Expending Multiplicity: Money in Cuban Ifá Cults

Countering the assumption that money acts as an agent of abstraction and ‘disembedment’, anthropologists tend to draw money into analogies with other objects of exchange, downplaying its uniquely quantitative nature. This article seeks to disentangle the association, implicit in this tendency, of quantity with abstraction. Focusing on the peculiar character of money as a ‘purely multiple’ object, the aim is to account for ‘embeddedness’ without bracketing quantity: what does quantity look like when it is not viewed as an abstract denominator? The question is explored with reference to Ifá, an Afro‐Cuban diviner cult that takes monetary transactions as a cosmological premise.