I have heard the statement–money is a social construct–frequently, ever since I was younger, but I never understood its meaning until I was in high school. Since then, my interpretation was that the value of the actual paper from which money is made is different from the value assigned to money. Money is all relative. Something can have worth from one perspective, but it can be worthless from another. From the presentation slides, I learned that because all the statements included before are true, money not only is a representation, but also can be represented by objects. In Niv Horesh’s Chinese Money in Global Context, the brief history of coinage and paper money on a global scale helps to set the timeline and establish China’s position relative to other countries.
I was not surprised when I read that there were gods of wealth in The Sinister Way by Richard Von Glahn. However, I was very surprised by the specificity of the distinct entities, depending on the circumstance. Furthermore, in popular religion, the main focus, in terms of wealth, was Wulu caishen, the Gods of the Five Paths to Wealth. I was fascinated by the paragraph describing the basic plot of Song and Ming folklore, which has a motif of wealth and Wutong, the cult that formed Wulu caishen (228). Also, there was a gradual association between Wutong and the god of wealth, especially in the sixteenth century.
Bibliographic References
Horesh, Niv. Chinese Money in Global Context : Historic Junctures between 600 BCE and 2012. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2014.
Von Glahn, Richard. The Sinister Way: The Divine and the Demonic in Chinese Religious Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
