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In communities throughout precontact Mesoamerica, calendar priests and diviners relied on pictographic almanacs to predict the fate of newborns, to guide people in choosing marriage partners and auspicious wedding dates, to know when to plant and harvest crops, and to be successful in many of life’s activities. As the Spanish colonized Mesoamerica in the sixteenth century, they made a determined effort to destroy these books, in which the Aztec and neighboring peoples recorded their understanding of the invisible world of the sacred calendar and the cosmic forces and supernaturals that adhered to time. Today, only a few of these divinatory codices survive. Visually complex, esoteric, and strikingly beautiful, painted books such as the famous Codex Borgia and Codex Borbonicus still serve as portals into the ancient Mexican calendrical systems and the cycles of time and meaning they encode. In this comprehensive study, Elizabeth Hill Boone analyzes the entire extant corpus of Mexican divinatory codices and offers a masterful explanation of the genre as a whole. She introduces the sacred, divinatory calendar and the calendar priests and diviners who owned and used the books. Boone then explains the graphic vocabulary of the calendar and its prophetic forces and describes the organizing principles that structure the codices. She shows how they form almanacs that either offer general purpose guidance or focus topically on specific aspects of life, such as birth, marriage, agriculture and rain, travel, and the forces of the planet Venus. Boone also tackles two major areas of controversy—the great narrative passage in the Codex Borgia, which she freshly interprets as a cosmic narrative of creation, and the disputed origins of the codices, which, she argues, grew out of a single religious and divinatory system.

Why do Internet, financial service, and beer commercials dominate Super Bowl advertising? How do political ceremonies establish authority? Why does repetition characterize anthems and ritual speech? Why were circular forms favored for public festivals during the French Revolution? This book answers these questions using a single concept: common knowledge. Game theory shows that in order to coordinate its actions, a group of people must form \"common knowledge.\" Each person wants to participate only if others also participate. Members must have knowledge of each other, knowledge of that knowledge, knowledge of the knowledge of that knowledge, and so on. Michael Chwe applies this insight, with striking erudition, to analyze a range of rituals across history and cultures. He shows that public ceremonies are powerful not simply because they transmit meaning from a central source to each audience member but because they let audience members know what other members know. For instance, people watching the Super Bowl know that many others are seeing precisely what they see and that those people know in turn that many others are also watching. This creates common knowledge, and advertisers selling products that depend on consensus are willing to pay large sums to gain access to it. Remarkably, a great variety of rituals and ceremonies, such as formal inaugurations, work in much the same way. By using a rational-choice argument to explain diverse cultural practices, Chwe argues for a close reciprocal relationship between the perspectives of rationality and culture. He illustrates how game theory can be applied to an unexpectedly broad spectrum of problems, while showing in an admirably clear way what game theory might hold for scholars in the social sciences and humanities who are not yet acquainted with it. In a new afterword, Chwe delves into new applications of common knowledge, both in the real world and in experiments, and considers how generating common knowledge has become easier in the digital age.

The last decade of financial crisis, “financialization” and “quantitative easing” has been a feast of public learning about money and finance. Anthropology, history, and political economy rediscovered a “forgotten” history of money as fundamentally a public good rather than basically a private one. This article discusses the rediscovery of the two competing basic historical theories of money. It also notes that, after a turbulent decade of class and political polarization, including a worldwide pandemic, we also learned that under capitalism it just cannot be publicly conceded that money, if we want to, costs nothing, even though that is scientifically true. The article then reflects upon the current return of inflation and the turn toward “hard and dear money,” and what that might mean.

The archaeology of religion is a much neglected area, yet religious sites and artefacts constitute a major area of archaeological evidence. Timothy Insoll presents an introductory statement on the archaeology of religion, examining what archaeology can tell us about religion, the problems of defining and theorizing religion in archaeology, and the methodology, or how to 'do', the archaeology of religion. This volume assesses religion and ritual through a range of examples from around the world and across time, including prehistoric religions, shamanism, African religions, death, landscape and even food. Insoll also discusses the history of research and varying theories in this field before looking to future research directions. This book will be a valuable guide for students and archaeologists, and initiate a major area of debate. 1. Introduction to the Theme 2. History of Research 3. Contemporary Approaches 4. The Case Studies 5. Prospects and Conclusion: Prospects, A Future Approach? Towards a Theory of Archaeology and Religion Timothy Insoll is Lecturer in Archaeology at the School of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Manchester. His previous publications include The Archaeology of Islam (1999), Archaeology and World Religion (2001) and THe Archaeology of Islam in Sub-Saharan Africal (2003)

This article contributes to the discussion of everyday domestic finance technologies by looking at CajaVecina, a correspondent banking network coordinated by BancoEstado, a leading Chilean financial institution. Differences in perceptions between actual users and designers of ICT for development projects (ICT2D) emerged from structured interviews with executives of financial intermediaries, customers, and shopkeepers. The extent to which independent merchants operating CajaVecina’s bespoke terminals confront and solve the “design-actuality gap” questioned whether the CajaVecina system enabled neighborhood retail stores to act as a de facto bank branch. Empirical results suggested that was not the case. Instead of following strict contractual behavior, participants in the correspondent banking network addressed a design gap through social interaction and leveraging relationships with repeat customers. This behavior builds on information emanating from what they called “operating quotas.” Operating quotas enabled BancoEstado to diversify risk, document financial services habits, and forecast the performance of merchants (particularly small, independent retail shops). Merchants used trends in operating quotas to tailor services offered through the CajaVecina terminal while aiming to increase the loyalty of trusted customers. These results further the understanding of correspondent banking services aiming to increase financial inclusion by providing evidence of a previously unexplored aspect of these networks, where social dimensions take precedence over economic, financial, and technological aspects.

In this response to critiques of 'full reserve banking' or 'sovereign money' proposals, we challenge four of the main criticisms made by Fontana and Sawyer (this issue): (i) the impact of the proposal on government finances and fiscal policy; (ii) the impact of the proposal on the supply of credit to the real economy; (iii) the danger of private money creation re-emerging in the shadow banking sector; and (iv) the argument that shadow banking, not commercial banking, is the real source of financial instability.

This is a comprehensive, critical introduction to the sociology of money, covering many currently taught topics, from the origins of money to its function today. Though our coins, bank notes and electronic tokens do function as means of exchange, money is in fact a social, intangible institution. This book argues that money does indeed rule the world. Exploring the unlikely origins of money in early societies and amidst the first civilisations, the book moves onto its inherent liaison with finance, including the logic of financial markets. Turning to the contemporary politics of money, monetary experiments and reform initiatives such as Bitcoin and positive money, it finally reveals the essentially monetary constitution of modern society itself. Through criticising the simplistic exchange paradigm of standard economics and rational choice theory, it argues instead that money matters because it embodies social relations.

The New Death brings together scholars who are intrigued by today's rapidly changing death practices and attitudes. New and different ways of treating the body and memorializing the dead are proliferating across global cities. Using ethnographic, historical, and media-based approaches, the contributors to this volume focus on new attitudes and practices around mortality and mourning—from the possibilities of digitally enhanced afterlives to industrialized \"necro-waste, \" the ethics of care, the meaning of secular rituals, and the political economy of death. Together, the chapters coalesce around the argument that there are two major currents running through the new death—reconfigurations of temporality and of intimacy. Pushing back against the folklorization endemic to anthropological studies of death practices and the whiteness of death studies as a field, the chapters strive to override divisions between the Global South and the Anglophone world, focusing instead on syncretization, globalization, and magic within the mundane.

Exploring the traditions, customs and contemporary legal framework of Czech funerary practices, this book analyses and interprets the high cremation rate, predominance of secular funerals and increasing popularity of cremation with no funeral ceremony against the background of the country's historical development.