Encountered by mobile money professionals – industry and philanthropic actors seeking to bring mobile phone‐enabled financial products to poor people in the ‘developing world’ – the authors move together with new collaborators to inquire into a problem they had been grappling with for some time. This is the problem of agency; specifically, the agency of ‘mobile money agents’, the people ‘on the ground’ or ‘in the field’ who form a crucial function in permitting others to put cash into an electronic money transfer system and pull cash out of it. These ‘human ATMs’ or ‘bridges to cash’ become the object of analytical scrutiny for mobile money experts and anthropologists. This article takes that analytical scrutiny – and not mobile money agents themselves – as its object. It seeks to understand how ‘agency’ inflects debates over money, its meaning and its pragmatics, and its transformation in new communicative infrastructures, and how it might inform anthropology and political struggles over money and payment.
The payments industry – the business of transferring value through public and corporate infrastructures – is undergoing rapid transformation. New business models and regulatory environments disrupt more traditional fee-based strategies, and new entrants seek to displace legacy players by leveraging new mobile platforms and new sources of data. In this increasingly diversified industry landscape, start-ups and established players are attempting to embed payment in ‘social’ experience through novel technologies of accounting for trust. This imagination of the social, however, is being materialized in gated platforms for payment, accounting, and exchange. This paper explores the ambiguous politics of such experiments, specifically those, like Bitcoin or the on-demand sharing economy, that delineate an economic imaginary of ‘just us’ – a closed and closely guarded community of peers operating under the illusion that there are no mediating institutions undergirding that community. This provokes questions about the intersection of payment and publics. Payment innovators’ attenuated understanding of the social may, we suggest, evacuate the nitty-gritty of politics.
What happens when an alternative economy becomes subject to a state bureaucratic apparatus? The question is posed in the context of a state project in Ecuador to institutionalize a so‐called ‘economía popular y solidaria’ (or EPS). This ‘popular and solidarity economy’, part of a project of ‘post‐neoliberal’ state transformation, invites questions about how to delimit its boundaries. This article offers an ethnographically informed account of the expert knowledge forms and bureaucratic techniques of Ecuadorian state actors charged with institutionalizing the EPS. I argue that in descriptions of the EPS, officials deploy an open‐ended aesthetic (which I term ‘parataxis’); in response to everyday bureaucratic demands to identify existing EPS practitioners, however, officials rely on techniques of provisional delimitation. The case promises insight into alternative economic imaginaries and the post‐neoliberal turn in Latin America and it raises questions central to the anthropology of the state about the intersection of expert knowledge and bureaucratic practice.
The invitation to review anthropological studies of money offers an opportunity not only to revisit the history of anthropologists' investigations into money's objects, meanings, and uses but also to refl ect on the intersections of such work with recent psychological research. In this review essay, we survey the primary fi ndings of the anthropology of money and the central challenges anthropological work has posed to assumptions about money's power to abstract, commensurate, dissolve social ties, and erase difference. We summarize anthropologists' historical concern with cultural difference and recent work on money's materialities, meanings, and complex uses. We emphasize the pragmatics of money-from earmarking practices and the use of multiple moneys to the politics of liquidity and fungibility. In the fi nal section of the paper, we fi nd inspiration in recent psychological studies of money to indicate new trajectories for inquiry. Specifi cally, we point to three potentially fruitful areas for research: money use as a tool and infrastructure; the politics of revealing and concealing money; and money's origins and futures as a memory device. We end with a brief refl ection on ongoing monetary experiments and innovations.Money has long been a topic of anthropological interest. From the giant Yap rai stones to the global diffusion of cowrie shells for use in trade to the creation of elaborate transactional archives in clay, string, and paper in places where physical money-stuff did not circulate, the ethnographic and archival record is rich with a diversity of money-objects: all manner of shells,
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