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Paper short abstract:

Based on fieldwork among the South Indian Badagas the paper illustrates the creative interaction of local monetary practices with both a rapidly changing socio-economic environment and locally shared aesthetic principles.

Paper long abstract:

The intellectual correlation between the tendency of capitalist development ethics to subsume morality under economic growth (monetary measured), and the transformative power that critical scholars have attributed to money's ascribed capacity to act as a social dissolvent is obvious. Yet, the persistent heterogeneity of global capitalism and recent global crises demand reflections on both. Thus, not only has the idea of development recently reincorporated notions of morality, harmony, spirituality and self-transformation, but the question how monetization affects people and their social environments has now given rise to the question what people really do with their monies, how precisely it is that money connects and disconnects people as well as their diverse spheres of evaluation, and how its concrete uses therein can be seen as multidimensional ways of expression, remembrance, and creation. Moreover, the all-pervading presence of money in peoples everyday lives and the performativity that is simultaneously displayed in their diverse monetary practices gives rise to questions of monetization as an aesthetic or sensory experience. In an attempt to address these issues the paper presents ethnographic material from the South Indian Badagas, a modern peasant community living in the Nilgiri-Highlands of North-Western Tamil Nadu. It shows how local monetary practices in such diverse fields like market, kinship, village and religion do not only embrace contradictive value regimes in terms of power, identity, self-interest, price, devotion and mutuality, but are experienced within a collective body of aesthetic principles that allows for sensory adaptation of social and economic change.