Taylor C. Nelms

Materiality, Symbol, and Complexity in the Anthropology of Money

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 reflect on the intersections of such work with recent psychological research. In this review essay, we survey the primary findings 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 final section of the paper, we find inspiration in recent psychological studies of money to indicate new trajectories for inquiry. Specifically, 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 reflection on ongoing monetary experiments and innovations.

‘The problem of delimitation’: parataxis, bureaucracy, and Ecuador's popular and solidarity economy

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 ‘economia 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 ZOMBIE BANK AND THE MAGIC OF FINANCE

This paper takes the appearance of the figure of the ‘zombie bank’ during the recent financial crisis as a starting point to think about how to historicize crisis. A zombie bank is an undercapitalized financial institution that continues to operate due to the support extended to it by the government; it emerged in 2009 as a vivid representation of contemporary capitalism in crisis. By tracing the intertwined histories of zombies and representations of capitalism, I argue for the importance of historical persistence when considering anxieties about the ‘magic’ of finance provoked by the recent crisis. Fears of zombie banks, I suggest, recapitulate capitalisms whitewashed origins in credit and in the Caribbean. The crisis, therefore, represents an opportunity not only to reflect on current engagements with capitalism through an investigation of the figure of the zombie bank, but also to interrogate our models of historical continuity.

Social Payments: Innovation, Trust, Bitcoin, and the Sharing Economy

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.

On brutal culture

If it is true that culture has succumbed to the ‘derivative logic’ of contemporary economies of circulation, deprived of essential attributes and working to scramble and undermine the very premise of culture as essence, the word nevertheless continues to be used to explain things that are politically difficult, intractable, and yes, undeniably brutal.

alt.economy: strategies, tensions, challenges*

Recent years have seen an upsurge in interest in how financial upheaval, state action, and technological change have disrupted economies across the globe and shaken confidence in familiar systems of economic organization. And yet, in the rush to grapple with the implications of highly visible government interventions and mass protests, everyday efforts by a diverse range of expert, state, academic, and public actors seeking to imagine and instantiate new or alternative forms of finance and economy have often been overlooked. While we frequently hear about ‘disruption’ and ‘innovation’ from London and Silicon Valley, this corporate rhetoric too often occludes the radical experiments taking place all the time, all around us. The creative labor of those at the leading edge of rethinking and remaking the economy cannot be dismissed. In searching out the alternative, there is never a simple switch to flip, no real ‘alt’ key to press. Alternatives take work – institutional and organizational work, legal and political work, knowledge work, relational and affective work. Alternatives are also often risky: to experiment with cooperative organization or hazard a proposal to remake finance are gambits. They often rely on or reproduce their own forms of exclusion, and they are often short-lived. Those actively working to make such economic or financial alternatives real in the world must ask not only how to define the alternative, but also how to make it durable. In January 2016, a group of activists, organizers, and academics convened on the campus of the University of California, Irvine to share projects, discuss challenges, and brainstorm possibilities for collaboration around these questions. The workshop, tentatively called ‘alt.economy: Ethnographic Explorations of Alternative Economic Imaginaries’, sought to foster a dialogue between those developing concrete financial or economic alternatives with the scholars who are studying and sometimes directly involved in their creations. The gathering was sponsored by the Journal of Cultural Economy (JCE), as well as the Dean of the UCI School of Social Sciences Bill Maurer (also Professor of Anthropology at UCI and a member of the JCE Editorial Board), the UCI Center for Ethnography, and the Institute for Money, Technology & Financial Inclusion (IMTFI), also at UCI. It was organized by Maurer, Taylor Nelms (Postdoctoral Researcher in the UCI Department of Anthropology and Reviews Editor of JCE), Hannah Appel (Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UCLA and one of the organizers of the Debt Collective), and Joan Donovan (Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Society and Genetics at UCLA and also a contributor to the Debt Collective). Daromir Rudnyckyj (Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Victoria) offered initial inspiration (and our title!), contributing significantly to the event’s conceptualization. At the alt.economy workshop, participants heard from the organizers of four ongoing alternative economy projects: Laura Hanna and Ann Larson (with contributions from Appel and Donovan) on the Debt Collective; Elandria Williams on the Highlander Research and Education Center and the Southern Grassroots Economies Project (SGEP); Brendan Martin on the Working World, also an SGEP partner; and Akseli Virtanen and Pekko Koskinen on the Robin Hood hedge fund cooperative and its future iterations. Other participants included: Rafael Betancourt (economist, consultant, and expert on the solidarity economy from Cuba), Bradley Cardozo (PhD Candidate in Anthropology at