Conveners
S96. GRAFFITI ON MONEY: CULTURAL PRACTICES FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN TIMES
- Elisabeth Günther (Universität Trier)
Description
Org.: Elisabeth Günther, Susanne Börner; chair: Elisabeth Günther
Coins and banknotes are more than the embodiment of any economy’s circulation and legal regulations. By passing through people’s hands, they shape and frame certain audiences. With their specific imagery and legends, they provide distinct messages, depending on the duration and circulation of a given currency. While these features have already attracted scholarly attention, later incisions and secondary writings on money have remained largely unexplored to date.
In our session, we examine graffiti as secondary graphic carvings on coins and banknotes, added later in their life cycles. In contrast to the carefully planned, official messages placed on money, we will investigate graffiti from the perspective of individual reactions to such official money frames. We shall explore the extent to which these graffiti were providing comments on current issues, attempting to spread unofficial/illegal information, express emotions, disagreement with, or re-framing of, certain ideas conveyed by a given numismatic object.
Our underlying hypothesis is that graffiti enable the study of the economic, politico-ideological, semantic, and aesthetic framework of coins and banknotes from a new perspective. Graffiti give insights into epigraphic, linguistic, onomastic, historical, and ethno-sociological aspects, helping to understand them as a testimony of cultural practices and dynamic human-object interactions. While coins and banknotes per se provide specific affordances to stimulate such practices, graffiti complement, corrupt, or even ignore the established official and standardized written/pictorial layout, adding new semantic layers to these innate affordances of money. In this way they offer as well as create new levels of interpretation, depending on the audience’s knowledge and expectations (“frames”).
Since graffiti appear in every age and in many different cultural contexts this session is explicitly dedicated to comparing aspects of graffiti on money which transcend cultures, space, and time.
This paper will provide the theoretical framework for the session’s topic “Graffiti on money: Cultural practices from ancient to modern times”. Coins and banknotes embody abstract concepts of value and exchange, depending on their economic, political, cultural, and social contexts. Simultaneously, they are part of material culture – objects – that interact with their recipients and users...
A significant number of Roman gold coins that have come down to us bear graphic engravings. Even though these are a common phenomenon they have rarely been studied comprehensively. Based on individual specimens, attempts have been made to establish viable theories on the social or monetary background of numismatic graffiti. This paper will present preliminary results of an extensive material...
There are several ancient Roman and Byzantine gold coins in the collection of the Ossolineum. Some of them have different marks on their surface, including lines and marks that can be interpreted as letters. Apart from single letters, there are examples of longer inscriptions, perhaps names. I propose to present a wider perspective on the phenomenon of graffiti on coins and present the results...
Analyzing graffiti on current Renminbi banknotes this paper examines the reasons and socio-economic and cultural circumstances of the appearance of graffiti on Chinese money. Classified according to the currency value, graffiti on RMB appear on larger (50 yuan and 100 yuan) and smaller denominations of banknotes as well as on coins (below 20 yuan). Usually, names written on larger...
