“Capitalism is so much easier!”— Learning savings through playing a board game

By Farah Qureshi and IMTFI/Loy Loy Team at UC Irvine in the Geek Anthropologist

Loy Loy: The Savings Game in Washington D.C.!

Staging of Loy Loy at the AnthropologyCon Salon in Washington DC

Julia had been waiting until the last round to take her pot of money from the others. She was trying to get 50 Loys from every player to buy the coffee cart for extra income. After passing the star square it was savings group meeting day. She bid 50 and each player was obliged to give her the money, but the request was met with resistance. Earlier in the game, Chris had threatened to leave the savings group when Julia did not lend him money to buy a pig. Her high bid was a gamble completely depending on the players’ solidarity, so she held her breath while Chris’ deliberated his options. While playing, they had all learned that trust was crucial to the game, but she also knew he would not survive long alone. In the end, Chris resentfully handed over his 50 Loys to Julia, it was her first asset purchase anyway, and helping her would overall help everyone. 

Welcome to Loy Loy: The Savings Game (loyloy.org) where you play a Cambodian female worker trying to save up money with the other players to purchase a garment factory together.

In November 2017, our team from UC Irvine’s Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion (IMTFI) carried a role-playing board game to the American Anthropological Association’s (AAA) annual conference in Washington D.C.. Loy Loy (which means “Money Money” in Khmer) is a financial education tool being developed by IMTFI to teach players how one type of rotating savings and credit association (ROSCA) works. Similar to Monopoly, you receive ‘payday’ money upon each circulation of the board, which represents one month in time. However, unlike Monopoly, all players both move collectively with a single placeholder representing time and save together to win by purchasing the $5000 garment factory before the maximum number of months is up. Your progress depends on random events and expenses (such as medical expenses), with occasional opportunities to purchase income generating assets (for example, a pig) despite the pressure to maintain your personal funds. If any player reaches bankruptcy, the game is over for everyone. All players are challenged to come together and reach the goal collaboratively to win, which you can do through extending loans to one another or paying one another’s bills.

As anthropologists like Clifford Geertz and Shirley Ardener have famously written, and as generations of ROSCA members and development professionals have experienced, ROSCAs are commonly used in low-income communities across the world but can differ dramatically from country to country. In East Africa, for example, members of the ROSCA (or chama) make sure that money is separated and stored in a box. All participants pay an equal amount each month, as payouts are all equal. Mexican and Mexican-American tandas provide a unifying social space, encompassing a form of community as well as consistent sharing of funds. In Cambodia, factory workers form a kind of bidding ROSCA. In this kind of ROSCA, each individual contributes towards a collective savings pot, for which each member of the group then bids by offering to repay at a rate of interest they’re willing to offer to receive the pooled funds. In Loy Loy, ROSCA day falls once each round to award one player funds from the pot, instigating haggling and bidding wars between players. Once a player has ‘won’ the pot, they cannot enter a bid on the next ROSCA day until each player has had a chance at winning.

The idea for the board game developed during a closed-door workshop for IMTFI fellows, "Getting Beyond the Survey: Ethnography and the Art of Seeing," where participants convened to share their in-progress research and discuss methodology. A creative group exercise materialized issues found in observations of payment practices in different field sites around the world. You can see the inception video here:

Games are recognized as a valuable tool to communicate complex social dynamics. Allowing students to participate, interconnect and play creates an immediate and ongoing feedback mechanism where failure is reframed as iteration so that learning happens by doing. In this case the game teaches you about your own interactions and relations with money even as it offers a window into the everyday economic challenges and financial practices of people like the Cambodian garment workers who inspired it. As a player, you’re responsible for both negotiating and preparing for expenses that turn out to be impossible to cover using the regular wage income that you’ll receive. Most players realize this within a few turns and begin to develop their strategies while playing, either forming as many close social connections as possible or bidding large on ROSCA days to receive loans and trying to hoard.

The game is engrossing: players are absorbed into a virtual reality constructed through their characters and ROSCA community. In both groups, players passionately embodied their characters while forming new friendships. Unique and surprising banter always appears as each player justifies their reasoning for deserving the money. The game encourages very particular creative thought and debating skills! We ran two testing sessions for interested gamers while at the AAAs, one in the lobby of the hotel where the conference was being held, and the second as invited guests at the AnthropologyCon salon for gaming and games at the conference. Sharing Loy Loy at the AAAs was a fun experience. I found it immensely valuable to receive feedback from anthropologists before and after each session, and in what follows, in the full blogpost I offer just a few reflections on what we learned.

For detailed reflections from the AAAs and background of Loy Loy, read the full blogpost in The Geek Anthropologist here: https://thegeekanthropologist.com/2018/01/26/capitalism-is-so-much-easier-learning-savings-through-playing-a-board-game/.

Interested in keeping up to date, learning more or helping us distribute Loy Loy? Please join us on LoyLoy.org. To purchase Loy Loy, follow this link to the Game Crafter site.

Mobile Money: The First Decade - NEW white paper

By Stephen C. Rea and Taylor C. Nelms

"Mobile Money: The First Decade" White Paper - 34pp.
IMTFI Fellows Jude, Sangaré and Kusimba at Day 3 Workshop (2014) 

Over the past decade, mobile phone-enabled financial services, such as those made famous by the Kenyan mobile money platform M-Pesa, have been heralded as a means of poverty alleviation and financial inclusion. The mobile platform represents an exciting possibility as a delivery channel for digital financial services and as a technology that, like money, connects people with one another. Indeed, mobile money has thus become a central pillar of a global and internally heterogeneous—although by-now mostly “market-driven”—financial inclusion agenda, bringing together many different stakeholders in international development and philanthropy, industry (including telecommunications, banking, technology start-ups, and more), multinational aid and regulatory organizations, government, and academia.

Yet mobile money deployments around the world have not had unequivocal success. In this working paper, we survey lessons from the first decade of research into mobile money, focusing on an archive of studies produced by fellows funded by the Institute for Money, Technology & Financial Inclusion (IMTFI), based at the University of California, Irvine. We specifically target insights about mobile money users’ everyday social, cultural, political, and economic practices. We suggest that the ethnographic sensibilities of mobile money researchers have enabled attention to mobile money’s real use cases, while demonstrating how those use cases are context-specific and dependent on material, political, and sociocultural conditions that are often not replicable. At the same time, however, this literature has been characterized by a lack of systematization and comparative insight. Often explicitly aspiring to replicate and scale specific innovations, mobile money professionals (like those in across the development world) make constant use of comparisons across contexts. Many of these comparisons mobilize categories familiar to social scientists: culture, history, locality, inequality. We see the case studies produced by IMTFI researchers as contributing to an explicitly collaborative project that lays bare these assumptions of comparability, as well as their limits. It is our hope that this synthesis will be beneficial for mobile money’s various stakeholders.

Mind Your Ps and 2s

We describe mobile money’s primary use case—P2P money transfer—and argue that both the “Ps” and the “2s” of this model (mobile money’s “peers” and the technological and social infrastructures that intermediate them) must be understood in context. We find that the complexities involved in introducing and scaling mobile money, shared across contexts, resist distillation and are not going away. They include infrastructural maintenance, liquidity management, and coordinating interaction among all of the people in the system, from users to agents to service providers to regulators. From a practical perspective, we insist that such complexities are best thought of not as “pain points” to be bypassed or “frictions” to be smoothed over, but challenges to be carefully and regularly attended to in ways that put history, culture, and politics front and center: not as buzzwords, but as windows onto the variables that make a difference—differently in different times and different places—in shaping uptake and use of both money and technology.

Insights from the Research Archive

In what constitutes the bulk of this paper, we outline ten insights from the IMTFI research archive that demonstrate these contextual complexities. These insights have to do with:

• agent networks; 
• physical infrastructure; 
• location, place, and space; 
• kinship and family; 
• gender and gender inequality; 
• class, caste, and rank; 
• religion and ritual; 
• time and tempo; 
• government and regulation; and 
• the persistence of both cash and non-currency stores of value. 

If indeed the comparative categories of social science—history, culture, and politics foremost among them—are now being embedded in the strategies, operating procedures, and even self-presentation of global development, then it’s up to us to specify the contours and content of those categories. For each, we attend to the gaps between the hopes for and realities of mobile money’s impact thus far, as well as some of the fissures that have emerged among mobile money’s different stakeholder groups.

Concluding Thoughts and Provocations

We conclude by raising issues that promise to be critical provocations for the next decade of mobile money research, making an argument for methodological diversity, and interrogating the limitations of the “financial inclusion” frame within which mobile money has been situated as a development intervention. If mobile money is, at its core, a technology of communication and circulation, it is also a central means of distribution and redistribution. What would it mean, then, to shift the conversation from debates over financial inclusion to questions about financial justice?

Read the full white paper: "Mobile Money: The First Decade" - (34pp.)

IMTFI Fellows Day 3 Workshop (2016)
View Flickr stream for more photos of and by IMTFI researchers

***
Read previous installments of the PERSPECTIVES blog series on Financial Inclusion:

• Can financial inclusion be synonymous with financial justice and equity?
• Reflections on the “Financial Inclusion of the Poor,” workshop in Karachi (Part One): Decolonizing Financial Inclusion
• Reflections on the “Financial Inclusion of the Poor,” workshop in Karachi (Part Two): Decolonizing Financial Inclusion
• Drama in the payments infrastructure and saturation in financial education: Discussing new avenues of research around financial inclusion in Colombia
• Continuing the conversation about “financial inclusions” in Latin America – onto Mexico

We invite you to send comments to imtfi@uci.edu.

Barriers to a single European payments market: Cultural-economic feedback loops

PERSPECTIVES By Erin B. Taylor, Canela Consulting, former IMTFI Fellow and co-creator of the IMTFI Consumer Finance Research Methods Toolkit

Look into the average traveller’s pockets today and you will find evidence of multiple means of payment. Debit cards, credit cards, traveller’s checks, several currencies, cryptocurrencies, and payment apps are now so common that it seems impossible to run out of ways to pay. Wherever we buy things—on the street, in shops, restaurants, at ticket machines—we have a way to pay. 

As cash falls out of favour, foreigners must switch between different debit 

and credit cards in order to pay. Photo By Erin B. Taylor.

Or so it would seem. In fact, as many travelers can attest, it is still possible to run out of ways to pay. 

Let me give an example. One fine winter’s day in early January 2016, I stopped at a kiosk at the University of Amsterdam to buy a coffee. It was the beginning of my six-month stint as a visiting academic, and the environment was brand new to me. 

I handed the teller some cash to pay for my coffee and croissant, and she looked at me in surprise: “We only accept PIN,” she said. She meant that the kiosk exclusively accepted payment via a Dutch debit card: no cash, no foreign cards—not even European ones. 

I was astonished. Not accepting foreign cards is bizarre enough, but who doesn’t accept cash? As it turns out, a growing number of retailers in northwestern Europe are turning away from hard currency, citing cost and safety reasons. Some stores don’t accept cash, but they accept virtually all foreign cards (debit and credit). Others accept cash and local debit cards, but not foreign cards. And a minority (like my kiosk) exclusively accept local debit cards. 

The unsuspecting traveller may encounter inconveniences not only when trying to pay in the odd kiosk, restaurant, or shop, but also when simply trying to get from A to B. In the Netherlands, an unusually cash-averse society, some parking meters and train ticket machines only accept Dutch cards, and many a traveller has been caught out trying to return to the airport but unable to pay for the fare. Even the simple act of making a meal can involve a complicated series of transactions (see text box at the end of this post, "A Recipe in pan European Payments"). 

This is not just a Dutch peculiarity: payments are a Europe-wide problem. The European common market is meant to deliver the “four ‘f’s”: freedom of movement in people, goods, services, and capital. Theoretically, this should endow people with far more choice as consumers, workers, and citizens. 

Yet despite decades of financial market integration, many consumer finance products and services cannot be readily used across national borders within Europe. This situation could worsen when Brexit is implemented. A diversity of financial systems and a willingness to experiment means that the consumer can never be quite sure what to expect when crossing national borders. Consumers who live, work, and socialize across Europe’s borders can encounter problems using a wide range of finance products and services (e.g., payments, mortgages, taxes, and pensions). Why is this the case?

Some ticket machines in the Netherlands only accept cash or
Dutch debit cards. Photo By Spoorjan (Own work)  CC BY-SA 3.0 

Barriers to integration

One major problem is that the process of financial integration is far from complete. Generally, this integration process is conceptualized as being primarily technological and regulatory. The Single European Payments Area (SEPA) has been largely rolled out across the continent, and the Target Instant Payment Settlement (TIPS)  service promises to abolish waiting times for transfers between European banks. European regulators are working to create legal solutions, such as developing Europe-wide pension schemes, and the Payment Services Directive 2 (PSD2) is due to be implemented next year, further deregulating payments and opening up the market to new players and products. 

However, there are also barriers to integration at the level of the firm and the consumer market interactions, and our understanding of these is threadbare. Some of these relate to market structures, such as pricing. For example, in some European countries, credit cards are not widely accepted because merchants consider the cost to be prohibitive. Other barriers have socio-cultural leanings, such as consumers’ preference for local services, which dissuades them from shopping around the EU, or a preference for using cash in Germany.

These barriers might appear to be either economic or cultural, but closer inspection often shows them to be both. Let me illustrate by way of an example. In an ECB Report, Kokola argues that the Dutch tend to be more averse to credit card debt than their neighbors, whereas Germans are more risk-averse. This kind of cultural heterogeneity influences how financial products and services are developed, marketed, and consumed. 

Such cultural predilections can have deep historic roots. In the Netherlands, there is a longstanding aversion to credit due to historical attitudes towards indebtedness, but bank cards were adopted early on. Because the Dutch are averse to credit, but used to debit cards, credit transactions are relatively rare compared with other countries. And because the Dutch don’t use credit cards much, the cost of credit card transactions remains expensive. Because they’re expensive, merchants don’t accept credit cards, and this reinforces the Dutch aversion to them. 

And so a cultural-economic feedback loop is created.

This lines up with what we know about the interplay between economy and culture globally. Social researchers have long observed that economy and culture are analytically inseparable, no matter what kind of economy people live in. This is easiest to observe in pre-capitalist societies, such as in the use of shell money in Melanesia. 

But economy and culture are intertwined everywhere. In Dreaming of Money in Ho Chi Minh City (2014), Allison J. Truitt discusses how money culture influences what banknotes people will accept (dirty or broken notes are rejected), how money is used for ritual purposes, and many more phenomena that cross the culture/economy divide. In Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (2009), Karen Ho describes how the decisions of investment bankers are  shaped by their sociocultural beliefs. Nobody, anywhere, is immune.  

The diversity of cultural-economic feedback loops has significant implications for the integration of consumer finance markets in Europe. It suggests that there are hard limits to what can be achieved through technological and regulatory means alone. As Sander, Kleimeier & Heuchemer note, “cultural distance limits international financial integration over and above what can be expected from economic trade and transaction costs.” Even if full integration is achieved, consumers will continue to face limits to their freedom of choice as they live, work, and socialize across European borders.

To understand why there is still no single market for financial services in Europe, it is not enough to look at technical or regulatory matters. But nor can we simply shift the blame to culture. Rather, a cultural-economic feedback loop comes into existence when an economic practice and a cultural practice reinforce each other’s existence. 

The standard EFTPOS machine is fast
being replaced by other POS devices.
Photo By Erin B. Taylor.

The EU’s problem is global

The globalization of payments and other financial services is also creating an imperative to figure out what happens when money cultures meet. Given that so many consumer finance products and services are now available over the Internet, consumers are no longer limited to what is available in their home town or country. Today, we can research and buy an increasingly wide range of savings, transfer, investment, credit, and money management services from anywhere around the world. 

Let’s stop for a moment to consider the irony here. A resident of one European country cannot use their bank card in a second European country, even though there is a single currency and theoretically an integrated payments system. But that same person can buy travel insurance from the U.S.A., invest money in a fund in India, exchange currency using a mobile app based in the United Kingdom, and trade cryptocurrency based in—well, anywhere really.

The problem we face is twofold. First, the integration of financial markets globally is proceeding at different rates in different places. This means that consumers are facing a rapid expansion of choice on the one hand, and the same old limitations on the other. (In fact, these limitations are becoming more problematic because people are more mobile across borders than they were before, and so they encounter these problems more often.) Regulators and financial services providers are over-providing services in some areas, and under-providing them in others. Corporate and government strategies for integrating financial markets need to find a balance between these extremes. 

Second, we have little idea what consumers do when faced with this strange situation. How do consumers work around obstacles to making financial transactions? Do any of the new products and services available globally fill gaps in local services? Why are some people willing to experiment and become “early adopters” of new digital finance products and services, while others remain “laggards” dependent upon traditional banks? And what will a more mature global market for financial goods and services look like in the future? 

Since consumers can now use financial services from around the world, we cannot assume that it is sufficient to approach any of these questions from a local or European angle. In the future, consumers are likely to care less and less about whether the financial services they use are local or not. This is particularly the case when brands that are already globally popular (such as Google, Apple, or PayPal) develop their own range of payments solutions, such as digital wallets. 

A Dutch ATM, fast becoming a rare commodity. 
Photo by Canadian Pacific CC BY-NC 2.0

Mixing methods to understand changing markets

Our challenge is not to get everyone using exactly the same tools, but to create a global ecosystem in which multiple tools and avenues are accepted. To do this, we need to first understand the market. This means we need to design research that investigates how a variety of factors–cultural, economic, regulatory, technical–shape market practices. This holds even if we are trying to specifically understand consumer behaviour. 

Due to the complexity of markets, relying on one single research method (e.g., a survey or interviews) is unlikely to be sufficient for many research questions. Just as financial markets for consumer services are diversifying, so must our research methods also diversify. Understanding consumer choices requires analysis of both qualitative and quantitative factors that influence behaviour, including price, market structures, personal preferences, social structures, and cultural norms. 

This is not news: product developers, designers, and marketers know well that in order to sell something, the offering must hit the right price point and the right “tone” with the consumer. But the shift to Internet-based and mobile consumer finance services presents a challenge because the transition is incomplete and the market is highly complex. 

While little can be done to predict how regulations will change, it is certainly possible to improve our understanding of changing consumer behaviour and thereby generate more robust market knowledge. As we discuss in the Consumer Finance Research Methods Toolkit (CFRM Toolkit), researchers from both industry and academia are innovating new ways to record and analyze the financial behaviours of individuals and households. 

Ethnography, interview methods, financial diaries, online/offline studies, experiments, and so on, are all being reconfigured and combined with other methods to account for the increasing mobility products and services through accessible digital spaces and technologies. Adapting and combining methods offers substantial potential to generate detailed data on a variety of cultural and economic problems. This is because they either include ways to collect qualitative and quantitative data simultaneously, or because they can be easily incorporated into mixed-methods research. 

Combining interdisciplinary thinking with mixed methods gives us a chance to understand the cultural/economic feedback loops that are shaping the emergence of a new generation of consumer financial practices and markets, not only in Europe, but around the world. Regulators, service providers, and researchers are best placed when they take this range of factors and geographies into account. 

Strange Intersections: Humans, Technology and Insects in a Himalayan Valley

By IMTFI Fellow Kabir Mansingh Heimsath

I study the complex material, technological, and financial practices surrounding the yartsa market as a case study of human-nature-technology relations in Manang, Nepal. "Yartsa gunbu" is an inter-species medicinal fungus. In my work it acts as a touchstone for understanding the transitional nature of life in the high Himalaya, illuminating the interdependence of technology, economy and place. In this ethnographic essay drawn from my fieldwork, I recount the experience of one day of the harvesting season.

Manang, Nepal

We crossed the 15,000ft pass without problems, the rain comes and goes, and the valley stretches out for hours. We don’t know how far it is to Naar and our companion is slow. I decide to move ahead, with thoughts of getting a horse in the village to come back for Poonam if it gets too late. I enjoy the rhythm of walking alone and it’s an easy trail through meadows dusted with wildflowers. Softly humming, and watching clouds move across the peak opposite, it takes me a several moments to realize that the village has materialized on an unexpected ridge directly in front of me.

photo by Kabir Mansingh Heimsath

Naar is one of the two major villages in the most remote region of upper Manang called, eponymously, Naar-Phu. It’s a special-permit zone with restricted access for tourists ($90 fee, trekking guide required, 7 day maximum stay) and limited proprietary rights for non-residents. Some forty families stay there now and, refreshingly, it bustles with a domestic energy missing in the easier access and more tourist-oriented villages elsewhere in the region. The fields suspended below the village in a wide basin are brilliant green with ripening barley. Two young men and an older woman with bright eyes herd a bunch of goats towards me and they stop to say hello. I ask for “Tiger,” the contact given by a friend in the last town, and the woman breaks off from her companions to show me the way. We dodge the remaining goats, stop to chat with a horse-rider, pass several houses and then she directs me up a ladder carved from a tree trunk. I climb onto a neighboring family’s porch, over their roof, and then back down via the roof of Tiger’s house to his open porch. Before I can explain the situation about my friends coming slowly Tiger’s wife insists I put down my pack, come inside, relax and have some tea. She is nursing an infant as she talks and prepares the wood stove. Tiger comes in, yes, he’s heard we’re coming, and will go out to find my friends in case they don’t reach the village before dark.

The hospitality continues during the four days we stay in Tiger’s sister’s lodge. The kitchen functions as an informal meeting point for villagers throughout the day and evening. Drolma, Tiger’s niece, has been out of school for only two years, but already manages the place, and all those who visit, with capable authority. She prepares bread, tea, liquor, snacks and full meals for the eclectic guests. Teenage friends of her brother back from school in Kathmandu for the monsoon holidays spend the evening watching Justin Bieber videos downloaded to their smartphones; elderly grandparents who while away the day exchanging stories; several young men waiting around for the yartsa picking season to open; and many of her own contemporaries who drop by to chat in between chores at their own homes. It takes me a full day of hanging out to realize that she is actually running a business with all this socializing. The payments are infrequent and informal, but Drolma keeps a running tab for everyone involved.

photo by Kabir Mansingh Heimsath

Tirtha is a regular visitor. He looks like someone from South India, a round face with an open smile. He recognizes us from when we walked through the district town of Chame, almost a week ago. He came a more direct route up the valley and is waiting for the picking season to begin. He’s come early the last several years to be amongst the first to buy from the local harvest, which has a reputation for being of very high quality and corresponding intensity. In 2012 several people were murdered in a conflict over access to territory. Tirtha is clearly an outsider here, but he has many friends and seems to be well liked and trusted by the villagers. Nevertheless, he and several other young men involved with yartsa dealing in Naar-Phu, insist that the picking season is a dangerous time and they are careful never to walk the trails alone or do anything unexpected that might arouse suspicion. When he’s not out buying yartsa, Tirtha runs a guesthouse in Chame and also works at the Honda motorcycle dealership in Pokhara (he received a complementary motorcycle last year for having the highest sales). He bought between 8-9kilos of yartsa from Naar-Phu last year - that is roughly half a million dollar’s worth of cash and/or worms he carries around in a backpack. He tries to buy and sell early because the prices are usually higher at the beginning of the season, then they drop. Three years ago he lost some 32 lakh NRs (approximately US$32,000) but shrugged it off with a smile, “Usually I do OK.” He deals with buyers in Kathmandu that he already knows, negotiates the deal over the phone with pictures and descriptions of provenance and quality, and takes his supply down once the deal is verbally confirmed.

The full-on picking season when everyone migrates to the upper pastures is delayed by a few days because of a funerary ceremony. They say it’s been a bad year, with ten deaths already by the fifth month. With ceremonies generally carried out every week for seven weeks, and the entire village participating, I wonder when they have time for much else. Today we all spend time in one of the three village temples, and there are at least fifty people there at any given time saying prayers. The family is responsible for feeding all of us.

photo by Kabir Mansingh Heimsath

We make donations. In between prayer recitations a young lay-lama reads out a teaching on death from his smart phone. I meet an ex-monk who was responsible for arranging logistics for the escape of the Karmapa from Tibet back in 2000, propitiously during my first visit to Manang. I remember a helicopter flying overhead and an old woman bowing, “there is the Karmapa.” I had visited him at his monastery outside Lhasa two months earlier and thought I didn’t understand correctly; two days later I heard an announcement come through on BBC shortwave. This was the most high-level escape from Tibet since the mass exodus accompanying the Dalai Lama in 1959; the man I was speaking to had arranged the helicopter. He had the bloodshot eyes and dazed look of an alcoholic, the rugged body and sinewy arms of a pastoralist; they said he had been in prison, had a price on his head, gone into hiding and had “problems” since the escape.

We’re waiting in the same kitchen for an announcement from the village committee - will the exodus to the upper meadows take place tomorrow, or later in the week?

photo by Kabir Mansingh Heimsath

Finally, well past 8pm, there is a call out of the darkness, “Attention, attention…” The voice carries over the suddenly quiet village without the help of any amplification. Tiger cocks his head to listen better - they announce the opening of a lower, more accessible, picking area for two days, and then the primary upper meadows three days hence. There was some consternation over me accompanying the villagers on the big trek, so Tiger is happy to take me picking to the more accessible grounds instead. We leave relatively late at 7am (the village starts moving around dawn, at 5am), but quickly scramble past other pickers on the lower slopes to join three of his cousins in the upper reaches of the range across from the village. Short alpine grass clings to the ravines between rocky ridgelines. The slope is crisscrossed with goat and yak grazing paths and scattered with wildflowers. Our group of five men wander up and down the steep slope, four of them looking intently at the ground, myself trying hard to frame photographs with the harsh backlight and struggling to keep-up without tripping. Only occasionally is there an exclamation, “alloooh-ah!” and we all scramble over to check the discovery. The forager uses his hand-axe for a quick swipe at the soil, and pulls the worm with its fruiting grass out of the extracted lump. The worms are certainly bigger then those I was seeing near Manang, but every other one is limp, mushy - as if the fungus has not fully occupied the caterpillar larvae. The cousins do not seem surprised or overly discouraged by the poor finds, they already know not to expect much from this season. There had been hardly any snow over the winter, and the many deaths in village were foreboding of a hard year to come.

photo by Kabir Mansingh Heimsath

Despite the poor yartsa showing, the group seems to enjoy the outing. We spend plenty of time snacking on wild herbs and shared food, chatting with other groups on the hill, and simply sitting, breathing, and staring across the valley. Even the few pieces each member has found counts for several thousands of rupees more than they would otherwise have. Despite two decades of extremely profitable harvests, the yartsa is still viewed as a boon, a symptom of luck and good fortune, rather than a factor of subsistence or necessity.

Read Kabir Mansingh Heimsath's Final Report here

In fast-moving world of money and payments, anthropology finds a niche

by Jonathan Miller, Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell University

Bill Maurer with cash, cards, and a new payment app.

Apple Pay, Venmo, Square – few aspects of modern life are changing more quickly than systems for moving money.

Ethnography, participant observation, domain analysis – few academic fields require as much time and patience as anthropology.

Yet the anthropology of finance is more urgent and relevant than ever, says Bill Maurer, professor of anthropology and dean of social sciences at the University of California Irvine.

“It’s been amazing to me how much people in IT, folks in the payment industry, really want to hear from us,” he said during a recent visit to Cornell. “Whether they call it anthropology, or the end-user perspective, or computer-human interaction, they want to know what people are really doing on the ground.”

Maurer, a leading figure in the social sciences of finance, was at Cornell to help kick off the Institute for African Development’s symposium “Mobile Money, Financial Inclusion, and Development in Africa.” His talk, “The Problems of Cash and the Perils of Cashlessness: Researching Mobile Money and Payment Infrastructure after M-Pesa,” looked at the “Cambrian explosion” in payment systems after the African telecommunications giant Safaricom launched M-Pesa, its cell-phone-based service, in Kenya in 2007.

einaudi.cornell.edu/working-group/global-finance-initiative

That explosion has brought millions of people into the financial system, making everyday payments easier while providing access to credit and other services. That can make a huge difference for people who need money for seeds, farming equipment, or other modest but crucial investments.

“That said, there are some pretty big risks in the extension of credit to people who haven’t had it before,” Maurer said in an interview.

“Often such people do have their own systems of credit, through patrons and family and kin, or through livestock or access to land,” he said. “When they are given a credit card or access to a formal line of credit it can be difficult at first to figure out how that is meant to interoperate with those other, older forms.”

He cites the case of South Africa, where workers began receiving their paychecks by direct deposit at the same time that banks got the power to reclaim debts directly from their clients’ accounts.

Mobile money grew out of the trade in phone card airtime as a substitute for cash in Africa. This retail stand is in Uganda.

Mobile money grew out of the trade in phone card airtime
as a substitute for cash in Africa. This retail stand is in Uganda

“Anthropologist Deborah James showed how folks went into a financial tailspin because they found they couldn’t negotiate with the bank the way they could negotiate with their relatives. With the bank, if you didn’t pay when it was due, they just took it,” he said.

In societies where loans, gifts, and other forms of exchange are central to social cohesion, the “financialization” of transactions can damage more than just the solvency of an individual borrower.

“So there is this big downside, but there’s tremendous upside” in developing new forms of payment, Maurer said. “It’s just that getting to that upside is going to involve doing some work that some of these service providers have not really been willing to do in the past – to really get to know their customers, to really understand what their needs are, what kinds of informal credit arrangements they’re already using, and really actively trying to educate their potential users on how this new service can work together with those things.”

That is where anthropologists come in.

“If you were trained in a business school, you’re going to miss things like familial relations as involving exchanges that are themselves forms of credit,” Maurer said. “You’re going to miss things that happen on timescales that you’re unfamiliar with.”

With his colleagues at UC Irvine, Maurer founded the Institute for Money Technology and Financial Inclusion to bring together social scientists, technology developers, and financial system practitioners from around the world, particularly from developing countries. The institute has set up a regional center in Pakistan and is planning to establish others in Mexico and Senegal. That is because the technology and culture of finance can vary dramatically from place to place.

“We have a researcher who worked on the Russian side of the Mongolian border with former nomadic herders who had only been settled into villages in the past generation,” he said. “They sit at the crossroads of all kinds of physical cash, some of which they don’t know what to do with. So they throw it into the river as an offering to the river god.”

Cultural issues can arise much closer to home. Maurer recently gave a talk to bankruptcy judges in Orange County, California, near where he teaches. They told him about recent Southeast Asian immigrants whose ideas of communal or familial property can put them at odds with a legal system that sees ownership as an individual responsibility.

“I had one judge tell me that she had a back-and-forth with a guy facing bankruptcy where she was saying, ‘You don’t understand, this is how American law works’ and he was saying, ‘No, no, you don’t understand, this is how gifts work,’” he said.

Maurer sees meeting with practitioners as an important part of his work. “I think that we have a fundamental duty to be willing to speak to people about what we’re doing and the insights that we have to offer,” he said. “Too often I think, especially in anthropology, we adopt this role of cultural critic, which means we come with a holier-than-thou perspective on everything. When we deal with people outside academia, doing work that touches on our own, we either get judgmental toward them or we think of them as data.

“But there’s a hunger out there for the kind of insights we have to offer, especially for people in the trenches who are really seeing what’s going on.”

Read the original interview here: bit.ly/2piOL

Regulation as Retrospective Ethnography: Mobile Money and the Arts of Cash

Does the growing interest and investment in mobile money signal an end to the use of cash and coin? In a recent article, IMTFI Director Bill Maurer writes that predictions of cash's demise are a bit premature. By looking at how financial regulations deal with the way that people make payments and store money in their everyday lives, Maurer argues that we gain access to a “retrospective ethnography of potential” and see how people have come to integrate mobile money into their monetary practices alongside of cash.


To read the full article, click here.