In a December post on the IMTFI blog, Dr. Liz Losh, a UCSD-based
media scholar who live blogged IMTFI’s 2013 Conference, referred to the
“inherently unwelcome nature” of my research experiments for exploring cash use
in an Andean market town. Why might this research have been so unwelcome, at
least at first? As part of my broader investigation into how development
projects have become engaged in stimulating the cultivation of indigenous
identity and putting that identity to work toward creating more economic
vibrancy in Andean Peru, I tried to get a better sense of what development actually
means at the level of cash changing hands. For my project, that meant repeated attempts
to purchase relatively inexpensive items—avocado sandwiches, vegetables, socks,
and other wares being sold in the Chivay market—with large cash bills, namely,
50 and 100-sol notes (about $17.50 and $35, respectively).
I set vendors on this potentially annoying task to find out
how fungible cash really is in practice. Of course, in theory, money is fungible:
any five dollars is mutually interchangeable with any other five dollars, and
the same goes for one-hundred soles, two-thousand rupees, and any other money amount.
Conceptually, it does not matter what notes or denominations or media might be
used to compose that particular amount of value. That’s one of the reasons why money
has been so important throughout modern history. As a medium of exchange, money
has lubricated countless economic transactions. It has long been seen as a
technology that eliminated the cumbersomeness of barter. And much more
recently, money has taken on even more liquid forms, from credit to today’s
mobile money platforms, a core interest of IMTFI. Because of this liquidity, as
social theorists have long argued, economic interaction has become so seamless
that it has almost completely ceased to be something social.
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| The central market of Chivay. Photo by author. |
Yet if buying things with money were really so easy, why
would my research experiments be so unwelcome? If cash use strips the economic interaction
of its social component, why did my annoying attempts to purchase small items
with burdensome big bills find relief in vendors’ social ties?
This research attends to the non-fungible dimensions of
those big bills. Based on what I have found, I argue that in Colca big bills
often cannot be spent without the mediation of certain social relations. In
other words, a bill’s denomination,
or the unit of value it designates (for example, 10 soles, 20 soles, or 50
soles), is sometimes a structural obstacle to cash fungibility: a 50-sol bill
can’t always be used to buy a 3-sol bag of tomatoes, and even if it can, the
exchange can’t happen immediately if the vendor does not have the right amount
of change to return to the buyer. And as a structural obstacle, denomination actually
ends up coloring market exchanges, making them more human, more intimate, and
even more political than standard social scientific approaches to exchange
would have us imagine. This research builds on a number of recent
anthropological studies—notably work by Jessica Cattelino (2009), Julie Chu
(2010), Bill Maurer (2005), as well as an upcoming collaboration with institute
affiliates Anthony Pickles, Vivian Dzokoto, and Taylor Nelms—suggesting that
exchanges of money could be key moments of forging social ties, ordinary
self-making, cultural value creation, and articulating a broader political orientation.
When I would give a 100-sol note for a 3-sol item to one of
the market vendors I have been following, I set for them a temporarily
unpleasant task—making change—that was both time-intensive and entailed drawing
on one’s ties and social networks within the market. They would, in rare
moments, tell me that they could not make change, preventing the transaction (a
process that can lead, in the aggregate, to significant loss, as Beaman,
Magruder, and Robinson [2014] pointed out in a study of Kenyan market vendors).
Usually, though, to complete the sale, vendors would initiate the process of
creating change in one of two ways. If they had the smaller denominations on
hand, they would simply put the change together themselves. More often, though,
they would run to a market neighbor or nearby friend to ask if they could sencillar—a Spanish word that means “to
simplify” but idiomatically also means “to make small change” (or sencillo)—their large bill.
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| Peru's 100-sol bill. Photo by author. |
One morning, I attempted to purchase two small avocado
sandwiches from Reina, one of the breakfast cart vendors I had been following.
She was able to make change, but saw my use of a 100-sol bill as an opportunity
to urge me to purchase more, so that the change-making process would be
slightly less burdensome for her. Hesitating before closing the exchange, she
asked, “¿Dos no más?” “Just two?” Here,
the large bill afforded a chance for salesmanship. She wanted me to sweeten the
deal, making clear the social element of the exchange actually made it a more
profitable one. Brígida, another vendor who tends to ask a small selection of
friends for help making change, told me that large cash denominations were like
any new tool. People simply had to learn how to use them.
So, as a structural obstacle, denomination becomes
fungibility’s “potentializing limit,” as Justin Richland puts it (2011). The
vendor’s need to figure out how to make change opens up what I have noticed is
a productive moment of hesitation. The customer may also hesitate, deciding not
only whether to buy something and what to buy, but also, what configuration of
coins and bills she or he will use to pay for it, considering the cash she or he
will have later that day. These moments of hesitation allow for many parallel
interactions to happen: casual conversation that enables customer and vendor to
strengthen their alliance, which could play a role in fostering customer
loyalty; a moment in which one of the actors is waiting on the other, allowing
the vendor to complete another sale; or a pause in which the vendor or customer
can observe what else is going on by the town square, and tune in to the
broader public culture. Of course, moments of hesitation can also cause harm,
bringing about distraction that can leave a vendor or customer vulnerable to
robbery (something very rare in Chivay) or miscounting.
Yet overall, I found that the interactional moments afforded
by the need to economically “activate” the value of large bills by making
change, however initially annoying, tended to create and reinforce
relationships between customer and vendor, between a vendor and colleagues in
the market, and between market actors and the larger public of the market town.
References
Beaman, Lori, Jeremy R. Magruder, and Jonathan Robinson. 2014. Minding Small Change among Small Firms in Kenya. Journal of Development
Economics 108(C): 69-86. (accessible here: http://www.povertyactionlab.org/publication/minding-small-change-among-small-firms-kenya)
Cattelino, Jessica. 2009. Fungibility. American
Anthropologist 111(2): 190-200.
Chu, Julie Y. 2010. Cosmologies of Credit: Transnational
Mobility and the Politics of Destination in China. Durham: Duke University
Press.
Maurer, Bill. 2005. Mutual Life, Limited:
Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Richland, Justin B. 2011. Hopi Tradition as Jurisdiction: On the
Potentializing Limits of Hopi Sovereignty. Law & Social Inquiry 36(1):
201-234.
Read Eric's full research report here.
Read Eric's full research report here.
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