The Purchase of Intimacy |
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| Authors: | Viviana A. Zelizer |
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| Affiliation: | Viviana A. Zelizer;is professor of Sociology, Princeton University. I am grateful for information, suggestions and criticisms to Bernard Barber, Boris Bittker, William Blatt, Maurice Bloch, Marvin Bressler, Randall Collins, Sara Curran, john Comaroff, Paul DiMaggio, Michael Katz, Julie Nelson, Edgardo Rotman, Gayle Rubin, Reva Siegel, Charles Tilly, Diane Vaughan, and Joan Williams. None of these critics have seen the paper's final version. For response to oral presentations of this paper's successive versions, I thank audiences at the Harvard Law School;the Annual Meetings of the American Anthropological Association;the Workshop on Organizations, Institutions, and Economic Sociology, Princeton University;the Gender and Society Workshop, University of Chicago;and the Departments of Sociology at Rutgers University, University of California, Los Angeles, and the State University of New York at Albany. I am also grateful for fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities at the Institute for Advanced Study and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation |
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| Abstract: | Students of the intersection between monetary transfers and intimate social relations face a choice among three ways of analyzing that relationship: as hostile worlds whose contact contaminates one or the other; as nothing but market transactions, cultural constructions, or coercion; or as differentiated ties, each marked by a distinctive set of monetary transfers. A review of payment practices, legal disputes, and recent legal theory illustrates the weakness of the first two views and the desirability of further pursuing the third alternative. |
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