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- Convenors:
-
Coco Kanters
(Leiden University)
Tristam Barrett (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology)
Vinzenz Baumer Escobar (University of Oslo)
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- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- SO-B315
- Sessions:
- Thursday 16 August, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Stockholm
Short Abstract:
While money facilitates movement and interconnection, its movement is also heavily regulated and transfixed by a variety of actors. By focusing on emerging monetary regimes, such as cryptomarkets and local currencies, this panel interrogates money's fixture and flow across multiple scales.
Long Abstract:
Money makes the world go round: or so goes the well-known adage. Inherently mobile, money certainly facilitates the flow of people, things, and ideas across and between borders. But recent technological developments are profoundly changing the infrastructures of money as well as our imagination of it beyond a state-instituted means of exchange, unit of account, and store of value. On the one hand, cryptocurrencies promote borderless monetary mobility and limitless speculation without regulatory oversight. On the other hand, grassroots movements have instituted alternative currencies and networks, aimed at fixing money into local economies and collectives. Central Banks and governments, meanwhile, are urgently exploring ways to regulate such emerging monetary flows.
The mobility of money has become an increasingly contested domain across multiple scales - local, national, and transnational - and regulatory regimes. This panel invites theoretical and ethnographic papers that examine situations where money is made to travel across, or on the contrary, is fixed into different forms and scales. We propose to discuss key questions that include but are not limited to: How are the boundaries of monetary regimes politicised and contested? How does the digitisation of value facilitate or obstruct global movement and interconnection? What kinds of often future-orientated imaginations, social practices, and regulatory frameworks are monetary transactions embedded in? And what is at stake for those who attempt to facilitate or stymie the mobility of money?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 16 August, 2018, -Paper short abstract:
Despite Bitcoin being usually promoted as a global currency, its use can be significantly locally fixed in order to protect it from the competition of fiat money. Such policies present theoretical challenge where Bitcoin exceeds the boundary between categories of global and local currency.
Paper long abstract:
My ethnographic research is situated in an independent hackerspace Parallel Polis (PP) in Prague; a three-store building, which is significant by excluding fiat money from its premises and enforcing Bitcoin-only policy. This policy has been introduced in PP as an act of political declaration of resistance towards state power and also as an educative measure aiming to promote Bitcoin among non-users. The general aim of Bitcoin is to avoid centralized control and as such to provide infrastructure enabling the users to be indifferent to power. Nevertheless the potentially emerging economically "just" society which shall be the outcome of Bitcoin's implementation is based on what Karl Polanyi calls the liberal creed, resting on undeniable faith in self-regulating markets. Therefore I argue that even though the Bitcoin advocates in PP believe in the self-regulation of markets, they still feel the urge to protect Bitcoin by creating a Bitcoin-only space in surrounding "hostile" environment. Their Bitcoin-only policy thus presents an ideological contradiction where particular alternative money - which are by design libertarian and as such shall follow the rule of currency competition - are being regulated by copying the border-making techniques of other sovereign actors. Although Bitcoin is in PP presented as a currency which transgress control and boundaries, its use is being carried through restrictive policy of spatial exclusion and as such is distinctly localized. This particular case thus challenges the border between local and global currencies and provides opportunity for rethinking the categories of flow and fixture.
Paper short abstract:
A case study on a farm in rural Russia which minted its own cryptocurrency.
Paper long abstract:
The paper is based on fieldwork that took place at a farm in rural Russia, where the owner initiated the creation of a cryptocurrency. The post-soviet countryside is an environment where different types of informal exchange are practiced, both monetary and non-monetary. Thus, cryptocurrency becomes a sociomaterial algorithm that is used for the redistribution of subsistence goods and favors, similar to the ways embedded in socialist and post-socialist economies. Drawing from earlier anthropological discussions on gift-commodity logic in the area, I argue that this cryptocurrency filled a "space in between" a gift (authority, name) and a commodity, as it can be traded and speculated on global crypto stock-exchanges.
Paper short abstract:
Cryptocurrencies and blockchain projects crosscut various material, regulatory and market configurations. This paper contributes to a mapping of the ways in which cryptocurrencies travel across such configurations, by examining how project teams navigate particular regulatory and market contexts.
Paper long abstract:
Despite carrying with it promises for decentralization, cryptocurrencies and blockchain bring about regulatory and social scientific discussions that go beyond that subject and relate more intimately to the nature of monies (Dodd 2014), technology (Oudshoorn and Pinch 2003) and the future socio-political configurations that emerging techno-economic arrangements may contribute to (Callon 1990; Swartz 2017, 2018).
Departing from the EU context, and from ethnographic and netnographic case studies about blockchain communities in the Netherlands and beyond - including groups seeking for financial alternatives, as well as financial incumbents - in this paper I intend to explore how tacit negotiations between financial regulations and project development play out in practice. When, and where, do cryptocurrencies and broader financial regulations become a worry in a project's roadmap? How do projects get funding? What are the monies and regulatory frameworks contemplated in funding strategies? How do projects supported by cryptocurrencies unfold, taking into account their many material and operational links to 'real' and regulated worlds?
Departing from concrete case-studies about blockchain based projects, I intend to trace the entanglements between digital spaces and currencies, and the material, regulatory and market configurations across which they travel. Through these ethnographic insights into project pragmatics, but also into regulatory and supervisory perspectives about cryptocurrencies, virtual currencies and blockchain technology, I wish to contribute to a discussion about monies, their creation, transformation, mobility and fixation.
Paper short abstract:
This paper details how regulatory frameworks are foundational to the re-organisation of money by local currencies. Via an ethnography of the Bristol Pound I draw attention to the various modes of money that come with specified sets of rules and economic regimes.
Paper long abstract:
Research on local "alternative" moneys rarely focuses on the aspect of financial regulation. In this paper I outline the monetary ecosystem of the Bristol Pound, where I worked as a consultant on legal and compliance issues between February and June 2018. I hope to illuminate how various means of exchange "shade into each other in the degree to which they function as money" (Hayek 1990:56). Showing a) the plurality of what money is and b) how practices of exchange must always position itself in relation to existing laws and regulations, including their definitions of what is money, and what is not. Though the regulation of local currencies impacts their shape and substance drastically, they simultaneously challenge the monopoly of the state and central banks over the definition and production of money by emphasizing monetary multiplicity. The mobility of money here is not about its capacity to traverse across spaces and blur distance; money is mobile because it moves between modes of being.
Paper short abstract:
This paper will introduce survival strategies of computer engineers in Macedonia who seek to make a living with forex. I will explore the personal aspects of a global economic transaction for peoples identity.
Paper long abstract:
I am looking at how computer engineers in Macedonia use their knowledge of algorithms to transcend borders to partake in high frequency trading. Their aim is not to become wealthy, but to substitute their meagre incomes by earning 50 to 100 Euros a month with long thought-out strategies for the Forex market. Macedonians cannot own bank accounts abroad. Several strategies ensued to be able to access the global world of Forex, including relatives immigrating to Australia and opening an account for my interlocutors, reigniting relationships of their lives in Yugoslavia, for example entrusting friends of friends in Slovenia thousands of Euros to open accounts there, all the way to becoming Bulgarian citizen. Bulgaria was one of the first countries to recognize the independence of the Republic of Macedonia in 1991, but always insisted that the people living there were Bulgarians. It is from this 'kinship' that Macedonians can receive a Bulgarian passport, access a Schengen visa, and a Forex account.
The traders are always having to invent new strategies to circumvent laws and regulations that are being put in place making it again and again impossible for the traders to trade. As example, one trader has been working over the last nine years to become a Bulgarian citizen in order to have access to a Forex account. Just when he holds his new passport in his hands rumours have it that now one has to physically live in Bulgaria to open an account. Nevertheless, he has started trading in Forex.
Paper short abstract:
A critical analysis of mainstream, mundane forms of money and their pragmatics, so far largely neglected in the anthropology of credit/debt, reveals the importance of specific ways of exploiting and contesting the mobility of money for the social relations and politics of household debt in Croatia.
Paper long abstract:
Croatia has experienced a marked boom of household debt in the 2000s, which was to a great extent funded by crossborder capital flows. In the context of insufficient regulation, much of this lending was highly exploitative and entailed significant risks for debtors. This paper stresses the importance of a critical analysis of mainstream, mundane forms of money and their pragmatics, so far largely neglected in the anthropology of credit/debt, for understanding the social relations and politics of Croatian household debt. The lenders' profit-making strategies are interpreted as particular ways of exploiting the mobility of money: single-currency "carry trade" (borrowing in a low-yielding currency, lending in a high-yielding one) in foreign currency (FX) household lending, and irregular crossborder mortgages servings as means of expropriation of debtors in the Croatian lending by Raiffeisen credit-savings cooperatives from Austria. The paper shows how these mobilities make use of what Marxists theorize as the fetishistic attributes of money (interest rates, exchange rates, fees, derivatives) and the ideological and institutional elements of the "community of money" (e.g. legal contracts) as well as the materiality of specific forms of money (e.g. cash) and the affordances of relevant state regimes of regulation. At the same time, these mobilities of money become objects of questioning and critique by activists who delegitimate these forms of household lending as illegitimate and/or illegal state-sponsored speculation, expropriation and money laundering and call for limiting the mobility of money and the acceptable manipulations of the money fetish.