Introduction: Marginal Gains Revisited

This special issue is the condensation of an author-meets-critics double panel organized for the African Studies Association meeting in Washington, D.C., in November 2005, on Jane Guyer's challenging book Marginal Gains—Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa.¹ The book was published in the first half of 2004, and when the three of us met in the fall of that year, we all felt it was a text that lent itself especially well to such a session. One of the elements that makes the book so compelling is Guyer's particular style of theorizing: Starting from a painstaking effort to discover regular patterns in empirical data, she moves to the positing and testing of theoretical notions—but in a way that does not strive to produce closure or systematicity. On the contrary, the book can sometimes be confusing because it leaves so much open. But precisely because Guyer continues to create new openings, it is an inspiring piece of work, constantly offering novel starting points for further research and reflection.

Of course there are also many other reasons, more directly related to the contents and main directions of Guyer's explorations, that discussing her work is so challenging and enriching. In our call for papers for the Washington panels we especially emphasized the relevance of Guyer's approach for trying to make sense of African economies—which for many Western observers seem to have surpassed the threshold of comprehension. Indeed, a central idea in her book is that the hegemonic nature of current (neoclassical) models of economic thinking risks making researchers (anthropologists included) blind to alternative forms of rationality and valuation that are developing in a context of constant crisis in a place like West Africa (as well as elsewhere in the world). Basic tenets of economic thinking, such as the assumption that combined processes of monetization and commoditization must result in ever-expanding commensuration through ever more uniform standards of valuation, tend to obfuscate the fact that in many parts of the world trends that defy such assumptions manifest themselves. In many parts of Africa, for instance, different standards of valuation and different forms of money have long functioned next to one another. To wit, even in postcolonial times, the prevailing forms of "soft money" have remained so volatile that people must learn to switch constantly from one standard to another. Indeed, right up to the present day central authorities hardly succeed in imposing a standardization of value. Of course, even in other parts of the world where such standardization is occurring, it remains a much more incomplete process than is generally assumed. Yet in many parts of Africa this is especially the case. It is striking, then, as Guyer shows with a wealth of diverse examples, that participants often do not see this as a weakness. On the contrary, she maintains, it is their ability to bridge enduring disjunctures that allows actors to realize the "marginal gains" that are crucial to these economies. Underneath apparent chaos there is regularity in the particular ways in which people strive to link different standards of valuation in a gainful way.

In our call for papers we suggested also—albeit more implicitly—that this search for alternative ways of organizing the economy might be clarifying not only for those who try to correct the view of Africa as "a hopeless continent" (as expressed in The Economist, December 9–16, 2000), but also for scholars who focus on economic developments in core areas of the world system. There as well, modern "risk"—or "finance"—capitalism seems to be marked by uncertainties and a playing on disjunctures (witness the vital role of money traders in the highly unstable dollar/euro market around 2002 and the inability of any central authority to control this) that are not that different from Guyer's examples from West Africa.² Even economists are now prepared to recognize that in hypercapitalist formations, valuation is determined only to a limited extent by "the" market. Indeed, it is certainly not only in Africa that valuation is a highly...