Maia Green, University of Manchester
A decade of reading in between all of the other rushed activities that make up the lives of academics probably collapses into what feels like a few hours. My reading occurs in snatched moments. Sometimes it fails to engage me. Distracted by another book, a journal content alert, a flood of emails or a student paper I may skim only a chapter, sometimes just the back cover. I confess to having more than one volume still shrinkwrapped in glistening cellophane some five years after eagerly pulling apart the corrugated card of the Amazon package. It seems that a book has to be truly different these days to pull me in. And to be readable not once but several times it is a book well worth sharing. Jane Guyer’s Marginal Gains: Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa (2004, University of Chicago Press) is one such book, the kind you keep coming back to. Guyer writes lucid, complex and intriguing prose that makes you want to read more and more. After I finished this book the first time, I went straight to JSTOR and read her entire output at a go.
Marginal Gains is about the ontology of popular economy in West Africa based on more than three decades of engaged anthropological fieldwork. Guyer really knows what she is describing. She strives to make the lived experience of the economy tangible and vibrantly real, whether it’s the strategies households use to allocate spare cash and food to friends and neighbors or the ways that a petrol station worker decides whom to serve first at the height of a fuel shortage, a decision which must take notions of respect, seniority and fairness into account.
Guyer uses her experience of how people in West Africa perform economic relations to make a series of arguments about the economy in Africa which she suggests is premised on multiple and overlapping scales of value. Negotiation, flexibility and contingencies are thus constitutive of economic cultures in the region, presenting a stark contrast to the essential regularity claimed to be the defining feature of functional economic systems. The aggressive push for economic formalization by international donors and financial institutions can be seen as analogous, she suggests, to colonial conversion, a strategy intended to tear apart and reconfigure existing systems of social practice and meaning. It is unlikely ever to be achieved because existing multiple scales of valuation do important work in formatting and reformatting social relations. Formalization in this part of Africa will remain partial, just another scale of transactional possibility.
There are fascinating chapters on budgets, debt and investment, and insights on every page about how and why people do what they do. For social theorists, the book offers food for thought on the constitution of the economic as involving multiplicities not singularities; for geographers the book offers ways of thinking about regional connections and questions of scale; and for scholars of Africa it provides a practical guide to the complexities of multiple, practical everyday economics. Finally, this book offers an armory of ammunition for rethinking simplistic prescriptive dichotomies between formal and informal, whatever these relate to.
