Viviana Zelizer

Viviana Zelizer is an American sociologist, born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1946, and the Lloyd Cotsen '50 Professor of Sociology at Princeton University. Her work in economic sociology examines how culture and morality shape the meaning and value people assign to money and economic exchange, including the economic valuation of the sacred in contexts such as life insurance and intimate personal relationships. Her books include Pricing the Priceless Child (1985), The Social Meaning of Money (1994), The Purchase of Intimacy (2005) and Economic Lives: How Culture Shapes the Economy (2010), and her integration of social history with sociological analysis, initially met with skepticism from the discipline, has since become recognized as a distinctive contribution to the field.