not being great for their economic condition. To avoid that outcome, a lot of people took out an even bigger village loan – you know, the one thing the World Bank tried to drive out – to repay the loan to the World Bank.

There are many lessons Gregory draws from this sequence of events. The first, and probably most important one, is what we’ve already remarked: we cannot judge the actions of others without being informed of their value systems. It would be stupid for me to take out a loan and then throw a kick-ass wedding with it, because my value system does not include kick-ass weddings. They’re fun, but they’re not something I do to gain prestige with other people in my proximity.

But for the people of Bastar? Sure, kick-ass weddings were the thing you earned money for. If you found yourself with a lot of money, a kick-ass wedding or funeral was what you did with it. Lifecycle rituals are really important in Bastar. People did with the money precisely what they needed to do with the money. It conflicts with my values, but not with theirs. (This is not an isolated incident. The World Bank is built on the assumption that if you just give people the right incentives, they will become good capitalists. It turns out it’s not an inherent human desire to become a good capitalist, and an economic system built around capitalism makes people worse off when capitalism is not part of the value system.)

And to be fair, I’m not one to judge. You should see my mortgage. I burn a ridiculous amount of my income paying interest on it. This is not money invested, it’s money I pay just to stay afloat. A large home in an attractive location is apparently one of my values – but I can imagine other people laughing all the way to the bank if they don’t share this value.

One might ask what makes a value different from a desire or a want. Gregory does not touch on this, but reading between the lines I think values

• Are more persistent,
• Are informed by the people around a valuer, and, oddly
• Can contradict each other.

On some level, I think I gain prestige from an expensive home. This stands in contradiction with one of my other values: charitable giving. This probably does not come as a surprise, but many people hold contradictory values. The interesting thing to do is not to go “Ah-ha! Gotcha!” and assert superiority, but rather to explore how a person resolves that conflict in a difficult situation.

This is indeed how Gregory first came over studying values across the world. In Trobriand, as we mentioned, there is a rich culture around gift-giving. This was despite the commercial world of free markets having captured the islands also. When Gregory studied other anthropologists’ work in Trobriand, it seemed as though they divided the islands into separate realms of being, and assumed that some people transact only at the market, and others only in gifts. Gregory thought this seemed odd, since he had only met people who effortlessly switched between value systems as they went from one sphere of life to another. A rich person might leave a gift-giving ritual in a Mercedes–Benz purchased from a regular dealership with a loan from a financial institution.

This sets up a recurring theme of coevality: something can belong to multiple categories at the same time. A person can be “a son, a brother, a patriarch, a Sikh, and an ironsmith” all at once. All these come with different expectations from different value systems, and resolving it into a judgment in a specific situation is a complex internal process. Gregory thinks we don’t acknowledge coevality enough when we study people – we tend to focus on one of their aspects to the exclusion of others.

The opposite response also happens. Many people, when facing this problem, instead turn to epistemological relativity. They say “it’s all relative” and then duck out of the interesting questions that would come if we tried to look at things more objectively.

It is not sufficient to merely assert that it is a cultural construction, and leave it at that. Cultural constructions have human builders and the task is to reveal the identity of these builders, to describe the tools they use, to define the form of their construction, and to critique their ends.

This is where Gregory stands with both feet firmly planted in positivism. He believes human behaviour is, in broad strokes, similar across time and space, and we can come up with generalisations that describe at least the framework within which human behaviour happens. This takes drawing sharp contrasts (such as those between gift and commodity) and seeing where that reasoning goes.

He notes that the point of inventing strict categories and trying to apply them is not to understand how the world really works, but it is a tool to sketch out a model of particular aspects of how the world works in certain situations.

In a broad example of Gregory’s embrace of coevality while retaining strict categories, he disagrees with Marx on the natural progression of economies. Marxists claim that barter (exchanging commodities for other commodities) evolves into marketing (taking commodities to market, exchanging them for money, and then using that money on the same market to buy other things), which then evolves into the cycle of mercantile capital (buying things for money, using goods to refine them somehow, and selling them for more money.)

Gregory finds these categories valuable, but wherever he has been, these forms of trade have not replaced each other, but coexisted in varying proportion – they are coeval. We cannot properly learn about people’s values by assuming one of these forms of trade dominates the others. We can learn something by investigating the circumstances in which people choose particular modes of transaction.

Going back to the failure of the World Bank, it’s worth briefly touching on two more lessons. The first is the common misunderstanding that a smallholder farmer of parcelised land can improve their productivity if they just have more money to invest. Gregory observes that throughout the history of industrialisation, it’s not as simple as putting money into capital to get more money.

Gregory borrows some notation from Marx, and the picture is perhaps most clear using that. Here are some examples:

• C–C notates barter, or exchanging commodities for other commodities.
• C–M–C notates marketing, or exchanging commodities for money, to buy other commodities.
• M–C–M’ notates the idea of “buy cheap here and sell dear there”.
• M–C…P…C’-M’ is how Marx notated the cycle of production, where money is used to buy commodities, and then labour power is used to refine the commodity into something more valuable, which is then sold for money.

Gregory wants to exchange the P for a G, i.e. Gregory’s claim is that production almost always happens through goods. In the case of farming, the good is land and equipment. In the case of Rajasthani merchants, the good is the territorial network of mercantile relationships. Critically, though, and the thing the World Bank seems to have missed, is that industrialised agriculture takes – among other things – the goods of consolidated land and appropriate knowledge. Smallholder farmers of parcelised land are generally not guardians over these goods.

The reason industrialised agriculture could happen elsewhere in the world is often due to some variant of primogeniture, where the land of a family is inherited solely by the eldest son. This allowed some families to accrue consolidated land through inheritance, rather than what would otherwise be the case, that land gets divided and parcelised through inheritance. The only farmers of consolidated land in Bastar are families who got rich through mercantile means, and then decided to settle down.

(These dynamics of inheritance, by the way, appears to be one of the reasons farmers in Bastar don’t get rich, while merchants do – having children above the replacement rate dilutes a farmer’s goods (land), whereas for a merchant it increases the value of their goods (territory, network of support.))

It is worth noting, however, that merchants-turned-farmers of consolidated land are often not the guardians of said land. Land is rarely bought or sold in Bastar. We remind ourselves that in order to buy or sell land, one has to treat it as a commodity, and in Bastar land is a good, not a commodity. The way rich families get to farm consolidated land is often through the village loans the World Bank tried to eradicate. A common form of village loan takes the shape of the borrower receiving a large amount of money now, in exchange for the lender gaining the right to farm the borrower’s land for a few years. To our market-influenced ears, this loan sounds like a kind of up-front rent payment. However, this assumes the land has a commodity value. As far as the Bastarians are concerned, this loan has no interest rate and there is no equivalent rent, because to them the land does not have commodity value.

Landless people cannot borrow with this type of village loan, and often instead offer labour as collateral, i.e. working off the loan – or, with our market-influenced eyes which see everything including labour as a commodity – getting their wages paid up front. (I think David Graeber remarked somewhere that “A Roman would have been able to buy the work product – or the worker – but to buy the worker’s time would have been foreign.”)

There is no market price of land in Bastar. This is the second lesson. Value systems can render certain questions nonsensical, and as anthropologists teach, when you ask nonsensical questions, you get nonsensical answers.

When the World Bank wanted to calculate the effective interest rate of a village loan, they had to either base it off of the very few, very weird transactions of land that have taken place in Bastar, or assume the commodity value of land in Bastar would be the same as in some other region. Either assumption leads to conclusions that are nonsensical to the Bastarians they were trying to help.

Going back to the title of the book, the term savage money refers to our new, post-1971 money: money that is unrestrained and unbridled and lives its own life. Money whose value is determined by the Market.

It also refers to the fact that until 1971, this kind of money has mainly been found in frontier economies, among communities of the poor, and in locations beyond the reach of major empires – an 18th century scholar would say it’s money as savages see it, not money for civilised people, who know its exchange rate against gold.

We don’t have much experience of savage money on a global scale, but it is common enough on smaller scales. This is why Gregory walks us through how humans value things, since the Market is, ultimately, the collective expression of the desires of humans, and the Market valuation of money is not as simple as it may at first appear.

To begin with, even good money is not necessarily valued at all. Thomas Muir observed in 1791 that

When any money is transmitted, cause a considerable part of it to be laid out at the Cape or Rio Janeiro, in rum, tobacco, sugar, &c., &c., which are invaluable, and the only medium of exchange. . . . In a country like this, where money is really of no value and rum everything, you must perceive the necessity of my having a constant supply by every vessel. For a goat I should pay in money £10 sterling; now for less than eight gallons of spirits, at 18d the gallon, I can make the same purchase.

Effectively, the people in this frontier economy did not value the money Muir was used to paying with, so he figured out it was more effective to trade in a valued commodity – rum. Muir discovered a case where rum was a better money than the actual money Muir would have brought instead!

The idea of some kinds of money being better or worse than others is puzzling to people around me. Where I grew up, money was money and there weren’t different kinds of money. Maybe different countries had different monies, but in each country there was a money and that was it. Everything else that could stand in as money was a worse kind of money. But Gregory explains that in addition to a quantity theory of money, we need a quality theory of money. This is not a renegade opinion. The Swedish central bank also thinks the way to maintain price stability is to have a high quality currency that people voluntarily use for exchange. Gregory’s case study of choice is not central banking theory though, but cowrie money on Papua New Guinea.

Cowrie shells have been used as a form of money in many places. The shells are light, small, easily recognisable, and completely worthless for anything other than potentially decoration. But by convention, people in Papua New Guinea (and west Africa) have used them as a medium of exchange and store of commodity value. Their availability Makes this an unstable arrangement, but it can last for centuries before the bubble bursts. There are a few islands in the Indian Ocean where cowrie shells can be harvested very efficiently. Locals did not travel there, but colonists did. Harvesting and transporting the shells to Papua New Guinea was a cheap way for colonists to acquire commodities and services from locals.

The traditional quantity theory of money then goes as such: the amount of cowrie shells started exceeding the rate of growth of the local economy, thus shells lost value, relatively speaking, and then hyperinflated until the bubble burst.

Gregory suggests another reading of history. The key event he thinks the quantity theory misses is that just before the cowrie bubble burst, the colonists started demanding taxes in metal coins, rather than allowing taxes to be paid in cowries. Gregory thinks this reduced the demand for cowrie shells. This meant that when a colonist wanted to buy something and offered to pay in cowries, the seller would ask for more shells than they would otherwise have. When the colonists discover this, they will do the natural thing: harvest and ship in more cowrie shells to pay the new, higher prices. The availability of cowrie works to further reduce the demand, meaning even larger imports of it is required to purchase the same things. Thus, the inflation in cowrie shells, Gregory speculates, was triggered by a reduction in demand for cowries, rather than an increase in supply. And this reduction in demand came from new requirements around taxation.

The same thing happened in the Netherlands during Tulipmania – an often misunderstood event. It consisted of two parts: trade in rare bulbs, and in common bulbs. The common bulbs are the ones for which the bubble burst (naturally, since they are nearly worthless thanks to their availability) but the interesting thing is why. Aaron Brown has dug into this topic before, and concluded that the inflation in contracts for common bulbs was preceded by a sudden drop in demand for them, which was triggered by legal adjustments in the Netherlands.

The Dutch Republic managed to have the contracts declared illegal in a piecemeal and confusing way that worked to the disadvantage of almost everyone.

One might ask what tulip contracts have to do with money. It’s as simple as these contracts being used as money by the poor. Much like cowries, they became a liquid medium of exchange by convention, even if they were fundamentally valueless.

It seems any form of money has a natural tendency to inflate, because it depends on its users valuing it. Thus to avoid inflation, demand for money needs to be manufactured and maintained (often through taxation, but also things like convenience of use.)

This may seem obviously true of token money, but it is just as true of other commodities. Not even during its 1:35 era were gold prices actually stable in U.S. dollars. They fluctuated with people’s faith in the U.S. ability to redeem dollars against gold. This ability, in turn, depended among other things on the relative worldwide demand for dollars versus gold, and the U.S. took some drastic measures to try to prop up both at the same time. (Like forbidding U.S. citizens from owning gold, and trying to get international markets to maintain the U.S. peg against gold.)

In the end, there is currently no thing on Earth that is fundamentally both rare and necessary to the point where it can be used as a stable money that maintains its own demand. Gregory observes that scarcity, in the sense of large demand compared to supply, is almost always a deliberate human construction. Sometimes we do this by manipulating the supply side, but more often it happens by generating outsize demand for something that is not biologically necessary.

It is sometimes claimed that the increasing influence of the Market will depersonalise relationships and devalue friendships in favour of a more anonymous community, where like is exchanged for like with no personal feelings involved.

As far as Gregory has been able to observe, this is not the effect of increased commercialisation. On the contrary, since Market values are still values – i.e. things we do to gain the approval of others – personal relationships will continue being as important as ever. It’s only that the signaling going on within relationships will to a greater degree revolve around profit-making and a family fortune built up of token money, rather than land or gold.

Status and prestige will be awarded, more and more, to those with big bank accounts rather than other forms of value, for as long as our money is a good as well as a commodity.

But my main takeaway from the book is that there is a surprising amount of variation in what people value. Most people seem to be unaware both of these differences, but also of the large range of value systems that exist. My value systems – and probably also those of my readers – are heavily influenced by the Market. Maybe that’s progress, or a sidewise movement, or a mistake. I don’t know. But I think it is useful to consider alternatives, and not assume that what we have now is the best we can do.

We should not be so quick to judge someone else with a different value system. We should strive to try to understand others’ value systems when forging relationships with them – even if, or particularly when – their value systems are in conflict with ours.