Human and non-human intermediation in rural agricultural markets

Article in the Journal of Cultural Economy by Elisa Oreglia, King's College, London and Janaki Srinivasan, International Institute of Information Technology 

Drawings courtesy of Krish Raghav (krishcat.com)

Abstract

A central trope of the information society is that of ‘information flows.’ The implicit assumption underlying such a vision involves the removal of gatekeepers and intermediaries who are perceived to impede such flows. Drawing from field research on information circulation, trade, and money in rural markets in Myanmar and India, we show why intermediaries persist alongside information and communication technologies (ICTs) in trade and financial transactions in the ‘Information Age.’ We examine the range of roles, (human and non-human) actors, and material practices that are involved in conducting financial transactions, and we show the importance of historical legacies and politics in explaining why both cash and financial intermediaries persist in the digital age. Focusing on the different value that human and non-human intermediaries bring to financial encounters helps explain what characteristics make each resilient or replaceable in a time of change. By situating intermediaries and mediations in the social relations within which they operate, we bring back the role of power and politics – an element that is often missing in accounts focused on the unmediated and ‘free’ circulation of information using ICTs – in explaining processes of mediation and circulation.

Access Journal of Cultural Economy:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17530350.2018.1544918

Access authors' drafts:
Elisa Oreglia: http://ercolino.eu/

Janaki Srinivasan: https://janakisrinivasan.wordpress.com/publications-and-talks/

Read up on original IMTFI-funded research project:
https://www.imtfi.uci.edu/research/2015/srinivasan_oreglia_2015.php

Intermediaries, Cash Economies, and Technological Change in Myanmar and India (Part Three)

By IMTFI Researchers and Elisa Oreglia | SOAS, University of London, UK and Janaki Srinivasan | IIIT, Bangalore, India

Is mobile money changing the way people carry out their financial transactions in rural markets in Myanmar and India? Our comparative qualitative research of an agricultural market town in northern Myanmar and of a fishing market in southern India showed the multitude of ways people move, borrow, and save money in these places, and the value that humans bring to transactions that could easily be made through ICTs yet continue to be done “the old way.” ICTs and specific applications such as mobile money bring a different type of value, and in this final post we reflect on what we learned about human and machine intermediation in financial areas.

First of all, the combination of various technologies and brokers, such as traders and auctioneers, in rural markets in Myanmar and India translates the global reality of finance, financial tools, international supply chains, and political economy into an actionable reality for local farmers and fishers. A key feature of human brokers is that they are flexible and responsive to the changing political economy of their countries in ways that are not always possible for technology by moving in the grey areas between official regulations and informal economies, and thus leveraging gaps or strictures in the official economy. This flexibility is the constant value that users get from using human brokers rather than ICTs, all other things being equal. Because humans can leverage their social knowledge in their roles as brokers, they are able to adjust to changes in a broader political economy as well as to the specific users who they are working with. Thus, they can offer temporal and spatial fixes as well as their expertise in ways that are attuned to the times and their users. Technologies, on the other hand, face constraints regarding the extent to which they can be flexible based on what is inscribed into them by their creators and by the regulatory regimes in which they operate. For example, the fact that mobile money makes financial transactions visible is a feature that is inscribed into both the hardware and software that power mobile money and into the regulatory framework that allows it to operate under certain conditions. ICTs can be used flexibly, but this flexibility has to be figured out by its users, and there are limits to how much flexibility a given technology affords along a particular dimension.

A second point that we want to highlight is how brokers are usually better equipped, financially and often socially, to appropriate ICTs and leverage them to strengthen their positions in the markets, sometimes undermining farmers and fishers and reducing them to mere recipients of their expertise, or even trapping them in relations from which they cannot escape. As both cause and consequence of their trade, brokers are able to inhabit different social worlds that their clients are often not able to successfully bridge: the sense of “feeling out of place” that makes opening a bank account a much bigger challenge than simply gathering the documents required to accomplish the task. Ethnicity, gender, religion, caste, and educational levels all contribute to making people feel out of place in certain situations and environments. This kind of expertise in navigating and bridging different social worlds is perhaps the hardest to delegate to ICTs. Whereas in principle social barriers to entry are lowered on the class-less and ethnicity-blind world of ICT-based services such as digital money, or Market Information Systems, in reality such experiences are highly mediated by the offline worlds that people belong to.

Thirdly, we suggest that the question of whether or not financial transactions can be mediated more efficiently or effectively by humans or technologies cannot be answered in the abstract without referring to the specific conditions of a specific place. We will note that, for example, the problem that ICT users might have with being tracked in their transactions is less of a concern where digital technologies are introduced together with system reforms that make the system less predatory. The axis of time/space is also amenable to technological rather than human mediation, once structural reforms change people’s material circumstances. The 2016 demonetization in India and the demonetizations that Myanmar experienced in its recent history have uniquely affected certain segments of the population for whom the state was and is an unreliable financial partner. Such actions reverberate through time, and rhetoric alone is insufficient for persuading the same people that the state is now concerned about their financial inclusion. Once again, the issue of time is at the forefront: the consequences of financial encounters, either between individuals or between individuals and institutions, extend through time, and the latest ones take place in the shadow of those that happened before, thus needing the appropriate historical and political background to be fully understood.

Finally, we want to stress how it is easier for existing social practices and networks to adapt to innovation than it is for them to be changed by it. This is not a novel finding, but it is often overlooked when talking about the potential for inclusiveness of digital technologies; they are, in fact, more empowering for those who are already in a position of power, and who can thus acquire them earlier and deploy them alongside their existing tools and networks. For instance, traders acquired mobile phones before fishers and farmers did, and were able to reconfigure their own networks to take advantage of them. Once again, if looked at purely from a transactional and financial perspective, fishers and farmers are perpetually catching up with the better-established traders. Using (or not using) ICTs and tools like digital money in their own way rather than according to the expectations of the government and of financial institutions is their own act of resistance to reclaim their own well-established practices.

Read their illustrated final report, "Intermediaries, Cash Economies, and Technological Change in Myanmar and India", drawings by Krish Raghav (krishcat.com).

The report examines the range of roles that (human and non-human) actors and material practices that are involved in conducting financial transactions have, showing the central role that historical legacies and politics play in explaining why both cash and financial intermediaries persist in the digital age.

Links to past blogposts: "Intermediaries, Cash Economies, and Technological Change in Myanmar and India (Part One) and (Part Two)."

Intermediaries, Cash Economies, and Technological Change in Myanmar and India (Part Two)

By IMTFI Researchers Janaki Srinivasan | IIIT, Bangalore, India and Elisa Oreglia | SOAS, University of London, UK

In our previous blog post, we described why we mapped how people borrow and send money around before and/or outside the formal financial sector. Our goal was to understand the value that intermediaries bring to financial transactions in Kerala (India) and Shan state (Myanmar). This led us to unearth a vibrant eco-system of intermediaries, who offer a variety of services and are often in competition with each other – a very different picture from the stereotypical idea that a lack of formal financial services is the same as a lack of financial services. The arrival of mobile money and mobile banking takes place in the context of an already crowded market of competitors. Clients have more choice – and digital financial service providers have to demonstrate their value relative to these existing ways of moving money.

The relatively newly established bank accounts for lower income sections of the population in Kerala are largely restricted to the depositing/transfer of money from the state under public schemes or subsidies. In Shan, state bank accounts are specifically targeted at people with some savings or traders. In both places, therefore, the introduction of mobile money services merely adds to the range of formal financial channels. People are aware of and are even beginning to use these channels, some to greater and others to lesser extents.

In Shan state, traders with a significant volume of business are opening multiple bank accounts to take advantage of free intra-bank money transfer, and thus be able to send money to clients for free regardless of where their clients have their bank account. Despite the digital banking applications, however, much of the work of signing up clients, helping them with deposits, transfers, and other operations still happened face-to-face. Banks would send their young marketing people around town to explain their services to potential clients, to tell them who else was already signed up and who was in the bank, thus allowing the client to establish a sort of trust by proxy: did they know the director of the branch? Any of the employees? Was any person they trusted already a client? This trust “check-list” was followed by regular, in-person visits to the bank even when the client did use mobile banking.

The increase of formal financial services has therefore resulted in an increase of formal financial intermediaries (regulators, banks, local telco operators in almost all cases) and the persistence of ‘old’ intermediaries, who still create value for their clients by moving around and lending cash.

Consequently, our second question in our fieldwork was about the different kinds of value that human intermediaries create. We have identified five such areas where the involvement of a human intermediary appears valuable enough to clients that they choose that route over using unmediated and/or digital modes of conducting financial transactions

1. Negotiating time
The intermediaries we identified were able to offer or move money at short notice, which was important in the largely agrarian communities we focused on. Economic transactions such as the sale of crops or fish are not always “cash-in-hand.” Very often, the markets for these commodities are far away (even international) and payments for goods sold are routinely delayed. Small-scale farmers seldom have the wherewithal to wait for payment. Therefore, they may decide to sell their goods to locally known traders for less than they could get if they sold directly to the final buyer, just so they receive immediate, cash payments. These decisions on when to sell, or who to sell to, are often made in the context of the farmer’s life at a given moment and their life phase – are there children to send to school? Is the farmer older and care more about receiving some cash now, than more cash at a later time? If a fisherman returns after a few days at sea and wants to buy himself a drink, he might care more about selling the fish quickly through his usual intermediary at a known market in order to get the cash he needs for that drink, rather than waiting to find the best price and market. (In the absence of a guarantee that digital money will be accepted, the need for physical cash is great. Cash is universally accepted, including at small- time liquor stores, a point that came up repeatedly in conversations with interlocutors at Kerala beach). What intermediaries offer their clients is thus an opportunity to negotiate how quickly they can access useable money.

2. Negotiating Space
Negotiating space is a second area where intermediaries add value. Intermediaries traverse geographical distances, going between villages and markets frequently – e.g. buying a crop from farmers or fish from fishermen, then selling at a market or to a factory, etc. For farmers, spending time going to markets (even with decent roads) represents a greater loss in income than the lower price they receive after a trader takes his/her cut.

3. Situated Expertise
Most of the informal intermediaries we met were themselves members of the communities where they transacted and had long years of experience in their work. This led to their status as local experts, who knew financial transactions and networks in their domain. In Kerala, fishers viewed their auctioneers as having experience with and deep knowledge of the local fish economy and the process of auctioning. They could be relied on to gauge the prices of different varieties of fish, their seasonal availability and demand across geographies. Similarly, in Shan state, traders are seen as experts in, for example, the national tea markets – as those in the know about which tea to send where. As local and export markets are increasingly intertwined, traders play an essential role in promoting, marketing, and establishing new markets for local produce.

4. Negotiating Visibility
Those involved in financial transactions are often concerned about the visibility of these transactions for a variety of economic, social, and legal reasons. Different formal and informal intermediaries are able to monitor the circulation of money to different extents. Importantly, the implications of their monitoring are also different. Money moved through formal and trackable channels, be they bank accounts or mobile money wallets, can potentially be monitored by the state and tied back to those involved in the transaction. In fact, in the Indian case, the Reserve Bank of India itself envisions digital money as a way to get a better and more reliable sense of the volume (and location) of financial transactions taking place in the country. However, medium to large-scale actors in a market often do not find being tracked by a telco or the state an attractive proposition.

On the other hand, smaller-time, informal intermediaries might not have the wherewithal (nor often the motivation) to track and document the transactions of those they transact with in as comprehensive a way (though they do ‘keep track’ of their borrowers). Moreover, sellers might be in a position to negotiate with intermediaries with whom they have a long-term relationship over how much they are being tracked, or what aspects of the seller’s transactions intermediaries are keeping track of. Thus, informal intermediaries (and cash transactions) keep actors much less legible to the state, which these actors might often find valuable.

5. Social fit
This is a tricky category that is as much about societal perceptions of fit. For example, in Shan state, Burmese-Chinese dominate the tea trade and many other agricultural commodities (especially those exported to China) because of language but also family networks. It then becomes difficult for non-Chinese tea farmers or traders without such extensive networks or skills to enter this market. But there are more subtle differences, such as gender (as other IMTFI researchers have pointed out) or educational level, that make people feel out of place in certain spaces. An intermediary, then, is the person who is able to bridge these divides, or who opens up access to some of these networks, because of their social location.

Studying intermediaries in the specific environment where they operate shows a rich variety in the roles they play and the value they create for their clients. Together, these can explain why clients might choose to go through human intermediaries rather than use their mobile phones directly to conduct many of their financial transactions. 

For Part One of this blog post series, see here.

To read more about their IMTFI funded research see their project page here.

Link to their one-day workshop this Friday, November 11th at IIIT-Bangalore featuring industry experts from Eko, Microsoft Research India, McKinsey Digital Labs, the Gates Foundation, India and the National Payments Corporation of India.

Stay tuned for Oreglia and Srinivasan's final report!

Intermediaries, Cash Economies, and Technological Change in Myanmar and India (Part One)

By IMTFI Researchers Janaki Srinivasan | IIIT, Bangalore, India and Elisa Oreglia | SOAS, University of London, UK

M-pesa, perhaps the best known and most successful mobile money service in the Global South, credits its success in large part to the widespread network of human agents that has facilitated wide adoption. But why do human agents continue to be important, when one has a mobile phone and could easily do without them? As the GSMA blog post that inspired our research puts it, “So here’s the puzzle: why do so many consumers … continue to rely on agents to make mobile money transactions… when sending money directly from an account registered in their own name is cheaper, faster and more convenient?” (Mann & Mutemi, GSMA’s Mobile Money for the Unbanked, 2015)

We set out to explore this question, starting from the viewpoint that if financial intermediaries persist, they must add some kind of value to the transactions they are involved with. What is this value, then? To uncover the value that human intermediaries bring to such encounters, we studied the roles they perform in financial transactions. We then analyzed which of these roles were amenable to being taken over by mobile money and phones, which ones were viewed as strictly linked to humans and why. 

To answer these questions, we conducted multi-country field research on financial transactions in Kerala, southwest India (Srinivasan) and in Shan state, northeast Myanmar (Oreglia). In Kerala, our focus was on fishers and in Shan state, on agricultural communities. In order to understand “who” moves money in these contexts, we took a step back and started from “how” money moves. Separating the “how” from the “who” turned out to be the first step in recognizing that intermediaries do not merely perform a function that can be accomplished instead with the use of technology. Rather, they create value for their customers in complex ways that a functional description such as “moving money from place x to place y” does not fully capture.  

Our fieldwork thus started by asking people how they sent around and borrowed money In both sites, we observed that there are a multitude of intermediaries available to farmers, small traders, shop keepers, and others who needed to perform financial transactions, both within and from/to other countries. A large proportion of these intermediaries did not operate through officially sanctioned or formalized institutions, working instead through more informal channels and networks. Overall, the complex web of such intermediaries we identified at the two sites included the following types:

1. Hundi, a system to transfer money (like hawala) that is based on informal networks of agents in different areas of a country - or even across borders - who transfer and lend money very quickly. In the Burmese context, these are often also traders, so they can move money around while also moving merchandise. While hundi is in fact a financial tool, in Myanmar people also referred to the agents themselves as hundi. 

2. Transport companies are used to transfer money for remittances or for commerce all over Myanmar. People give money directly to drivers, or to the bus company, which might then keep the money – acting rather like a clearinghouse with correspondents all over the country.  

3. Family and friends were used to move money around, and to borrow from, at both our sites. These transactions were governed by complex rules on whether / when to charge interest and how much. 

4. Traders, who are typically very mobile and have somewhat more liquidity than their average client, can transport (and loan) money easily. Such traders were present at both our sites. At the Kerala site, for example, many fishers would be loaned the money to purchase their fishing craft and equipment by medium and larger traders of fish  in return for the right to auction the fishers’ catch and a percentage of their fish sales on every trip.

5. Specialized money lenders (called ‘blades’ in Kerala) lend money at very high interest rates for short periods of time to clients (in this case, small-scale female fish vendors) who need an unpredictable amount of cash every day to purchase their produce (here, fish) because of wide fluctuations in the volume, quality and variety of the daily supply.

These ‘informal’ intermediaries take on great significance in light of how formal channels of finance function in the sites we studied. In Myanmar, they played a crucial role during the years of the military dictatorship (1962-2011), when the formal financial sector was limited to urban areas and to a very small segment of the population, and when the majority of people did not have other alternatives to move money around. In India, and especially Kerala, formal financial services, including international money transfer services, have been relatively more accessible for a large proportion of the population. Even here, however, fishing communities have been outliers.

By mapping out the existing solutions to move and borrow money outside formal financial services, we see that there are many services available even in places without banks and mobile money. In some cases, these intermediaries are in competition with each other, which keeps service charges down. For example, in Shan state there were so many different options to send money around the country that it was often a free service – as opposed to mobile money, which always charged a service fee. However, it is not only cost considerations that explain the persistence and reliance on these intermediaries, as we will discuss in our next blog post.

Read Part Two of this blogpost series.

*Building on this IMTFI-funded research, Srinivasan and Oreglia are hosting a one-day workshop this Friday, November 11th at IIIT-Bangalore. CLICK HERE to register and view the program, and join the research discussion with expert panelists from Eko, Microsoft Research India, McKinsey Digital Labs, the Gates Foundation, India and the National Payments Corporation of India.


1 While cooperatives and banks also offered loans to fishers in Kerala, the number of loans they could offer was far exceeded by the demand for loans in sites such as the one I studied.

Trust Funds: Session Four of the 2016 Conference

"In _____We Trust: The Contingencies of Social and Financial Protection" with discussant Kate McKee of Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP) began the session by polling participants about their trust relationships with banks, insurance companies, credit card companies, and spouses. She also built on earlier discussions about the differences between "knowing how" and "knowing whether" by pointing to issues about lack of choice, the disconnect among clients with efficiency discourses from industry, the "layering" of digital effects, and the understanding that the continuing "role of the state is quite important" as an entity that can "drive" efforts.

“The role of mobile money in social protection networks in two rural areas of Colombia" by Maria Elisa Balen and Andrea Beltrán from the Universidad Externado de Colombia started with an explanation of how sixty years of conflict had produced over six million internally displaced people. Using the analytical triad of market, state and family, the research team focused on "social protection practices" in two field sites: Montes de María in the north and Putumayo in the south. The northern region has been suffering from a decline of tobacco production, and in the south the ups and down of illegal coca crops have been disruptive. Thus the family has to "reconfigure over a large distance." Two additional features are significant: "the state has become more present," and "mobile money becomes an interesting object of study."

The methodology of the study, which used snowballing ("someone who knows someone") and different entry points, avoided "normative perspectives of what family is" and was structured around "two decentralizations." Researchers looked at practices from a past-present-future perspective (including accounting for "how they think the future will be" and "how they want the future to be") and viewed money with "an approach allowing for diversity in conflict zones" and in the context of "other goods and services." The research team used tools like storytelling, drawing (including family maps), and workshop participation.

Participants faced a number of challenges in an environment in which regulation is designed to protect a platform being open to everyone but has yet to be enforced. Often bank intermediaries change very often, and the distribution of cash transfers also changes. When populations in those environments "don't know who they are dealing with and what they have to do to be more stable," the resulting volatility can be very relevant. Regional differences matter as well. For example, in the north the availability of cash transfers for two or three years has shaped uptake patterns. Researchers also looked at how participants treated different amounts of money differently. Among their major findings, researchers found 1) the amount of money in circulation changed in both directions, 2) money is often part of a wider web of exchange, and 3) mobile phones are present in family practices but don't appear to be influencing "technological spillover."

"Dimensions of Electronic fraud and Governance of Trust in Nigeria’s Cashless Ecosystem" by Oludayo Tade of University of Ibadan and Oluwatosin Adeniyi of University of Ibadan looked at "what trust means" and "how trust-building can be done" by examining financial fraud in the digital sector and how it might be facilitated by the trust fostered by intimate ties. They also observed a generational dimension in opportunities for deviant behavior in this "peculiar ecosystem," because of the existence of a "huge population of young people" that is "also dynamic" in which Nigerian youth may "deploy their energies" for "the right and wrong reasons." In considering the dimensions of e-fraud and how trust issues may stymie adoption of new technologies, they reminded the audience that the "internal dimension" in which a conspiracy by staff of the bank may compromise the data of the bank or improperly use technical know-how to make cash transfers. With 21.69 billion lost to 3,756 fraud cases in 2013 alone, policies pushing cashlessness can stimulate greater anxiety. Wen "trust underlies customer-bank relations," breaches cause avoidance behaviors and disrupt financial ecosystems. Fraud strategies may also involve love/fiancee, wife/husband, and son/father dyads, although transaction alerts can foil schemes, particularly for ATM card withdrawal fraud.

At this stage of the primarily qualitative study, content analysis has been done and crime narratives have been analyzed. For example, they presented The Eatery Case as an instance of "un-credited lodgment." Many scams promise to return money in two weeks time and are facilitated through text messages. They also note the "other side" of fraud in terms of governance, and how from the side of business and government, access to subscription services can be compromised

In the question and answer session the team emphasized the importance of specific context in "what you mean when you think about the unbanked." Insights from the field indicated that people were deeply invested in formal banking, and that the rhythms of life in "normal local markets" were still structured around the informal collection of daily contributions from traders. They noted that in making trade-offs, an incentive for becoming banked might be to avoid being susceptible to "increased physical attacks" and "robbery at home," in which victims would lose not only their property but also their lives. Transferring risks to a formal banking center could limit this danger. Additionally, they pointed to the affordances of existing programs for students to open accounts, which "enables you to receive money from home." They also observed that as people travel "we need to design packages that addresses customer characterizations."

"Intermediaries, Cash Economies, and Technological Change in Myanmar and India" by Janaki Srinivasan of the International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore (IIITB) and Elisa Oreglia of SOAS at the University of London examined why intermediaries might be valuable rather than vilified.

"We have most of our fieldwork ahead of us," Oreglia admitted and expressed her enthusiasm for IMTFI critique, because she and Srinivasan were "looking for feedback." She began with a story of a tea trader from the northern part of Myanmar. "In many ways she is the kind of intermediary who is portrayed as the 'bad guy' in markets." Enthusiasts for disintermediation might see her as taking "advantage of farmers who may be ignorant of prices or unable to travel" and morally compromised by her assumptions that "farmers are really dumb." In a system in which traders may "give money and clothes" that create obligations from farmers who "have to sell to us because they are indebted to us" she appears as a suspect character. But Oreglia argued that the story is "much more complicated," particularly when "cash persists as do intermediaries" despite the potential "escape" offered by mobile money. Yet "even when the same operation would be cheaper and faster" if done directly by the farmer himself, many prefer existing social, cultural, and economic norms.

Srinivasan noted how "markets that are dominated by cash" raise interesting questions about the role of intermediaries and "what value are they bringing to the market," "what value do these transactions brings to the idea of value as situated in a place," and "what constitutes value in two different places." She emphasized the importance of how different countries manifest different patterns of adoption: "mobile money is about to take off in Myanmar," but in India "mobile phones has been around for a while, but mobile money is relatively recent." Although she granted it can be challenging to map how intermediaries are able to add value or disrupt value in a summer of fieldwork, she will be looking at a site that she has worked at previously in in Kerala in a study "which is itself a revisit" of an influential study by Robert Jensen who did survey work over the course of five years. (IMTFI blog readers can peruse the article for themselves from this link to "The Digital Provide: Information (Technology), Market Performance, and Welfare in the South Indian Fisheries Sector and read an account of Srinivasan's first IMTFI presentation with Jenna Burrell and Richa Kumar here) 

Srinivasan believes that terms like "producer" or "seller" may actually be more complicated categories characterized by differences of investment, size of fishing crafts and operational costs, and even various types of fish. Thus "the story of a sardine" may be different from the story of another fish. In particular, the role of the auctioneer may be important as well as issues of religion and gender that differentiate Janaki's field site in the Christian south and Jensen's in the Muslim north. Although the middleman is "the person that everyone wants to remove," she asserts that collective organizations can have more benefits than autonomous entrepreneurs and that the rise of co-ops in the sixties and seventies had undermined the power of the previous"fairly exploitive relationship." Using an auctioneer who was paid by the co-op was often valued "to get the best prices for the fish," although a system of transparent auctioning facilitated that, because it was "a system that people have come to recognize and trust." In asking "what does this have to do with technology," she noted that "the auctioneer always had a mobile phone." Accounts were settled daily and sometimes settled weekly. Of course, in 2012 there was "no mobile money to speak of," so Srinivasan was looking forward to revisiting to "see how the intermediary deals with" the new platform.

Oreglia noted three previous financial crises in Myanmar and instances of demonetization. She explained that the field site was in an area of ethnic minorities and small market towns with Burmese-Chinese and Burmese-Indian residents, as well as tribal people, so ethnicity could also play a role not only in trust but in loyalty. The region might "trade with the rest of the country," as well as with China and Thailand, using its economic base in agricultural products. In the illustration above she shared the roughness of field notes, in trying to map out how money travels, including on bus networks. and the many financial movements of small traders who tended to borrow money from financial traders. Unlike the Kerala case, co-ops were used mostly by women traders. Goldsmiths who were all around the market and tended to be Chinese, Those of Chinese ethnicity "did business with everyone," although she emphasized the fact that "loyalty is not necessarily trust." Her tea traders relied on farmers not having many choices, but the technology that has proved to be most transformative is not mobile money. Rather she claimed that cheap motorbikes from China were offering now access to other lines of credit, because farmers could travel to other villages much more easily. Nonetheless most "still rely on these traders," and "ethnic ties have big part to play."

Bothe researchers said they strove to "rescue intermediaries from distain" and the "contempt they are held in." To learn more about the disintermediation debate, you can visit this profile of Janaki Srinivasan to read an extended interview with her and see images from her Kerala field site.