Una apología del lucro sucio

Abstract

This article probes the long-standing and cross-cultural associations between money and excrement. In questioning why this association crops up as often as it does, the author turns to the anthropological literature on the study of metaphor and metonym. By doing so, he offers a rehabilitation of the money form, pointing out that excrement itself is a cross- cultural trope that is often intimately tied to ideas and rituals of social reproduction, to fertility in short. Thus, the widespread denigration of money as dirty may be less straightforward than we think. In fact, the author shows how the denigrating predication may itself serve as a sort of economic regulatory mechanism, which aims to reinvigorate money's potential fertility when this latter has become sterile due to alleged acts of antisocial exchange or non-exchange