People often worry about the mingling of social and economic transactions. They feel that the market erodes moral values and personal relationships; putting a dollar value on something renders it not sacred and essentially cheap (hence the inappropriateness of paying friends for small favors, and the taboo against prostitution). They also feel that personal relationships can contaminate professional settings -- for example, it is improper for certain personal boundaries to be crossed by doctors and lawyers with regards to their clients. As a result people intuitively arrive at a "hostile worlds, separate spheres" doctrine -- economic and social transactions are best left separate, and only trouble comes from mixing them.
Zelizer's book is an effort to move past this dichotomy. She notes that it is simply not the case that money and intimacy never go together -- in fact, "no household lasts long without extensive economic interaction among its members... money cohabits regularly with intimacy, and even sustains it."
The thrust of her argument is as follows:
People engage routinely in the process of differentiating meaningful social relations, including their most intimate ties. They undertake relational work. Among other markers, they use different payment systems -- media -- to create, define, affirm, challenge, or overturn such distinctions... Such distinctions apply to intimate social relations... relational work becomes even more delicate and consequential when intimacy comes into play.., people manage to integrate money transfers into larger webs of mutual obligations without destroying the social ties involved.She argues that hostile worlds arguments are popular because:
People regularly invoke hostile worlds doctrines when they are trying to establish or maintain boundaries between intimate relations that might easily be confused... participants often employ hostile worlds practices, using forms of speech, body language, clothing, uniforms, and spatial locations to signify whether the relationship between this man and this woman is boss-secretary, husband-wife, patron-prostitute... They thus prevent confusion with the wrong relationship.I'll come back to the general themes of the book much more soon.
2 comments:
This reminds me of some issues in early modern household organization, except in reverse. While modern people feel that personal relationships contaminate professional ones, historians often struggle with the idea that in early modern households, strict hierarchy coexisted with companionate relationships. Now, we tend to think in terms of either/or: either the relationship between husband and wife (or parent and child, or master and servant) is authoritarian (a rigorous exchange of duties), or it is loving (a free exchange of affection). But early modern people didn't see the intermingling of hierarchy and affection as posing a significant problem -- they thought it was normal that children should address their parents as "sir" and "madam" and so forth. Do you think this is an analogous situation, and do you think that Zelizer's analysis has something to say to the early modern situation?
I think Zeziler would say that the intermingling of different relational modes is a steady feature of human life, and people go into "either/or" mode only when there's a possibility of confusing different types of relationships. In this case, it seems that historians are more likely than their subjects to get confused about the alternatives to the typical relationships of the time period.
In modern times, people who work for corporations are engaged in both hierarchical and free-market relations with their employers, but nobody feels compelled to ask "Well which is it really?" It's both.
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