Recent irvine_law items

Whose Streets? Race and the Right to Protest

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This Article traces historical patterns in systemic responses to protest movements along racial lines. It contrasts the militarized response to protests advocating for racial justice with the leniency shown towards predominantly White-led demonstrations, arguing that the different systemic responses to the Black Lives Matter movement and the January 6th insurrection illustrate the enduring impact of racialized policing and systemic racism in the modern context. It further advocates for non-reformist approaches that challenge systemic inequalities rather than perpetuate them. The Article concludes by urging continued collective resistance and the pursuit of justice in the face of entrenched power structures and systemic racism.

Coin Taxes

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

New kinds of private money are thriving, with increasing circulation, growing acceptance, and rapid technological innovation. But this new money suffers from an old problem: bank runs. Bank runs can destabilize even well-regulated and healthy banks, and their contagion can catalyze and amplify a system-wide financial crisis. Since the 1930s, policymakers have sought to protect our financial system from bank runs through public deposit insurance and other emergency response mechanisms. Those historically effective policy tools, however, are critically unavailable or ineffective in the context of these new types of money. As a result, these new types of money remain critically vulnerable to bank runs, and the potential for financial contagion from their failure poses catastrophic risks to society.

In light of traditional legal tools’ inadequacy, this Article proposes an unconventional...

The Inevitable Vagueness of Medical Exceptions to Abortion Bans

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In the aftermath of the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization removing federal constitutional protection for abortion, twenty states currently significantly restrict access to abortion. These state laws all include exceptions for the life of the pregnant person; most also exempt significant impairments to the pregnant patient’s health. Despite these exceptions, repeated accounts in the press and in court cases have shown pregnant patients in significant medical need being denied abortion care, resulting in serious injuries and, in some cases, death. The reasons for this denial of care, though, are disputed. Physicians have contended that the language of medical exceptions is so unclear that they are difficult to apply. Meanwhile, legislators who favor strict restrictions have blamed attending doctors for failing to apply what they say are clear...

Table of Contents

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Table of Contents

Regulating Police Robots

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Once considered a mere novelty, ground robots and aerial drones are quickly becoming a mainstream policing tool. Autonomous police robots, equipped with a panoply of cameras and sensors, have been sent into parks, schools, and train stations. Agencies across the country are piloting “Drone as First Responder” programs, which automatically dispatch drones in response to 911 calls. Police have used robots to disorient, immobilize, and use force against suspects.

Police robots may provide public safety benefits, but they may also carry real risks. The widespread adoption of highly mobile robots equipped with cameras, sensors, and analytics will only hasten the proliferation of police surveillance, with attendant risks to individual privacy. Algorithmic bias and disparities in where policing technologies are deployed may fuel racial inequities. The advent of force-equipped...

Masthead

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Masthead

The Human Rights Obligations of Corporate Directors

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Corporate directors and officers substantially influence how well—or poorly—a corporation addresses human rights risks. But their involvement is often hidden or misunderstood, despite the reality that many corporate human rights abuses occur because of explicit choices made by their leadership that, on many occasions, inevitably lead to human rights violations. The failure to understand their role in past corporate human rights violations leads to ineffective strategies to prevent future ones as leading international, regional, and domestic laws and norms on business and human rights inadequately address the corporate governance gaps that facilitate human rights violations.

This Article identifies the critical role that corporate boards and officers play in human rights violations committed by their corporations. It introduces a four-part typology that categorizes the different executive choices at the root...

Mission Statement

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Mission Statement

Generative AI and the Limits of Work Product Doctrine

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Generative AI and the Limits of Work Product Doctrine

Cover

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Cover

Multigenerational Illegality: Transforming Indigenous People to “Illegal” Beings

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This Article integrates multigenerational illegality into the canon by employing conceptual analysis and personal narrative. Multigenerational illegality explains how mixed-status Indigenous, Black, Latinx/e, and Asian and Pacific Islander families are branded as “illegal” and systemically denied pathways to status or citizenship, thereby becoming marginalized across generations. In this way, this Article demonstrates the legal injuries and sacrificios of mixed-status families of color caused by the system of immigration law and enforcement.

The Myth of Equal Protection

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

It is a myth that equal protection doctrine protects women and people of color. It is a
myth, first, in the sense that it is a fiction. Although the Supreme Court claims to enforce the
equality rights of all, it is unwilling to combat the contemporary inequality of women and
people of color. It is also a myth in a second sense: it is a political myth or legitimating story.
The Court relies on the fiction that it protects women and people of color to justify a broad
new vision of equality for religious conservatives that, perversely, is not available to women
and people of color. More perverse, the Court invokes this new vision of equality to invalidate
federal, state, and local laws that do real work to promote race and gender equality.

Understanding the reality of equal protection doctrine clarifies debates about the
Supreme Court’s power. The Court’s present...

Tokens, Writing and (Ac)counting: A Conversation with Denise Schmandt-Besserat and Bill Maurer

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000
In her foundational study of Neolithic clay tokens, the renowned archaeologist Denise Schmandt-Besserat identified that different token shapes represented different goods and were used in accounting and distribution. When these tokens came to be stored in sealed clay envelopes (likely representing a debt), each token was impressed on the outside of the envelope before being placed inside (thus allowing people to see quickly what was within). Three-dimensional objects were thus reduced to two-dimensional representations, the first form of writing (and contributing to cuneiform script). These clay envelopes in turn developed into pictographic tablets; here each token did not have to be impressed into the clay in a 'one, one, one' system, but instead quantity was indicated by a numerical symbol - abstract number was born. Much of Schmandt-Besserat’s work can be found online at https://sites.utexas.edu/dsb/. Her book ‘How Writing Came About’ was listed by American Scientist magazine...

Some pig! Exchanging NFTs for the perspective of regeneration

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000
There are a thousand more silly ideas for every utopian blockchain project to heal the planet, foster financial justice, transform cultural production or democratize practically anything and everything. Non‐fungible tokens (NFTs) are one of them. The funny thing is that the more you pick at them, the more they harmonize with certain longstanding anthropological arguments. Non‐fungibility lurks in the anthropological imagination of non‐capitalist economies. This article uses the common law of fungibility to explore the elevation of the very idea of non‐fungibility presumed in many NFTs. This idea might have more in common with saints’ incorruptible flesh or the Crown Jewels than the standard fictions of capitalist finance. They cut social ties by insisting on their singularity and immutability. In doing so, they crowd out other blockchain conversations about regeneration and ways to reckon the debts we owe any number of possible futures.

Payments are Getting Political Again

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Payments are political in that they are a function of state sovereignty, and also an extension of it. This is old news, of course: money itself emanates from state sovereignty. But digital payments, obviating the anonymity of cash transactions and generating vast quantities of data in their wake, provide new opportunities for states to extend their reach. These politics of payments are not, of course, limited to authoritarian regimes. Payment providers have been enlisted into government service almost since their inception, whether in the tracking of cash to hamper criminal activities or in the regulations around customer due diligence and identification for cross‐boundary payments of all kinds. With more attention to payments, and payment data, people can also hear the rumblings of another politics. Data activism has emerged as a potential social movement and political force.

Blockchain

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Blockchain

Introduction: Curating Transactional Things

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Consider this book a catalog for an exhibition that never happened. Each contribution takes up an ephemeral object connected to the act of payment, a transactional thing that unlike metal coins or paper banknotes would rarely make it into a display case-or, in some cases, even be impossible to curate. Money is the most obvious transactional thing. It is used for billions of transactions every minute, the sum total of which we call an “economy.” Museums have money galleries, displaying coins, notes, and some of the other objects that people have used historically to conduct transactions—pretty things like beads, shells, stones, and metal ingots. Such items have been displaced by coins and cash, and commentators today predict the imminent demise of those transactional things, too, heralding a cashless future in the face of digital technologies of payment. Supposedly, the pretty things will get replaced by pure data. Increasingly, however, monetary transactions have begun to require...

Primitive and Nonmetallic Money

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Feathers, beads, shells, copper bracelets, and giant stones – objects that Western observers have assumed serve the functions of money in so-called simple societies and other non-Western contexts – come in all shapes and sizes. This chapter reviews the literature on “primitive” currencies, from early ethnology to contemporary anthropology and archeology. Showing how analysts frequently misunderstood the use of such objects in context, it hones in on the social relationships and political systems those objects operated within and reflects back on the limitations of the Western imagination of currency revealed by what collectors call “odd and curious money.” It also takes up the question of whether and how standards determine value and expands the social scientific vocabulary for the diversity of forms of political authority that constitute money.

Series Preface

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Series Preface

Money, Rank and the Frailty of Authority: Schurtz’s World and Ours. An Outline of the Origins of Money By Heinrich Schurtz. Translated and Annotated and With an Introduction by Enrique Martino and Mario Schmidt (eds.), HAU Books, London. 2024. 274 pp. ISBN: 9781914363078 [paperback]; ISBN: 9781914363276 [PDF]; ISBN: 9781914363283 [e‐book].

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Money, Rank and the Frailty of Authority: Schurtz’s World and Ours. An Outline of the Origins of Money By Heinrich Schurtz. Translated and Annotated and With an Introduction by Enrique Martino and Mario Schmidt (eds.), HAU Books, London. 2024. 274 pp. ISBN: 9781914363078 [paperback]; ISBN: 9781914363276 [PDF]; ISBN: 9781914363283 [e‐book].

Bill Maurer

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Professor Bill Maurer is a renowned cultural anthropologist who conducts research on law, property, money and finance, focusing on the technological infrastructures and social relations of exchange and payment. Professor Maurer graduated from Stanford University in 1994 with a PhD in Anthropology. He moved to UC Irvine in 1996 as Assistant Professor, going on to become Chair of UC Irvine’s Department of Anthropology (2005-2011) and Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies in the Social Sciences (2011-2013). In July 2013 he assumed his current role as Dean of UC Irvine’s School of Social Sciences. Professor Maurer has published on topics ranging from offshore financial services to mobile phone-enabled money transfers, Islamic finance, alternative currencies, and the future of money. He is founding director of the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and was the founding co-director of the Intel Science...

Channels and Codes, Rails and Freight: Can You Hear Me Now?

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Channels and Codes, Rails and Freight: Can You Hear Me Now?

A promise is a promise: A love letter from the ACH to the world of 2050†

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000
ABSTRACT Experiments in money often recapitulate long‐standing human concerns over finality and fixity, despite money's reference points in political authority, trust, and the memorialization of relationships of credit and debt. From the point of view of the primary set of infrastructures facilitating the movement of money in 2050, those concerns are misplaced. Recounting the history of those infrastructures, this love letter from a future intelligence is addressed to those humans who would reimagine money so that they will recognize the human and technical infrastructures on which it has always depended.

Crypto, charisma, and Trump's chaos economy

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Crypto, charisma, and Trump's chaos economy

Interview with Bill Maurer

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Interview with Bill Maurer

Money: Anthropological Aspects

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000
From its traditional concern with ‘primitive’ moneys and definitional quandaries over the nature of money in small-scale and nonmarket societies, anthropology more recently has considered money’s meanings in multiple, overlapping spatial, cultural, and temporal milieu, as well as the pragmatics of money – what it does and how it signifies, rather than what it is or what it signifies. Early twenty-first century business interests in divesting the state of its monopoly over the legitimate means of exchange open new frontiers for the anthropology of money and value.

Signatures

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Signatures

Blow that Mausoleum Down

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Abstract Drawing on anthropological perspectives, this paper argues that the fungibility of objects and the ability to exchange them for money is a defining characteristic of capitalist markets. In contrast, other systems of reckoning value emphasize the unique relationships within which objects are embedded and their inability to stand for just any other thing. This paper further highlights the role of slavery in the origins and continued dominance of capitalism and the existence of alternative systems such as cooperativism and sharing that are often overlooked. This paper then examines the Saussurean and Peircean semiotics underlying the concept of money as an abstract sign and argues that non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in blockchain technology contradict these theories by emphasizing pure uniqueness and rendering objects non-transformable or inconvertible. This paper concludes by warning against the dangers of a future where fungibility is absent, as it is necessary for life and...

Money, Ritual, and Religion: Reason, Race, and the Re-Enchantment of the World

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Money, Ritual, and Religion: Reason, Race, and the Re-Enchantment of the World

Money's ends and epistemic burdens

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Money's ends and epistemic burdens

The Gift of Money: Dematerialization, Demonetization, and Money’s Pedigree

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Partant de la démonétisation en 2016 des grosses coupures en roupies indiennes, cet essai reconsidère la position chartaliste sur le « don » d’argent de l’État et s’inspire de Marilyn Strathern sur les distinctions entre partage, emprunt et vol. Keynes a fait valoir que l’argent devait avoir un pédigrée, une lignée continue. La démonétisation semble interrompre cette lignée. Dans le contexte plus large de la numérisation et de la dématérialisation de l’argent, la dématérialisation n’est pas simplement une redénomination des billets matériels, mais une affirmation de l’autorité de l’État à « écrire le dictionnaire » de l’argent, alors que de nouveaux débats politiques et des lobbies se forment autour des infrastructures monétaires, tant publiques que privées. La démonétisation peut couper la lignée et affirmer le contrôle de l’État, mais, après Mauss, la lignée brisée offre aux gens l’occasion de ressentir la possibilité de renouer des relations à travers d’autres...

In Memoriam Nicole Hahn Rafter

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000
In Memoriam Nicole Hahn Rafter

The Land, The Law and Legitimate Children: Thinking Through Gender, Kinship and Nation in the British Virgin Islands

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Through twenty engaging essays exploring cultures ranging from ancient Judaic civilization to contemporary Brazil, Gender, Kinship and Power places important contemporary issues related to kinship--such as parental responsibility and female-headed households--in their proper comparative and historical framework.

Repressed Futures: Financial Derivatives' Theological Unconscious

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Repressed Futures: Financial Derivatives' Theological Unconscious

Feminist Challenges to Archaeology: Avoiding an Epistemology of the Other

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Feminist Challenges to Archaeology: Avoiding an Epistemology of the Other

Empire's New Clothes, Reading Hardt and Negri

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Empire's New Clothes, Reading Hardt and Negri

Women’s Place is Every Place: Merging Domains and Women’s Roles in Dominica and Barbuda

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Women’s Place is Every Place: Merging Domains and Women’s Roles in Dominica and Barbuda

Cyberspatial properties: Taxing questions about proprietary regimes

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Internet-based banking products, electronic commerce transactions, and internet-based offshore financial services are new objects of proprietary and regulatory concern. Each seems to circumvent state apparatuses such as community investment and taxation regimes designed, at least in principle, to serve the public weal. In this chapter I ask whether these new objects of property necessitate a rethinking of property's moral form. They are not merely challenging regulatory frameworks; they are challenging moral obligations involved in territorial state jurisdictionality. If property always entails moral claims, then new kinds of proprietary objects that trouble legal and regulatory obligations unsettle the moral orders in which property is constituted. Cyberspatial properties, by unsettling these moral orders, make visible the contours and the limits of liberal and critical theories of property, themselves bound up with its moral orderings.

Wiseman's and Fool's Gold

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Wiseman's and Fool's Gold

Re-formatting the economy: Islamic banking and finance in world politics

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Re-formatting the economy: Islamic banking and finance in world politics

Of Law and Belief

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Of Law and Belief

Lateral Reasons for a Post-reflexive Anthropolog INTRODUCTION

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Lateral Reasons for a Post-reflexive Anthropolog INTRODUCTION

Innumerate Equivalencies: Making Change with Alternative Currencies

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Innumerate Equivalencies: Making Change with Alternative Currencies

In the Matter of Islamic Banking and Local Currencies

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000
In the Matter of Islamic Banking and Local Currencies

Mutual Life, Limited ISLAMIC BANKING, ALTERNATIVE CURRENCIES, LATERAL REASON Preface

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Mutual Life, Limited ISLAMIC BANKING, ALTERNATIVE CURRENCIES, LATERAL REASON Preface

Of Monetary Alternatives and the Limits of Values Past

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Of Monetary Alternatives and the Limits of Values Past

Mutual Life, Limited: Insurance, Moral Value, and Bureaucratic Form

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Mutual Life, Limited: Insurance, Moral Value, and Bureaucratic Form

Restaging Abstraction and Adequation CONCLUSION

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Restaging Abstraction and Adequation CONCLUSION

Globalization and Governmentality: An Introduction

Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000
The future outlines of the new global order are the constant object of speculation-economic, political, and metaphysical. From the sunny new world proclaimed by global free marketers to the rebellion against globalization unleashed in the streets of Seattle and Genoa, to the doomsdays envisioned by transnational terrorists and counterterrorists alike, this emerging global-millennial epoch is foretold alternately as redemption or apocalypse. The authors consider these sweeping descriptions of humankind's future, as well as the discourses of globalization that filter and frame them, from perspectives in anthropology, geography, law, sociology, and cultural studies. Their goal is not to resolve the ultimate semantic or philosophical question of what "globalization" really is; instead, their essays explore the forms, practices, and effects of governmentality integral to global modernity's architecture. In Globalization under Construction, the authors ask: What are the rationalities...

Finance

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Finance

Foreword: Rusing Risk

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Foreword: Rusing Risk

International Political Economy as a Cultural Practice: The Metaphysics of Capital Mobility

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Recent discussions of globalization are founded on an assumption about the movement of capital, goods, people, and images—that movement generates change, and that movement is a self-evident phenomenon. Cultural approaches to globalization, such as Appadurai’s (1996) and Hannerz’s (1996), tend to posit thatincreasingmobility characterizes the contemporary era. Critics of these approaches note that capital, goods, labor, and ideas have been moving from place to place ever since the rise of capitalism, if not before, through trading routes and ancient empires (e.g., Abu-Lughod 1989; Friedman 1995). Within political science, “international political economy” (IPE) scholars, while not dipping quite...

Moral Economies, Economic Moralities: Consider the Possibilities!

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Moral Economies, Economic Moralities: Consider the Possibilities!

Implementing Empirical Knowledge in Anthropology and Islamic Accountancy

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000
This chapter contains section titled: Making Reasonable Accounts Mudarabah Accounting in Theory Mudarabah Accounting in Practice Accounts of Islamic Accounting Toward Anthropological Tawhid Notes Making Reasonable Accounts Mudarabah Accounting in Theory Mudarabah Accounting in Practice Accounts of Islamic Accounting Toward Anthropological Tawhid Notes

Fractions of Blood on Fragments of Soil: Capitalism, the Commons, and Kinship in the Caribbean

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Fractions of Blood on Fragments of Soil: Capitalism, the Commons, and Kinship in the Caribbean

Corrigendum to “Fingerprint evidence in exoneration cases” [Forensic Sci. Int.: Synergy 12 (2026) 100675]

Sun, 16 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000
[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1016/j.fsisyn.2026.100675.].

Entry for "Globalization"

Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Entry for "Globalization"

Entry for "Anthropology"

Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Entry for "Anthropology"

Shared memories of event details in the human brain are altered by misinformation and test expectations

Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Shared memories of event details are crucial to eyewitness testimony. When different people encode or recall the same event, similar scene-specific neural activity patterns emerge across individual brains. However, it remains unclear whether these patterns are specific to event details and how test expectancy (i.e., expecting free recall or general memory tests) and misinformation affect them. In this study, 100 participants were randomly assigned to view one of two versions of each event. Both versions featured identical scenarios, but with different details. About half of the participants were informed about the upcoming free recall before viewing events, while the others were told to expect a general memory test. Functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to record their brain activity during four stages: viewing original events, initial free recall, reading misinformation, and final free recall of original events. The neuroimaging data were analyzed based on the similarity...

Conspiracy thinking in American politics.

Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Conspiratorial thinking is an indelible part of American politics; indeed, conspiracy theories proliferated in North America even before the founding of the United States. A current headwind of trends appears to facilitate a surge in conspiratorial thinking, including the increased spread and accessibility of misinformation, steady declines in public trust in authority figures, and an increasingly polarized electorate marked by mutual partisan animosity. The annual symposium of the UC Irvine Center for Neuropolitics brought together experts in law, political science, neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology to discuss why and how conspiracy thought develops and persists. This paper synthesizes the insights from that symposium, addressing the foundations of conspiracy thinking in both individuals and society as a whole, and its place in the current American political landscape. Through integrating various disciplinary perspectives, the symposium aimed to identify possible pathways...

Quels défis pour une anthropologie contemporaine?

Fri, 7 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Sans les idéaliser, les exagérer, ou les diaboliser, incontestablement, les technologies de l'information et de la communication transforment le monde et ses habitants. Bien que la rapidité de ces transformations, en cours en rende l'appréhension ethnographique difficile, le point de départ de notre cadre conceptuel est qu'il est non seulement possible, mais impératif, de mieux cerner le caractère multiple et souvent inattendu de ces changements. L'émergence des technologies en ligne et mobiles oblige à repenser les questions de mondialisation qui ont été un theme majeur de l'enquête anthropologique dans les années 1990. Les . travaux de cette période ont porté principalement sur les medias de masse comme la télévision èt' le cinéma,_sur l'impact des développements politiques et économiques, ainsi que sur le marché du travail mondial.

SERIES PREFACE

Wed, 5 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000
SERIES PREFACE

SERIES PREFACE

Wed, 5 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000
SERIES PREFACE

Linguistic and Material Intimacies of Cell Phones

Wed, 5 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Linguistic and Material Intimacies of Cell Phones offers a detailed ethnographic and anthropological examination of the social, cultural, linguistic and material aspects of cell phones. With contributions from an international range of established and emerging scholars, this is a truly global collection with rural and urban examples from communities across the Global North and South. Linking the use of cell phones to contemporary discussions about representation, mediation and subjectivity, the book investigates how this increasingly ubiquitous technology challenges the boundaries of privacy and selfhood, raising new questions about how we communicate.

SERIES PREFACE

Wed, 5 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000
SERIES PREFACE

Redecorating the International Economy: Keynes, Grant, and the Queering of Bretton Woods

Wed, 5 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000
John Maynard Keynes is often credited with the creation of the theory of the “national economy,” since the components of hisGeneral Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money(1935) are all economic aggregates measured over a given geopolitical space (Radice 1984:112). Hence Keynes’s association with Fordism and Fordist nation-based systems of mass production and mass consumption. Also central to Keynes’sGeneral Theorywas the explicit threat, as he saw it, of external forces of instability. Hence Keynes’s arguments for limits on capital mobility, fixed exchange rates, and a model of international order based on economically sovereign nation-states interlinked by trade...

Rosaldo, Michelle Zimbalist

Wed, 5 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Rosaldo, Michelle Zimbalist

Redecorating the International Economy: Keynes, Grant and the Queering of Bretton Woods

Wed, 5 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Redecorating the International Economy: Keynes, Grant and the Queering of Bretton Woods

SERIES PREFACE

Wed, 5 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000
SERIES PREFACE

SERIES PREFACE

Wed, 5 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000
SERIES PREFACE

Afterword

Wed, 5 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Afterword

From the Revenue Rule to Soft Law and Back Again: The Consequences for ‘Society’ of the Social Governance of International Tax Competition

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000
This chapter reflects on the implications for the anthropology of law. As anthropologists turn to transnational and international legal processes, the question of the ‘social’ takes on a particular salience and has the potential to create productive theoretical muddles. The chapter serves as a demonstration of Thrift’s statement, and points toward a less linear, less causal account of the role of the ‘social’ in transnational, multilateral governance today. It proceeds by reviewing the notion of soft law and its incorporation/creation of a category of the social. It then analyses the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) effort to curb harmful tax practices as an initiative designed to incorporate ‘society’ into governance. It concludes by reflecting on the observation among legal anthropologists and law and society scholars that international legal processes resemble and contingently re-assemble something called ‘society’ in the process of trying to...

Structural Inequalities in the Global Legal System

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Structural Inequalities in the Global Legal System

A DECADAL SURVEY OF THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES: A Research Agenda for Advancing Intelligence Analysis

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000
The primary function of the intelligence analyst is to make sense of information about the world, but the way analysts do that work will look profoundly different a decade from now. Technological changes will bring both new advances in conducting analysis and new risks related to technologically based activities and communications around the world. Because these changes are virtually inevitable, the Intelligence Community will need to make sustained collaboration with researchers in the social and behavioral sciences (SBS) a key priority if it is to adapt to these changes in the most productive ways. A Decadal Survey Of The Social and Behavioral Sciences provides guidance for a 10-year research agenda. This report identifies key opportunities in SBS research for strengthening intelligence analysis and offers ideas for integrating the knowledge and perspectives of researchers from these fields into the planning and design of efforts to support intelligence analysis.

Can a Computer Understand? Hermeneutics in Computer Science (Thinking Through Heidegger, Habermas, and Dilthey)

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000
The article highlights the critique of science put forth by Wilhelm Dilthey and subsequent discussions of technology by members of the Frankfurt School and in the phenomenological tradition, may appear to have had little effect within the scientific tradition itself. It reports that positivist science works that permits a technical mastery of the world it presupposes and simultaneously constructs.

Foreword: Rusing risk

Mon, 3 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000
A ruse, says the Oxford English Dictionary, is a ‘‘detour; a doubling or turning of a hunted animal to elude the dogs.’’ The term derives from the French ‘‘ruser,’’ from which English also acquired the word ‘‘rush,’’ as in a frontal impact that drives an opposing force away, leading it in turn to ruse, to flee and scatter in all directions. This quality of turning about and scattering in all directions, like game in the hunt, also lends the word its more common and more modern English meaning of trickery. Hunted animals, it would seem, deceive in order to escape their pursuers. In doing so, they take unexpected tacks and twists in direction, thwarting the hunters’ forward rush. The chapters assembled in this fascinating collection lend new sig- nificance to the techniques of misdirection and meandering of the ruse. For, in documenting efforts to govern through risk in the recent history of the ‘‘war on terror,’’ the authors demonstrate that new forms of governance are attempting...

Trauma-Informed Lawyering Leads to Movement Lawyering in International Human Rights Work

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Trauma-Informed Lawyering Leads to Movement Lawyering in International Human Rights Work

Payment systems

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Money's technologies have undergone rapid change since the global financial crisis altered people's credit, debt and payment practices, and revenue models from new entrants into the business of moving money began to disrupt the banks and card networks. Anthropologists and other social scientists have only just begun researching the world of payment technology–but they are not alone in being newcomers to the field, the area having been largely the domain of payment industry professionals, not scholarly researchers. This entry provides a historical overview of anthropologists’ and others’ engagement with payment infrastructures, taking note of its relationship to allied work in social studies of money and finance.

Does Money Matter? Abstraction and Substitution in Alternative Financial Forms

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Does Money Matter? Abstraction and Substitution in Alternative Financial Forms

Value transfer and rent: Or, i didn’t realize my payment was your annuity

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Value transfer and rent: Or, i didn’t realize my payment was your annuity

Credit Crisis Religion

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Credit Crisis Religion

That Touch of Money

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000
That Touch of Money

Navigating Future Moneyscapes

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000
The digital revolution is changing money, moving it from paper and coins to mobile devices, smart cards and virtual worlds. From ethnographic studies of existing sites of monetary innovation, Intel social scientists and designers have been exploring future implications of the emerging landscape of digital payment, transfer and banking methods on everyday life. Here is a short animated video which sketches some possible future scenarios.

"Belonging," Citizenship and Flexible Specialization in a Caribbean Tax Haven (British Virgin Islands)

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000
"Belonging," Citizenship and Flexible Specialization in a Caribbean Tax Haven (British Virgin Islands)

Ungrounding knowledges offshore Caribbean Studies, disciplinarity and critique

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000
This article considers how the field of Caribbean Studies constructed and defined its objects of study. It critically reflects on the history of the field, drawing mainly from the discipline of anthropology but also attending to the institutional sites of scholarly production and their impact on the worlding of the Caribbean as an 'area' fit for 'area studies'. As it does so, the paper considers the limits of the modes of fact-making implicit in Caribbean Studies, the scalar imaginaries bound up in it, and their implications for the problems of generalizability and distinctiveness subtending social inquiry and 'area' formations more broadly.

From the Editors

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000
From the Editors

Statemaking at the Fringes of Development

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Statemaking at the Fringes of Development

Lex Llewellyn and the Tribal Tax Status Act: 'Fallible Gropings' in Law and Society

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000
This article is the result of our inquiry into two proximate fields in which issues of law, custom and markets arise in sociolegal scholarship and praxis: the mid-20th century jurisprudence of the legal realist Karl Llewellyn and the contemporary debates surrounding efforts by tribal governments in the U.S. to issue tax-exempt bonds. Both are sites for efforts by legal scholars and practitioners to grapple with the convergence of social categories that, until very recently, are normally held apart – Native Americans, law, and commerce. We first explore Llewellyn’s efforts at drafting the Uniform Commercial Code, and the extent to which in this and his The Cheyenne Way (written at virtually the same time), he drew considerable influence from the American pragmatist philosophical tradition. In so doing, we find that his jurisprudence and lawmaking (often maligned for its circular reasoning) can be better understood as an effort to announce a philosophy of law and enact commercial...

Articulating Islamic Knowledge to an American Dream: Islamic Home Financing Alternatives after September 11, 2001

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Articulating Islamic Knowledge to an American Dream: Islamic Home Financing Alternatives after September 11, 2001

Symbolic Sexuality and Economic Work in Dominica, West Indies: The Meanings of Gender and Eroticism in Dominica, West Indies

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000
This paper draws from a specific ethnographic example to elucidate the connections among gender, sexuality, eroticism,. and work, and argues for a method of analysis encompassing both the symbolic and the economic. Symbolic meanings embodied in sexuality cannot be reduced to the gendered economics of production and reproduction, yet neither can production and reproduction be explained away or ignored completely by a symbolic approach. In the Commonwealth of Dominica in the West Indies, men' s work and sexuality are linguistically marked and conceptualized as highly differentiated. Women's sexuality and work, on the other band, are unmarked and undetermined. Parallel meanings are attached to work and to sexuality, and these parallel meanings inform an economic and symbolic system in which women' s power over their own bodies and economies is undermined.

Orderly families for the new economic order: Belonging and citizenship in the British Virgin Islands

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000
The British Virgin Islands became a tax haven shortly after the U.K. enacted changes to citizenship policy for itself and its colonies. The new citizenship law disaggregated an old citizenship category into several new categories and emphasized legal paternity and descent rather than place of birth. The law encouraged BVIslanders to position themselves against increasing numbers of immigrants from other Caribbean islands by imagining BVIslander identity as an attribute of descent, thereby naturalizing it. Citizenship law also enabled BVIslander legislators to craft tax haven services in the BVI for another new class of foreigners—the British. BVIslanders and immigrants recreate their families in order to guarantee the “stability” required by this new industry, while BVIslanders monopolize the few good jobs created and shunt immigrants into menial work.

Credit slips (but should not fall)

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Recent calls for ‘cashlessness’ – for abolishing paper money as a medium of exchange – draw attention to the operations of payment, the act of value transfer through electronic and other infrastructures. Exploring payment infrastructures and their multiplication through new networks, especially but not limited to mobile telecommunications, this paper argues that the attempt to eliminate cash from the palette of payment ‘choices’ throws into relief the role of the state as arbiter of value, and the credibility of institutions, persons, and networks subtending value.

Alternative Globalizations: Community and Conflict in New Cultures of Finance

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Alternative Globalizations: Community and Conflict in New Cultures of Finance

Children of Mixed Marriages on Virgin Soil: Citizenship, Descent and Place in the British Virgin Islands

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Children of Mixed Marriages on Virgin Soil: Citizenship, Descent and Place in the British Virgin Islands

Subjects of Law, Objects of Politics

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Subjects of Law, Objects of Politics

Review Symposium: Michel Callon’s Markets in the Making: Rethinking Competition, Goods, and Innovation. Zone Books

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Review Symposium: Michel Callon’s Markets in the Making: Rethinking Competition, Goods, and Innovation. Zone Books

Money from nothing: indebtedness and aspiration in South Africa

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Money from nothing: indebtedness and aspiration in South Africa

Jane Guyer’s negative capability

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Jane Guyer’s negative capability

Book review: Crowdfunding and the Democratization of Finance

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Book review: Crowdfunding and the Democratization of Finance

Schmidt, Mario, and Sandy Ross (eds.): Money Counts. Revisiting Economic Calculation. New York: Berghahn Books, 2020. 141 pp. ISBN 978-1-78920-685-2. (Studies in Social Analysis, 10) Price: € 30,99

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000
Schmidt, Mario, and Sandy Ross (eds.): Money Counts. Revisiting Economic Calculation. New York: Berghahn Books, 2020. 141 pp. ISBN 978-1-78920-685-2. (Studies in Social Analysis, 10) Price: € 30,99