The Future of Money: Investigating the Social and Political Implications of Currency Experiments

New monetary forms ranging from cryptocurrencies and state-issued digital currencies to local and alternative exchange systems to mobile money and other forms of cashless payment portend significant changes to money and society.
Today money is mainly considered state-issued general-purpose fiat money. Yet, even as the dominance of state currencies appears to be waning, it is unclear how emergent forms will affect the ways in which we use money and the types of relations they create. Mainstream social science has been little help in this regard. Even innovative work in behavioural economics tends to impose ethnocentric and ahistorical notions of rationality and value when encountering non-Western contexts. In contrast, our proposed international partnership brings the strengths of anthropological research methods---locally-grounded, human-centered fieldwork that focuses on practices---to bear on the future of money across a set of culturally diverse sites. Thus, it brings cultural specificity and comparative perspective to scholarship on the topic and engages with a broader public to illuminate ways money might be restructured for the broadest social benefit.