`` Money's a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet.'' Henry James The Portrait of a Lady (2009 [1881], page 332) `` Money ... is seldom dropped by angels or from helicopters, or taken out of circula- tion by angelic pickpockets. Economic agents do not wake up with changed money balances. The money must enter (or leave) the system somehow and somewhere.'' John Cochran and Steven Call (1998, page 32) 1 Introduction It is now twenty years since David Harvey famously implored geographers to ``deploy the Marxian concept of fetishism with its full force''. Harvey's argument (1990, pages 422 ^ 423) was that the fetishism of the commodity öthe seeming significance, even power, of its immediate `thingness' öconceals and thus diverts our attention from the material circumstances of its origination and circulation. His answer was to ``go behind and beyond what the market itself reveals'' by tracing backwards the commodity's life- course. Doing so, he posited, ``reveals a relation of dependence upon a whole world of social labor conducted in many different places under very different social relations and conditions of production'', the importance of this disclosure being precisely its unmasking of the ``geographical and social ignorance'' that constitutes fetishism. In a memorable statement Harvey summed things up thus: ``The grapes that sit upon super- market shelves are mute; we cannot see the fingerprints of exploitation upon them or tell immediately what part of the world they are from.'' Thanks to the myriad research endeavours of geographers and others in the years since Harvey offered this injunction, those fingerprints and their spatial coordinates are, today, much more visible. We now have a rich and substantial literature that does largely what Harvey hoped it would. Although many of those contributing to this literature have been inspired and guided very directly and very literally by Harvey (eg, Hartwick, 2000), others, to be sure, have taken the study of `geographies of commodity chains' (Hughes and Reimer, 2004) in directions not especially congruous with Harvey's own theoretical and political dispositions (see, especially, Cook and Crang, 1996; Jackson, 1999). Yet even in the most original, eclectically inspired of Follow the thing: money Brett Christophers Department of Social and Economic Geography, Uppsala University, Box 513, 75120 Uppsala, Sweden; e-mail: brett.christophers@kultgeog.uu.se Received 19 May 2010; in revised form 18 February 2011 Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2011, volume 29, pages 1068 ^ 1084 Abstract. In an attempt to resist and surmount the mystifications of commodity fetishism, scholars have gone to great lengths to trace the social and spatial pathways of various physical, consumable commodities. By contrast, there have been relatively limited efforts to similarly defetishise what Marx called the ``god of commodities'' ömoney öand there has been no systematic, theoretically informed consideration of what the defetishisation of money might actually entail. From an explicitly Marxian perspective this paper aims to make a modest contribution in such a direction. It has two central objectives: to demonstrate why money merits defetishisation and to explore, at a largely theoretical level, how such an exercise might proceed, what primary challenges it would confront, and where the main opportunities for progress are likely to lie. doi:10.1068/d8410