The invitation to review anthropological studies of money offers an opportunity not only to revisit the history of anthropologists' investigations into money's objects, meanings, and uses but also to reflect on the intersections of such work with recent psychological research. In this review essay, we survey the primary findings of the anthropology of money and the central challenges anthropological work has posed to assumptions about money's power to abstract, commensurate, dissolve social ties, and erase difference. We summarize anthropologists' historical concern with cultural difference and recent work on money's materialities, meanings, and complex uses. We emphasize the pragmatics of money-from earmarking practices and the use of multiple moneys to the politics of liquidity and fungibility. In the final section of the paper, we find inspiration in recent psychological studies of money to indicate new trajectories for inquiry. Specifically, we point to three potentially fruitful areas for research: money use as a tool and infrastructure; the politics of revealing and concealing money; and money's origins and futures as a memory device. We end with a brief reflection on ongoing monetary experiments and innovations.

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. © 2013 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.

Encountered by mobile money professionals - industry and philanthropic actors seeking to bring mobile phone-enabled financial products to poor people in the 'developing world' - the authors move together with new collaborators to inquire into a problem they had been grappling with for some time. This is the problem of agency; specifically, the agency of 'mobile money agents', the people 'on the ground' or 'in the field' who form a crucial function in permitting others to put cash into an electronic money transfer system and pull cash out of it. These 'human ATMs' or 'bridges to cash' become the object of analytical scrutiny for mobile money experts and anthropologists. This article takes that analytical scrutiny - and not mobile money agents themselves - as its object. It seeks to understand how 'agency' inflects debates over money, its meaning and its pragmatics, and its transformation in new communicative infrastructures, and how it might inform anthropology and political struggles over money and payment. © Royal Anthropological Institute 2013.

The payments industry – the business of transferring value through public and corporate infrastructures – is undergoing rapid transformation. New business models and regulatory environments disrupt more traditional fee-based strategies, and new entrants seek to displace legacy players by leveraging new mobile platforms and new sources of data. In this increasingly diversified industry landscape, start-ups and established players are attempting to embed payment in ‘social’ experience through novel technologies of accounting for trust. This imagination of the social, however, is being materialized in gated platforms for payment, accounting, and exchange. This paper explores the ambiguous politics of such experiments, specifically those, like Bitcoin or the on-demand sharing economy, that delineate an economic imaginary of ‘just us’ – a closed and closely guarded community of peers operating under the illusion that there are no mediating institutions undergirding that community. This provokes questions about the intersection of payment and publics. Payment innovators’ attenuated understanding of the social may, we suggest, evacuate the nitty-gritty of politics.

With the increase of digital and networked media in everyday life, researchers have increasingly turned their gaze to the symbolic and cultural elements of technologies. From studying online game communities, locative and social media to YouTube and mobile media, ethnographic approaches to digital and networked media have helped to elucidate the dynamic cultural and social dimensions of media practice. The Routledge Companion to Digital Ethnography provides an authoritative, up-to-date, intellectually broad, and conceptually cutting-edge guide to this emergent and diverse area. Features include: a comprehensive history of computers and digitization in anthropology; exploration of various ethnographic methods in the context of digital tools and network relations; consideration of social networking and communication technologies on a local and global scale; in-depth analyses of different interfaces in ethnography, from mobile technologies to digital archives.