Stone Money – bluedream1997

In a society where monetary payment is the one thing that is asked of individuals in return for their acquisition of goods and utilization of services, it can be argued that sooner or later those individuals will eventually develop a desire, if only strictly need-based, to get their hands on as much money as circumstantially possible in order to provide for themselves in terms of both everyday necessity and, if fortunate enough, materialistic desire. The United States is a perfect example of a nation in which the above claim might hold true, except for one major flaw; most Americans, be they impoverished, wealthy, or somewhere in between, rarely “get their hands on” the full extent of the wealth they believe lies in their possession, or physically see the stacks of bills they understand are sitting in a vault somewhere with their names on them. In today’s society the dollar, a rectangular piece of cotton fiber and linen that was once used to represent the value of a certain amount of gold, is no longer backed by any commodity or resource of worth. As NPR News’ Jacob Goldstein would argue, money is nothing but fiction, and the dollar is only worth something as long as the federal government says it is; the fictional quality of money is inherent in the very idea of money, in any system of currency, no matter how simple it may be.  

For centuries the Islanders of Yap, which is the “most westerly” of Micronesia’s Caroline Islands, have used a system of currency that is far less complex and sophisticated than the one Americans are accustomed to today. According to William Henry Furness III, an American anthropologist who spent several months living amongst the natives of Yap in 1903 and who wrote a book detailing the customs of its people titled The Island of Stone Money: Uap of the Carolines, their currency is called “fei, and it consists of large, solid, thick, stone wheels, ranging in diameter from a foot to twelve feet, having in the centre a hole varying in size with the diameter of the stone, wherein a pole may be inserted sufficiently large and strong to bear the weight and facilitate transportation.” Along with the physical peculiarity and impracticality of the fei, which can individually outweigh a car, Furness noted other interesting characteristics of the stone currency, including that it is not actually necessary for the owner of fei to physically possess their limestone money to claim it belongs to them. He wrote that after “concluding a bargain which involves the price of a fei too large to be conveniently moved, its new owner is quite content to accept the bare acknowledgment of ownership and without so much as a mark to indicate the exchange, the coin remains undisturbed on the former owner’s premises.” To further illustrate the culture’s strange concept of monetary ownership, Furness retold in his book a strange story he heard on the island that involved an enormous fei of incomparable quality and value that, supposedly, was lost at sea by the same men who crafted it.

As the story goes according to Furness, these men encountered a violent storm while sailing back from this particular fei’s island of origin (limestone cannot be found anywhere on Yap), and were left with no choice but to untie the immense piece of stone from their rudimentary raft in order to stay afloat. When they returned home empty handed, “they all testified that their fei was of magnificent proportions and of extraordinary quality, and… it was universally conceded…that the mere accident… ought not to affect its marketable value, since it was all chipped out in proper form.” This event occurred decades before Furness visited Yap, however the man who told him the story assured him that the descendants of the same men who lost the fei to the depths of the ocean were still rich because of that very stone; the family’s wealth remained unquestioned and was known to everyone on the island, almost as if the limestone was “leaning visibly against the side of the owner’s house” for all to see.

The story above along with other bits and pieces of Furness’ book can be found within the first chapter of an essay written in 1991, also titled “The Island of Stone Money,” by a man named Milton Friedman. In this essay Friedman reveals to his audience that his initial reaction to the story above was: “How silly. How can people be so illogical?” He makes the assumption that his audience will react in the same way he did, and in my case his assumption held true because I found myself thinking the exact same thing about the Islanders of Yap. However, when I stopped reading and seriously considered how strongly the islander’s currency system relies on their own faith in abstract concepts, such as the unquestioned purchasing power of a stone lying at the bottom of the ocean that never even made it back to Yap, I realized that Americans in the present day are really no different than those islanders. In today’s society we almost never see the monetary income we earn from the jobs we work; the only compensation most people receive for their efforts in the workplace is a growing number on their monthly bank account statements, a figure that soon falls when it comes time to make regular bill payments online and through the mail. These changing digits on computer screens and pieces of paper are meant to represent tangible dollars changing hands from one individual or entity to the other, yet in reality nothing is actually changing in the physical world. If this is not a perfect illustration of unwavering faith in abstract financial concepts then I do not know what is.

My point is, whether you’re an Islander of Yap buying a house with limestone or a middle class American paying for airplane tickets online, the fiction that is money is apparent in all systems of currency and finance. According to AFP News’ journalist Anne Renaut, there is now a type of digital “e-money” in existence “that is made of strings of dazzlingly complex code created by raw computing power.” This impressive and complex computer currency was developed in 2009 and has soared in value since, however it is still considered “a very uncertain, speculative venture” to invest in as reported within Renaut’s article “The bubble bursts on e-currency Bitcoin” because it is not backed by a commodity, providing further evidence for my argument that the value and worth smoney is often nothing more than a figment mankind’s imagination. Not even the American dollar is backed by a scarce commodity or resource anymore, and the cotton fiber and linen that makes the fabric of our greenbacks has practically no intrinsic value, making our tangible currency as well as the ink on paper checks that often represents it worth only what people are willing to trade for that currency. On any given day a food vendor on the street might be willing to trade one bag of chips for a dollar bill, and on that same day a different food vendor down the road might be willing to trade two bags of chips for that same dollar, indicating that our currency is only worth the most we can possibly get in return for handing it over to others. I believe that deep down most people understand that money is just a fairy tale, a fiction that keeps the economy going; my own concept of money did not change much at all after doing research for this assignment, the only thing that did was my previously unquestioned belief in its worth through the eyes of society.

Works Cited

Friedman, Milton. “The Island of Stone Money.” Diss. Hoover Institution, Stanford University , 1991.

“The Invention of Stone Money.” 423: The Invention of Stone Money. This Is American Life, WBEZ. Chicago . 7 Jan. 2011.

Furness, William Henry. The Island of Stone Money: Uap of the Carolines. N.p.: J.B. Lippincott, 1910. Print.

Renaut, Anne. “The Bubble Bursts on E-currency Bitcoin.” Yahoo! News. Yahoo!, 13 Apr. 2013. Web. 23 Oct. 2016.