Session 26

The session addresses the methodological problem of studying the rapid changes in the usage of money, the procedures of payments and the marketization as a consequence of digitisation with a special focus on the distinctions formal/informal and rural/urban in the Global South. It calls for contributions that reveal the methodological challenges of the multiple forms of money usage in empirical studies. Money itself is a paradoxical social institution because it requires the existence of a network of money users, which it generates itself. Therefore, any empirical study of money usage has to deal with the structural element of a network and the individual agency of payment at the same time. The empirical study of money in African contexts revealed a high diversity in its forms and practices, which resulted in a methodological preference for the study of monetary agency. But digitisation, at the latest, brought the importance of structures back on the agenda, as the organisers of the session in their publications on mobile money (S. Maliehe) and consumer credit (J. Schraten) in Southern Africa have shown. The methodological challenge of the structure/agency-distinction in the Global South contexts is increased by two additional and overlapping poles of tension. The well-known distinction between rural and urban social conditions is complicated by the difference between formal and informal economic activity. While the former refers to the qualitative effect of a quantitative population density, the latter addresses the quantitative limitations due to qualitative differences regarding the economies of scale. Digitalisation keeps the promise to solve both. The session invites papers which address the methodological challenges of studying money and payments under the conditions of digitalisation in regard to the tense poles of rural/urban and formal/informal in the Global South.

ABSTRACTS

1.Money and Digitalisation in the Global South

Sean Maliehe  (Centre for gender and Africa Studies, University of Free State, South Africa)

Jürgen Schraten  (Department of Sociology, University of Giessen, Germany)

The session addresses the methodological problem of studying the rapid changes in the usage of money, the procedures of payments and the marketization as a consequence of digitisation with a special focus on the distinctions formal/informal and rural/urban in the Global South. It calls for contributions that reveal the methodological challenges of the multiple forms of money usage in empirical studies. Money itself is a paradoxical social institution because it requires the existence of a network of money users, which it generates itself. Therefore, any empirical study of money usage has to deal with the structural element of a network and the individual agency of payment at the same time. The empirical study of money in African contexts revealed a high diversity in its forms and practices, which resulted in a methodological preference for the study of monetary agency. But digitisation, at the latest, brought the importance of structures back on the agenda, as the organisers of the session in their publications on mobile money (S. Maliehe) and consumer credit (J. Schraten) in Southern Africa have shown. The methodological challenge of the structure/agency-distinction in the Global South contexts is increased by two additional and overlapping poles of tension. The well-known distinction between rural and urban social conditions is complicated by the difference between formal and informal economic activity. While the former refers to the qualitative effect of a quantitative population density, the latter addresses the quantitative limitations due to qualitative differences regarding the economies of scale. Digitalisation keeps the promise to solve both. The session invites papers which address the methodological challenges of studying money and payments under the conditions of digitalisation in regard to the tense poles of rural/urban and formal/informal in the Global South.

2.The Postcolonial Infrastructure of Mobile Money

Jürgen Schraten  (Department of Sociology, University of Giessen, Germany)

The presentation addresses the methodological challenge of studying mobile money as an everyday tool of postcolonial societies. It problematises the link between household economies on the one hand and world market infrastructure on the other hand in the research of mobile money. The presentation defines the misunderstanding of the social as a void that unfolds between featureless individuals as the root of the problem. It suggests an understanding of society as a collectivity that is populated by human beings, and by all kinds of tools and media as suggested by the ‘Science and Technology Studies’. From this perspective, scientific and economic knowledge itself becomes a part of society that serves the purpose of equipping and connecting individuals. The two competing perspectives of the methodological divide appear as different attempts of ‘naturalising’ their own effects by overcoming the contingency of their respective tools (statistics on the one hand, and stabilised social interaction on the other). As a consequence, the presentation suggests taking the ethnomethodological study of postcolonial infrastructure as an approach that reconciles the (informal) local and the (formal) global perspective by focussing its ‘missing link’. It actually consists of text-based organisations, which begins with the contractual instructions of local mobile money agents and ends with the financial reports of multinational stock companies. They build a chain of bureaucratically connected clusters, each demanding “institutional accountability” (Garfinkel) from local actors. An analysis of this chain reveals the qualitative shift of demands presented to the actors, which explains the methodological divide: customers of mobile money have to demonstrate their ability to maintain their livelihood whereas the company clerks have to outline profit towards their superiors.

3.‘The state and the world economy on the local scenery’: ethnographic reflections from Diepsloot in postcolonial South Africa

Sean Maliehe  (Centre for Gender and Africa Studies, University of the Free State, South Africa)

This paper reflects on my periodic field visits to Diepsloot between June 2016 and March 2020. The township offers an ideal platform to explores some methodological challenges that confront researchers when studying the complexities of a local scenery. Unlike many South African townships, Diepsloot emerged in a period of transition from apartheid to democracy in the mid-1990s. It is a home to a multitude of migrants from Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Somalia and Ethiopia. I reflect on two distinctive ethnographic observations, one empirical and another methodological. First, while mobile money services had failed elsewhere in South Africa, they were vibrant in Diepsloot. The rise of mobile money emerged as a necessity of local inhabitants in need of secure remittance channels. Second, I encountered methodological challenges that consisted of analysing a local scenery that is visibly shaped by the global economy and the state. The world economy forced African migrants into a township periphery, while a global market and banking system allowed the movement of money across borders in a form of remittances. The state marginalised migrants, instead of accepting them as citizens with equal rights. In a neoliberal dispensation, the state also paddled back and forth between marketisation and monetarisation on the one hand, while attempting to control the banking system and prevent money laundering and criminal activity through the Financial Intelligence Centre, on the other hand. I argue that what is happening in Diepsloot should be analysed through complex methodological lenses that appreciate the on-going presence of the past in unsettling ways, and how people’s actions on the ground are dialectically connected to an impersonal world beyond their control.

4.Making digitalisation, making money: Methodological challenges of doing anthropology with digitalising monies

Detlev Krige  (University of Pretoria, South Africa)

Hannah Acutt  (University of Pretoria, South Africa)

This paper reports on the completed first phase of a research study and details the plans for a second phase of research on digitalisation and money in the Global South. The title of our paper points to our interest in being in conversation with the authors of “Gens: A Feminist Manifesto for the Study of Capitalism”. Instead of assuming the existence of ‘digitalisation’ or ‘money’, we want to understand how money and digitalisation and its “social relations are generated out of divergent life projects”. This means not beginning with markets or money or postulating “the economic” as a separate domain, but rather paying attention to the “diverse and wide-ranging practices of life and production that cross-cut social domains” which are often messy and uncoordinated even as it appears totalising and coherent as in for example the notion of “data colonialism”. While some scholars have abandoned the notion of “the field” as work/home boundaries get reconfigured, we argue that the notion of “location-work” as articulated by Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson prior to the emergence of the online/offline distinction, retains value. Location-work points to how “the field” is cognitively constructed, how researchers are never “out of the field in an interconnected world”, and how accountable and situated knowledge emerges from a “well developed sense of location”. In this approach, fieldwork emerges as “motivated and stylized dislocation” in the production of empirical data. We argue that the notion of “location-work” is important not only for its insistence on doing anthropological research that is not colonial in its mode of engagement, but also for the theoretical opportunities it creates for making empirical data on ‘digitalisation’.

5.Mobile Money in a Human Economy

Keith Hart  (France)

Based on his substantial works in the field of research like ‘The Memonry Bank’ (2000), ‘People, Money and Power in the Economic Crisis: Perspectives from the Global South’ (2014), ‘Economy for and Against Democracy’ (2015) and ‘Money in a Human Economy’ (2017), Keith will comment on the three papers and provide key statements on the topic.