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Based on ethnography in post-reform Cuba, this paper introduces monetary disorder to show how digital platforms, fiscal governance, and informal trust networks co-produce new financial subjectivities, inequalities, and solidarities amid inflation, digitalisation, and state-led monetary reform

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how digital financialisation, fiscal governance, and informal communities intersect to produce new subjectivities and inequalities in contemporary Cuba. Drawing on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork, it develops monetary disorder as an analytic for understanding how state-led efforts to stabilise and formalise monetary systems can unintentionally generate fragmentation, informality, and moral uncertainty.

Focusing on Cuba’s recent reforms—monetary reunification, enforced digitisation of payments, and the legalisation of private microenterprises—the paper shows how citizens are increasingly constituted as digitally mapped fiscal subjects embedded in state banking infrastructures, while simultaneously relying on transnational and informal financial networks to survive inflation and currency collapse. Platforms such as Telegram, Zelle, TropiPay, and cryptocurrency exchanges function as bottom-up infrastructures of trust that enable exchange, savings, and investment when formal channels fail.

The paper traces how these digital financial communities link intimate household economies to global circuits of remittances, speculation, and state revenue, while producing differentiated financial subjectivities: entrepreneurial investors adept at arbitraging currencies, cryptocurrency investors, precarious pensioners, and digitally excluded actors. These processes are deeply gendered, racialised, and generational, reinforcing new class formations tied to access to remittances and digital infrastructures.

By situating Cuban digital finance within broader debates on financialisation and governance, the paper argues that polarisation is not simply imposed from above but is negotiated, contested, and occasionally mitigated within everyday digital financial practices. Ethnography reveals how informal solidarities, trust-based verification systems, and improvised governance emerge within fragmented monetary systems, highlighting alternative forms of economic coordination under conditions of fiscal crisis.

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China’s P2P fintech boom promised “inclusive” democratic finance but collapsed into digital Ponzi schemes and predatory cash loans. Drawing on ethnography, this paper shows how platform design turned financial inclusion into a machinery of dispossession.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how “financial inclusion” became a vehicle of mass dispossession in China’s decade-long experiment with fintech. Based on ethnographic research conducted between 2018 and 2023 among investors, borrowers, and platform workers in the peer-to-peer (P2P) lending sector, it traces how digital platforms transformed everyday hopes for mobility into speculative extraction. China’s fintech boom did not emerge from a lack of banking access but from dissatisfaction with state-dominated, conservative financial infrastructures. Platforms such as Alipay popularized a vision of “democratic finance” through user-friendly design, real-time returns, and populist rhetoric that framed financial participation as part of the Chinese Dream. P2P platforms extended this affective infrastructure into high-risk credit markets, repackaging peer lending into guaranteed “wealth-management” products while alienating the ethics of mutuality that the term “peer” implied. Under conditions of unregulated competition, this inclusionary script depended increasingly on deception: simulated profits, unfounded guarantees, and referral-driven expansion. When competition intensified, platforms shifted to short-term “cash loan” models that combined data extraction, algorithmic scoring, and coercive repayment practices, producing cycles of debt, shame, and social breakdown. By 2020, nearly 6,000 platforms had collapsed, wiping out millions of households’ savings. Placing China in dialogue with global fintech trajectories, the paper argues that inclusion is not inherently empowering. When mediated through platform infrastructures and investor-driven growth, it can become a technique for distributing risk, extracting value, and normalizing financial violence—an exportable model now spreading across the Global South.

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Does digitalization promote development and inclusion in informal finance, or does it create new opportunities for value extraction and worsen inequality? We focus on savings groups, as they embody finance rooted in social ties, to document their digitalization journey.

Paper long abstract

This research explores the digital transformation of Kenya's informal finance sector through the new perspective of financial pluralism. It questions the dominant linear formalization theory by arguing that low-income households strategically manage a diverse portfolio of financial relationships across various institutions and agents, including banks, savings groups, mobile money, money lenders, shopkeepers, family and friends, etc., to meet their daily needs. Using a mixed-methods approach, we analyze national survey data and qualitative fieldwork data with savings groups (chamas) to address a key question: Does digitalization promote development and inclusion in informal finance, or does it create new opportunities for value extraction and worsen inequality? We focus on savings groups, as they embody finance rooted in social ties, to document their digitalization process through mobile money, lending apps, and digital platforms as tools for modernization and development. We highlight the perceived benefits by some group members and also note the associated risks. These include overindebtedness from excessive borrowing, shifts in trust and power dynamics among members, and the exploitation of social relations and collective financial practices by fintech and telecom operators for their own gain. The study records individual and group strategies for resistance and accountability, including mixed cash-digital practices. These actions go beyond economic significance as they represent, in our view, a way to reshape the socio-economic life of a community. Taken together, they may be seen as ways in which segments of society renegotiate spaces and influence public policies.

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This paper explores how stability is produced through governing, infrastructuring, and moralising stablecoins in Hong Kong’s digital finance scene, highlighting the emergence of stabilising subjectivities amid efforts to position the city as a global Web3 hub.

Paper long abstract

In classical anthropological theories, stability is often regarded as the ‘default state’ of society, articulated through concepts such as Radcliffe-Brown’s (1940) notion of ‘natural equilibrium’ or Bourdieu’s (1977) idea of ‘enduring dispositions’. Building upon ethnographic research conducted among blockchain industry professionals and regulators in Hong Kong, this paper explores how stability is conceptualised and produced within the context of digital financialisation. This inquiry is situated amidst broader efforts to position the city as a ‘global Web3 hub’.

Specifically, we focus on the introduction of a Hong Kong dollar stablecoin, a novel form of digital currency that, in contrast to volatile cryptocurrencies, claims to offer intrinsic stability by referencing an underlying fiat currency. Through this case, we identify three key processes through which stability is constituted: governing, infrastructuring, and moralising. Governing is enacted via innovative regulatory approaches such as sandboxing, which allow for controlled experimentation. Infrastructuring involves the development of ostensibly ‘agnostic’ transactional technologies, designed to operate amidst ongoing geopolitical polarisation. Moralising occurs as industry figures present themselves as responsible actors, aligning their practices with normative ideals appropriate for licensed stablecoin issuers.

This paper examines how these interrelated processes give rise to distinct stabilising subjectivities—those individuals and organisations who internalise and enact stability through their practices. We argue that these emerging subjectivities are central to understanding the broader anthropological significance of stability amidst digital financialisation, highlighting the ways in which stability is actively produced, moralised, and embodied within Hong Kong’s transforming financial landscape.