Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

Introduction 1. Woman's Place in Man's Life Cycle 2. Images of Relationship 3. Concepts of Self and Morality 4. Crisis and Transition 5. Women's Rights and Women's Judgment 6. Visions of Maturity References Index of Study Participants General Index

In a Different Voice. Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge, MA (Harvard University Press) 1982.

The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society

It seems that a new paradigm is being formed within the social sciences, the ‘new mobilities’ paradigm. Some recent contributions to forming and stabilising this new paradigm include work from anthropology, cultural studies, geography, migration studies, science and technology studies, tourism and transport studies, and sociology. In this paper we draw out some characteristics, properties, and implications of this emergent paradigm, especially documenting some novel mobile theories and methods. We reflect on how far this paradigm has developed and thereby to extend and develop the ‘mobility turn’ within the social sciences.

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The new mobilities paradigm.

All these premises having, as I think, been clearly made out, it is impossible that the rulers now on earth should make any benefit, or derive any the least shadow of authority from that, which is held to be the fountain of all power, Adam's private dominion and paternal jurisdiction; so that he that will not give just occasion to think that all government in the world is the product only of force and violence, and that men live together by no other rules but that of beasts, where the strongest carries it, and so lay a foundation for perpetual disorder and mischief, tumult, sedition and rebellion, (things that the followers of that hypothesis so loudly cry out against) must of necessity find out another rise of government, another original of political power, and another way of designing and knowing the persons that have it, than what Sir Robert Filmer hath taught us.

Two Treatises of Government.

This review surveys anthropological and other social research on money and finance. It emphasizes money’s social roles and meanings as well as its pragmatics in different modalities of exchange and circulation. It reviews scholarly emphasis on modern money’s distinctive qualities of commensuration, abstraction, quantification, and reification. It also addresses recent work that seeks to understand the social, semiotic, and performative dimensions of finance. Although anthropology has contributed finely grained, historicized accounts of the impact of modern money, it too often repeats the same story of the “great transformation” from socially embedded to disembedded and abstracted economic forms. This review speculates about why money’s fictions continue to surprise.

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The Anthropology of Money

List of Illustrations and Tables xi Preface xiii Acknowledgments xvii A Note on Transliteration xxi INTRODUCTION: Lateral Reasons for a Post-reflexive Anthropology 1 CHAPTER 1: In the Matter of Islamic Banking and Local Currencies 24 CHAPTER 2: Of Law and Belief 55 CHAPTER 3: Of Monetary Alternatives and the Limits of Values Past 77 CHAPTER 4: Innumerate Equivalencies: Making Change with Alternative Currencies 100 CHAPTER 5: Wiseman's and Fool's Gold 122 CHAPTER 6: Mutual Life, Limited: Insurance, Moral Value, and Bureaucratic Form 136 CONCLUSION: Restaging Abstraction and Adequation 154 Notes 169 References Cited 185 Index 205

Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason

(Received XX XXX XXXX; final version received XX XXX XXXX) This paper investigates the semiotics of Bitcoin, an electronic cash system that uses decentralized networking to enable irreversible payments. For enthusiasts, Bitcoin provides an alternative to currencies and payment systems that are seen to threaten users’ privacy, limit personal liberty, and undermine the value of money through state and corporate oversight. Bitcoin’s promise lies in its apparent capacity to resolve these concerns not through regulatory institutions or interpersonal trust, but through its cryptographic protocols. We characterize this semiotics as a ‘‘practical materialism’’ and suggest it replays debates about privacy, labor, and value.

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“When perhaps the real problem is money itself!”: the practical materiality of Bitcoin

This article explores the emerging field of ‘mobile money’: mobile phone-enabled systems for value transfer and storage, primarily in the developing world, which are heralded as signal intervention...

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Mobile Money: Communication, Consumption and Change in the Payments Space

Financial derivatives are credited with bringing to the fore a number of sociological and metaphysical problems for modernity, from the instantiation of particular modalities of risk to the destabilization of referentiality in knowledge-claims about the world. This essay argues that derivatives can take on the particular power they hold in such accounts only through a repression of their mathematical technique. Opening up the black box of the mathematical technique through a history of statistics, it argues that the founding trauma animating derivatives' discursive power is the separation of religion from the technical procedures of mathematics and the stochastic models that give form to trading in derivatives. Derivatives' indexical power is a symptom of this trauma. That symptomatology reveals derivatives to be a moral, not just mathematical, problematic.

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Bill Maurer

Papers

The Anthropology of Money

Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason

“When perhaps the real problem is money itself!”: the practical materiality of Bitcoin

Mobile Money: Communication, Consumption and Change in the Payments Space

Repressed futures: financial derivatives' theological unconscious