Recent uci_anthropology_oapdeposits items

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