DFMM Episode 2: Cere-money vs money in Papua New Guinea. What’s ’shell money’ & why is it resurging?

Normally my Dispatches from the Frontiers of Modern Money (DFMM) videos are for my paying Substack subscribers only (see here ), but I wish to gift this episode to everyone, in tribute to David Graeber, who was featured in my last piece: The Anthropologist in an Economist World In this episode I take on the topic of the resurgence of Tabu ‘shell money’ in Papua New Guinea (long a favourite location for anthropologists) in the context of Covid-19. You can find my write-up about it here In the video I cover many topics, including commodity vs. credit theories of money, ceremonial money systems (’cere-money’), fetish objects, commodity fetishism, colonialism, syncretic money and countertrade, all of which lead to the present day story about shell money (which I became aware of on the 21st August, when the Guardian ran