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- Convenors:
-
Camilla Ida Ravnbol
(University of Copenhagen)
Atreyee Sen (University of Copenhagen)
David Birch
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- Formats:
- Panels
- Sessions:
- Friday 24 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
This panel explores new approaches towards value, economy, money, debt, finance and fiscal relations. In doing so, it discusses how global turns towards digital finance (e.g. mobile wallets; credit and debit cards) impact cash dependent and marginalized groups, communities and families worldwide.
Long Abstract:
New anti-cash fiscal policies and initiatives are decreasing cash transactions and replacing them with online payments, digital assets, credit and debit cards, algorithmic governance, and alternative forms of digital exchange, such as cryptocurrencies (Birch 2017). The subsequent 'cashlessness' encountered in everyday life takes on diverse infrastructural forms, social expressions and immeasurable manifestations: as scarcity of hard cash in circulation, the disappearance of material/cold cash as notes and coins, as abstract 'phone cash', and even as state-sanctioned demonetisation in which cash denominations are erased as legal tender (Sen, Lindquist and Kolling forthcoming 2020). Anti-capitalist economic forums remain critical of these financial drives that implement invasive, bio-metric strategies to facilitate consumer credit markets, and segregate unbanked populations from cash-light, mainstream economies. Other commentators and policy-makers argue that the rise of digital finance drives financial inclusion, socio-economic development and connectivity with marginalised economic communities. Etched in relief against this contested economic backdrop of e-finance, we invite papers that explore contemporary flows between credit, debt, and various conditions of exchange, borrowing and lending among/between individuals, markets, states, businesses and communities, which are negotiating global cashlessness. Contributions to the panel can focus on (but not be limited to) local themes and contexts such as changing household economies, migration landscapes, transactional activities, and lending cycles. They can also explore broader horizons involving the provision of financial services and the contingencies of cashless transitions.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 24 July, 2020, -Paper short abstract:
The paper will analyse migrant women's secrecy and solidarity related to the use of net-banking and smart phones in urban India. I show how domestic workers in Kolkata creatively manage and hide digital savings, to ensure that their informal income is not entirely wrested away by drunk husbands.
Paper long abstract:
With more than half a billion internet subscribers, India is one of the fastest-growing markets for digital consumers. Through Aadhaar, the world's largest bio-metric identification system, the central government has incentivised citizens to link their personal data to a host of services, including sim cards and bank accounts. For example, mAadhaar is an official mobile application that allows Aadhaar holders to link their demographic and banking information to their individual smartphones. While some scholars argue that Aadhar offers a channel for financial inclusion of the poor into mainstream economies, others have criticised the coercive nature of such invasive technologies. Etched in relief against this debate, the paper will analyse rural-urban women workers' multiple journeys of secrecy and solidarity related to the use of net-banking, Aadhaar and smart phones. Using the narratives of women employed in domestic and care work in Kolkata, I will show how female migrants conspired with each other to creatively manage digital savings in the city. They used smartphone-banking to scatter their informal wages into numerous bank accounts, and disclosed only a fraction of their income to drunk husbands and exploitative in-laws in the village. This economy, which involved the circulation of digital cash and everyday lies, offered women workers an alternative but fragile vision of their financial futures. The paper is framed through the concept of women's 'migra-monies'. It refers to shadow networks of informal earnings and domestic remittances that lie at the interface of emerging digital technologies and gendered social relations within local migration landscapes.
Paper short abstract:
In the shadows of an emerging 'planetary' digital labour market, local financial exclusion often limits refugees' access to digital livelihoods and online work. Building on research among Syrians in Lebanon, this paper scrutinizes the ostensibly 'global' digital economy through its extreme margins.
Paper long abstract:
Despite the spread of an ostensibly 'planetary' digital labour market, persistent difficulties with financial access have limited the inclusion of refugees in digital economies globally. Among Syrians in Lebanon in particular, digital skill trainings have aimed to connect this marginalized minority to online work opportunities, such as platform work and remote freelancing. However, the restrictive regime that governs their digital and financial access undermines the feasibility of transactions and payments that can be turned into cash. Partly due to US-led global sanctions against Syria and certain Lebanese groups, banks in Lebanon do not allow Syrians to open bank accounts and even where such an account exists, payments are limited to the increasingly devalued Lebanese pound and exclude US-Dollars. While mobile wallets offer an alternative in other places, this has not been very successful in the restrictive regime of Lebanon. Building on Syrians' own experiences with online work and the creative 'workarounds' and 'brokerage' social entrepreneurs and development agencies have adopted, I scrutinize the ostensibly global digital economy from the viewpoint of its extreme margins. At the heart of this inquiry stand two questions: How do local financial restrictions imposed on marginalized minorities determine the possibilities offered by digital economies and e-finance solutions? What alternative solutions have the involved actors developed and how can intermediation and brokerage increase refugees access to digital livelihoods and online work now and in the future?
Paper short abstract:
The paper aims to analyse the survival strategies of citizens in failed or transitional economies such as post-Soviet and urban economies of Turkey.
Paper long abstract:
The paper aims to analyse the survival strategies of citizens in failed or transitional economies such as post-Soviet and urban economies of Turkey. In the context of limited welfare and unemployment individuals face lack of basic provisions and finances to meet daily needs for food, small items and clothing in order to survive economic hardships. This creates a situation where most vulnerable members of the society such as women, elderly persons and children suffer most. This also creates dependencies among kinship, friendship and other social networks which become crucial in providing social and financial security. Debt economies flourish in such situations of financial deficiency and lack of cash to pay their daily needs and basic provision. Debt economies are organised both interpersonally and informally as well as formally through book loans. An extreme case of debt economies through bank loans for financing daily expenses for food and basic provisions can be observed in Georgia in the devastated mining cities where people and their properties belong to the small banks where the latter innovatively successfully made profits on the misery of the poor residents of the mining cities.
Other examples of debt economies come from the south-eastern part of Turkey specifically Mardin where people borrow from their close social networks or families or even sometimes banks credits for their survival needs where they find themselves in the debt cycles.
Paper short abstract:
Bitcoin re-introduces monetary pluralism to western economies and brings the anthropological question of conversions between spheres of exchange to the picture. Thanks to its ambivalence and technological design it poses as "digital cash" and challenges cashless economies.
Paper long abstract:
Bitcoin is a new digital technology of exchange which re-introduces into western societies monetary pluralism. Bitcoin is designed in order to overcome the control of central regulators over economic exchange and as such it is quite resistant towards state-led institutionalization. By many members of Bitcoin community Bitcoin is referred to as "digital cash" - combining mobility of digital finance with exclusivity of ownership of cash - and thus it challenges the "cashless" culture with its socio-political implications. This puts Bitcoin into legally and economically ambivalent position which plays crucial role in its practical uses, i.e. sometimes it is treated as money, sometimes as commodity; sometimes the prices for goods and services are fixed in fiat currencies, sometimes in bitcoins. Such situation of "monetary anarchism" resonates with monetary practices of west-African popular economies as described by Jane I. Guyer in "Marginal Gains". Guyer analyses asymmetrical monetary conversions, where statuses of money-objects are being shifted in order to allow gains for one of the exchanging parties. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in two Bitcoin communities in Prague and Bratislava this paper argues that Bitcoin allows for a similar kind of conversions. Such strategies enable some members of the Bitcoin community to deal with volatility of Bitcoin's prize and ambivalence of its legal status and treat the "monetary anarchism" as a resource of its own.
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses the de-facto access that urban poor Roma have to digital economies in Europe. It explores how poor Roma families engage with digital financial initiatives at home in Romania, and when they travel to work in the informal economy in Denmark.
Paper long abstract:
This paper contributes towards contemporary ethnographies concerning the access of urban poor migrants to digital economies in Europe. More specifically, it explores how poor Roma families engage with digital financial initiatives at home in Romania, and when they travel to work in the informal economy in Denmark. It focuses on the empirical case of three brothers in a Roma family, primarily as a pathway to discuss critical financial issues related to their livelihood. The paper shows how the brothers are caught in spirals of debt to informal usurers in their community, and analyses the possibilities and limitations of their integration into the national banking system in Romania. Thereafter, it sheds light on how the three brothers travel with their spouses to work with scrap scavenging in Denmark, including searching for refundable beverage containers. In this regard, the summer festivals in Denmark constitute their main income stream. The paper analyses how the brothers experience the recent financial turn towards making the refund system at the festivals cashless, and the strategies that the brothers employ in order to access digital disbursements from the refund deposit. On this basis, the paper ends by discussing the de-facto access that urban poor Roma have to digital economies in Europe.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines how multi-level marketers narrate the story of bitcoin and its meteoric price rise, to sell cryptocurrencies to cash dependant and often marginalised members of communities. It explores how an entrepreneurial self, imbued with 'agency' to overcome financial hardship, is created.
Paper long abstract:
On 3 January 2009, the bitcoin network first came into the world. It was the product of a technical online community attempting to create a global digital decentralised currency away from gaze of the nation state. For the first couple of years, bitcoin was essentially worth nothing - it traded amongst a niche community of software developers. A large proportion of whom were attracted to bitcoin for its political emphasis on privacy. Fast forward to 2020, and cryptocurrencies are slowing reaching mainstream consciousness as the price of bitcoin soars above £6000. Those who not only bought early but maintained their conviction through drastic drops in price are now being rewarded handsomely.
Much of the literature on cryptocurrencies have focused on its technical mechanism, and the politics and philosophy this engenders. However, there has been little focus on those interacting with cryptocurrencies on the ground, away from the techno elite. Drawing upon ongoing ethnographic fieldwork conducted both online and offline, this paper interrogates how cryptocurrencies are being sold via multi-level marketing to cash dependant and often marginalised members of communities, by invoking the story of the meteoric price rise of bitcoin. For many, the bitcoin story is about meteoric price rises rather than any political or philosophical underpinnings. This paper goes on to examine how, through the telling and re-telling of the bitcoin story, an entrepreneurial self is created that is imbued with 'agency' to overcome financial hardship.
Paper short abstract:
The paper explores the pursuit of credit and betrayal among women in northeast Brazil. It takes an onset in all things left unpaid, despite the intentions to pay, to develop an ethnography of unsettled debt, that is situated in a context of new digitized credit markets and 'feminization of finance'
Paper long abstract:
For Brazil's urban poor, access to credit has become a life condition and a necessary means to 'progress', a desire frequently expressed during fieldwork among impoverished families in Salvador, Brazil. Debts were paid in cash, but a lack of cash often forged exchanges in which people obtained goods without cash at hand. Water and electricity are goods that are commonly consumed and not paid for. But food, clothes, perfume, ceramic tiles and furniture are also bought on credit at stores across the city, from local vendors, or by using a credit card, or on someone else's credit card, and left unpaid despite the intentions to pay. This paper portrays the debt practices of black women in Salvador and explores the impact of this on community life, as people undermine the future aspirations and opportunities of others in their pursuit of credit. This ethnography of unsettled debt is situated within recent developments of expanding credit markets and the 'feminization of finance' (Allon 2014), and a growing analytical attention to the female labour of juggling debt (Harker, Sayyad and Shebeitah 2019; Schuster 2014; Roberts 2015; Strathern 1988). It further addresses how this unsettled debt might unsettle the concept of cashlessness, as these economic exchanges become cashless in a literal sense, as well as the common notion of credit, defined as an agreement of lending concrete resources and demanding a return in the future (Peebles 2010).
Paper short abstract:
The proposed paper is an analysis of an ethnography focused on Bitcoin users as observed in Rovereto during 2018. The aim is to provide further insights on the socio-political motivations underpinning Bitcoin usage as a digital cash alternative to the Euro.
Paper long abstract:
In the proposed paper, I will develop a study focusing on the ethnographic data I gathered in Rovereto in early 2018, related to the individual attitudes towards technology of Bitcoin users. To provide points of reference and a better understanding of the topic, the first section will analyse Graeber's reflections on the expectations of past generations on the impact of technological innovation as exposed in his book "The Utopia of Rules". Additionally, I will provide a short comparison between the structural characteristics of innovations such as those analysed by Graeber and the characteristics of digital technologies developed with open-source methodologies, specifically Bitcoin. In the second section, I will compare social mechanisms observed in Rovereto with the notion of inter-subjectivity as developed by Husserl and develop the notion of participative techno-optimism, as opposed to Graeber's understanding of techno-optimism. The theoretical notions analysed in the first two sections and the ethnographic material will then be connected, to provide further insights on the factors that may be underpinning the differences between the insights of Graeber's book and my findings in Italy. The conclusion aims to provide an understanding of the relationship between Bitcoin usage as in the case of Rovereto and the socio-political values of their users. Moreover, the Husserlian notion of inter-subjectivity will be used to provide a deeper understanding of the social context present in Rovereto, which may have played a role in the spread of Bitcoin usage.
Paper short abstract:
The paper asks what does a cashless economy look like in settings where informal/criminal economies are rampant and cash dependent? What are the risks associated with social financing in such setting? In answering these questions we engage with classical anthropological discussions of risk.
Paper long abstract:
Drawing on recent research on the modus operandi of systems of bossism across India, Pakistan and Bangladesh (Michelutti et al 2018) and a collaboration with an Fin-tech/social enterprise the paper explores how social financing works in coercive political economies in North India. Moneylending, usury and extortion are the building blocks of systems of power often called 'Mafia Raj'(the rule of mafia or the rule of gangsters. The paper shows how the dynamics of such economies are largely ignored by new digital social financial models whose aim is to promote rural prosperity across South Asia (in particular in India). Importantly vernacular evaluations of credit risk are not taken into consideration and integrated in statistical centered credit rating tools. The paper asks what does a cashless economy look like in settings where informal/criminal economies are rampant and cash dependent? What are the risks (for lender and borrowers) associated with social financing in such setting? In answering these questions we put into dialog classical anthropological discussions of risk with the ethnography of 'the digital finance turn' in rural Rajasthan and beyond.
Paper short abstract:
As cash has suddenly gone missing from Swedish life, a growing range of citizens and institutions have sounded the alarm. The Swedish central bank's response, which includes issuing the world's first national digital currency, charts a course that all central banks must consider in the near future.
Paper long abstract:
As cash has suddenly gone missing from Swedish life, a growing range of citizens and institutions have sounded the alarm that its disappearance threatens not only cherished egalitarian values, but even the capacity of the state to deliver and monitor a standard payments infrastructure. Across the world, national currencies—public goods that emerged out of a previous era of currency proliferation— are now competing with private alternatives. As paper and coins fall into disuse, the funding structure that supports these public goods could potentially wither away, while their capacity to bind together states and citizens diminishes in equal measure. The Swedish central bank's response to these threats, which includes issuing the world's first national digital currency, charts a course that all central banks must consider in the near future.