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Paper short abstract:

The adoption of digital payment enables gift-money's digitization through mobile transfer. My paper discusses digitized gift-money's impacts on gift paradigms and social relations as windows in reading money's social/monetary meaning in contemporary China's dialogue of morality and neoliberalism

Paper long abstract:

It was a long debate about money's monetary nature, social nature, and other types of nature. Money were understood as an impersonal commodity without social meanings in classic theories of money, while anthropologists also emphasize the social meaning of money. China's money-gifting tradition is a typical socio-cultural phenomenon to support this idea. Money-gifting plays a vital role in connecting morality, sentiment, and interpersonal relationships in ceremonies of cultural significance, where people attend with gift money, using ceremonial performances and sentimental interactions to hide the inherent monetary nature of gift exchange. A set of social paradigms is developed in gift reciprocating regulations and grow to a moral power constraining people's everyday behaviors. Based on literatures on social money and ethnographic cases of wedding money-gifting in villages of Tai'an city, China, my paper brings digitization to the concern of money's socially integrative function by scrutinizing nuanced shifts in the power relation between the monetary and socializing features of digitized gift money.