Ghost Money
A Bonfire Night talk about the the power of money, and why some people
set fire to it.
In 1994, a band called the KLF set fire to a million pounds in cash,
after quitting the music industry. John Higgs has tried to figure out
why they did it. After a packed-out talk in Brighton earlier this year, he’s back for this talk on Ghost Money.
He is joined by Jon Harris, a writer and researcher who does a small ritual money-burning once a year (a bit like Christmas). John writes a blog which tries to answer the question “what is money?” something that has fascinated him ever since he can remember. Read his blog here
“Offering money to gods, ancestors, and ghosts is an increasingly
important part of everyday life…When it concerns the traces of a
violent war, this custom is believed to help the spirits of the dead
become liberated from their grievous histories…replica US dollar notes
have become a pre-eminent ritual currency in parts of Vietnam…this
situation is related to changing political relations in the imagined
world of the dead.”
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2007.00414.x/abstract
In Afghanistan: “We called it ‘ghost money’,” Khalil Roman, who served
as Karzai’s chief of staff from 2002 until 2005, told the New York
Times. “It came in secret and it left in secret.”
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/04/29/us-afghanistan-money-cia-idUSBRE93S00K20130429
“The transformation of the commodity relation into a thing of ‘ghostly
objectivity’…stamps its imprint upon the whole consciousness of man”
– Lukacs
an Economics Anonymous event