Contemporary Authors

• Recharting the Caribbean: Land, Law, and Citizenship in the British Virgin Islands University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 1997
• Gender Matters: Rereading Michelle Z. Rosaldo University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 2000
• Globalization under Construction: Governmentality, Law, and Identity University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis, MN), 2003
• Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 2005
• Pious Property: Islamic Mortgages in the United States Russell Sage Foundation (New York, NY), 2006
• Accelerating Possession: Global Futures of Property and Personhood Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 2006
• Humanités réticulaires: Nouvelles technologies, altérités et pratiques ethnographiques en contextes globalisés Academia/L'Harmattan (Louvain-la-Neuve, France), 2015
• How Would You Like to Pay? How Technology Is Changing the Future of Money Duke University Press (Durham, NC), 2015
• Paid: Tales of Dongles, Checks, and Other Money Stuff MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 2017

1. Accelerating possession : global futures of property and personhood LCCN 2005054751 Type of material Book Main title Accelerating possession : global futures of property and personhood / edited by Bill Maurer and Gabriele Schwab. Published/Created New York : Columbia University Press, c2006. Description viii, 275 p. ; 24 cm. ISBN 0231137842 (cloth : alk. paper) Links Table of contents only http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/fy0607/2005054751.html CALL NUMBER HB701 .A26 2006 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms CALL NUMBER HB701 .A26 2006 LANDOVR Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 2. Gender matters : rereading Michelle Z. Rosaldo LCCN 99006290 Type of material Book Main title Gender matters : rereading Michelle Z. Rosaldo / edited by Alejandro Lugo and Bill Maurer. Published/Created Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, c2000. Description xiii, 252 p. ; 24 cm. ISBN 0472110462 (alk. paper) 0472086189 (alk. paper) Links Publisher description http://www.loc.gov/catdir/description/umich051/99006290.html Shelf Location FLM2015 234825 CALL NUMBER HQ1075 .G43 2000 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM2) Shelf Location FLM2015 262096 CALL NUMBER HQ1075 .G43 2000 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM2) CALL NUMBER Electronic Resource Request in Online Electronic file info Electronic copy from HathiTrust http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/004120332 3. Globalization under construction : governmentality, law, and identity LCCN 2003008777 Type of material Book Main title Globalization under construction : governmentality, law, and identity / Richard Warren Perry and Bill Maurer, editors. Published/Created Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, c2003. Description xxi, 367 p. : ill. ; 24 cm. ISBN 0816639655 (hardcover : alk. paper) 0816639663 (pbk. : alk. paper) Links Table of contents http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip042/2003008777.html CALL NUMBER JZ1318 .G6792 2003 FT MEADE Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 4. Humanités réticulaires : nouvelles technologies, altérités et pratiques ethnographiques en contextes globalisés LCCN 2016398612 Type of material Book Main title Humanités réticulaires : nouvelles technologies, altérités et pratiques ethnographiques en contextes globalisés / Jacinthe Mazzocchetti, Olivier Servais, Tom Boellstorff, Bill Maurer. Published/Produced Louvain-la-Neuve : Academia L'Harmattan, [2015] Description 326 pages : illustrations ; 19 cm. ISBN 9782806102492 2806102499 CALL NUMBER GN406 .H86 2015 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 5. Paid : tales of dongles, checks, and other money stuff LCCN 2016028477 Type of material Book Main title Paid : tales of dongles, checks, and other money stuff / edited by Bill Maurer and Lana Swartz ; foreword by Bruce Sterling. Published/Produced Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, [2017] Projected pub date 1703 Description pages cm. ISBN 9780262035750 (hardcover : alk. paper) Library of Congress Holdings Information not available. 6. How would you like to pay? : how technology is changing the future of money LCCN 2015004994 Type of material Book Personal name Maurer, Bill, 1968- Main title How would you like to pay? : how technology is changing the future of money / Bill Maurer. Published/Produced Durham ; London : Duke University Press, 2015. Description viii, 163 pages : chiefly color illustrations ; 18 cm ISBN 9780822359562 (hardcover : alk. paper) 9780822359999 (pbk. : alk. paper) 9780822375173 (e-book) Shelf Location FLS2016 070949 CALL NUMBER HG1710 .M38 2015 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLS2) 7. Mutual life, limited : Islamic banking, alternative currencies, lateral reason LCCN 2004019757 Type of material Book Personal name Maurer, Bill, 1968- Main title Mutual life, limited : Islamic banking, alternative currencies, lateral reason / Bill Maurer. Published/Created Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, c2005. Description xix, 217 p. : ill. ; 24 cm. ISBN 0691121966 (alk. paper) 0691121974 (alk. paper) Links Table of contents only http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip0422/2004019757.html Publisher description http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0654/2004019757-d.html Contributor biographical information http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0734/2004019757-b.html CALL NUMBER HG3368.A6 M378 2005 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms CALL NUMBER HG3368.A6 M378 2005 Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 8. Pious property : Islamic mortgages in the United Sates LCCN 2005044411 Type of material Book Personal name Maurer, Bill, 1968- Main title Pious property : Islamic mortgages in the United Sates / Bill Maurer. Published/Created New York : Russell Sage Foundation, c2006. Description xi, 123 p. : ill. ; 24 cm. ISBN 0871545810 9780871545817 Links Table of contents only http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/fy0713/2005044411.html Contributor biographical information http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy1602/2005044411-b.html Publisher description http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy1602/2005044411-d.html CALL NUMBER HG2040.5.U5 M38 2006 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms CALL NUMBER HG2040.5.U5 M38 2006 Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 9. Recharting the Caribbean : land, law, and citizenship in the British Virgin Islands LCCN 96051247 Type of material Book Personal name Maurer, Bill, 1968- Main title Recharting the Caribbean : land, law, and citizenship in the British Virgin Islands / Bill Maurer. Published/Created Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, c1997. Description xvii, 301 p. : ill., maps ; 24 cm. ISBN 0472108115 (cloth : acid-free paper) Links Publisher description http://www.loc.gov/catdir/description/umich051/96051247.html CALL NUMBER F2129 .M38 1997 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms CALL NUMBER F2129 .M38 1997 FT MEADE Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• 2016 AAUP BOOK, JACKET, AND JOURNAL SHOW WINNERS - 2016 Duke University Press, https://dukeupress.wordpress.com/2016/02/03/2016-aaup-book-jacket-and-journal-show-winners/
• - ,

• UC Irvine School of Social Sciences - http://faculty.sites.uci.edu/wmmaurer/

  Dean, School of Social Sciences
  Professor, Anthropology, Law, and
  Criminology, Law and SocietyMaurer-May13
  Director, Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion Ph.D.: Stanford, 1994

  Publications on UC’s e-Scholarship Repository

  Social and Behavioral Sciences Gateway
  949.824.6802 | wmmaurer@uci.edu

  Bill Maurer is a cultural anthropologist who conducts research on law, property, money and finance, focusing on the technological infrastructures and social relations of exchange and payment. He has particular expertise in emerging, alternative and experimental forms of money and finance, payment technologies, and their legal implications. He has published on topics ranging from offshore financial services to mobile phone-enabled money transfers, Islamic finance, alternative currencies, and the future of money. He is founding director of the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and was the founding co-director of the Intel Science and Technology Center in Social Computing.

  His research has been supported by several grants from the National Science Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, and other sources. He is the editor of six collections, as well as the author of Recharting the Caribbean: Land, Law and Citizenship in the British Virgin Islands (1997), Pious Property: Islamic Mortgages in the United States (2006), and Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason (2005). The latter received the Victor Turner Prize in 2005. His new book, How Would You Like to Pay? How Technology is Changing the Future of Money, is set to appear in Fall, 2015. He has worked as a consultant in industry and the non-profit and philanthropic sector, and has also provided expert testimony on his areas of expertise. For more information on Professor Maurer’s current research projects, click on the Research link above.

  He is Associate Editor of the Journal of Cultural Economy and serves as a member of the Editorial Boards of the Journal of Islamic Accounting and Business Research, Cultural Anthropology, Cultural Critique, and PoLAR: The Political and Legal Anthropology Review. From 2007-09 he was President of the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology, and served in 2009-10 as a member of the Program Committee for the Law and Society Association meetings in Chicago, IL. He was Chair of the Department of Anthropology at UC Irvine from 2005-06 until 2010-11, during which time the Department solidified its standing among the very top cultural anthropology programs in the country. He was Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies in the Social Sciences from 2011-13.

  In July 2013, he assumed the role of Dean of the School of Social Sciences at UC Irvine. He maintains an active side interest in the experimental history of the Irvine School of Social Sciences, and has been involved in several curatorial projects related to that history. He has also been involved in curatorial work more directly associated with his research, represented most recently in an ongoing exhibit on the past, present and future of money at the British Museum. In 2015 he was appointed to the Board on Behavioral, Cognitive and Sensory Sciences of the National Academy of Sciences. He was named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2016.

  Research
  Professor Maurer is currently conducting research on the shifting regulatory landscape in the offshore Caribbean; the cultural implications of new forms of electronic money and payment systems (with Scott Mainwaring, Lana Swartz, and Taylor Nelms, the “Future of Money Research Collaborative“); the emerging regulatory landscape for mobile phone-enabled payment systems, and the bitcoin phenomenon, focusing on the use of distributed ledgers to carry out law-like functions. The latter recently was awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation. Professor Maurer’s maintains an active interest in Islamic banking and finance, and has recently published on the religious and rating-agency debate over Islamic bonds (sukuk).

  Professor Maurer’s research in the anthropology of finance and money grew from his work on the offshore financial services sector of the Caribbean, specifically the British Virgin Islands (BVI), one of the world’s leading centers for offshore incorporation and today “home” to around one million companies. With the establishment of the Eastern Caribbean Commercial Court in 2009, the BVI has become a jurisdiction where commercial cases can be heard according to the priciples of equity, historically associated with Chancery, much like in the Delaware’s Court of Chancery. In his most recent research in the BVI, Professor Maurer has been exploring the historical trajectories of chancery and equity, their fusion with and separation from the common law in different phases and moments, their (re)instantiation in a British dependent territory, and the complex legacies in equity of slavery, money and property in the offshore. He is also investigating the recent phenomenon of Chinese entrepreneurs using BVI shell companies, and how Chinese corporate structures in the BVI may render moot recent multilateral efforts to crack down on tax haven abuses. Several papers based on his newest BVI research have appeared in print, and he is currently writing a book on the topic of the new offshore through Chinese incorporations in the “Caribbean’s chancery.”

  Since 2007, Professor Maurer has been engaged in a series of collaborations with professionals in industry and design who are working on the development of new digital and mobile phone-enabled money transfer and savings systems. To this end, he co-organized an Everyday Digital Money conference, Sept. 18-19, 2008 which brought together scholars, industry professionals, nonprofit and philanthropic agency representatives and activists to discuss digital and alternative currency systems, the confluence between complementary currencies and emerging digital and mobile moneys, and the always-ambiguous potential of such moneys for political empowerment and economic transformation. In a related vein, Professor Maurer served as Special Advisor to the Royal College of Art’s Future of Money project.

  Professor Maurer’s work in this domain led to the founding of the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion in 2008. The Institute supports original research on cultures of money around the world and serves as a clearing house for research on the emerging mobile money phenomenon, as well as an ethnographic archive of people’s everyday social, ritual and religious practices around money. All of the projects funded by the Institute are original research on monetary pragmatics and repertoires around the world, from Nigeria to the Altay Province of Russia to Indonesia and Mexico, and nearly all are being conducted by scholars from the countries where they are conducting their research. The Institute is thus building a network and a community of inquiry into people’s everyday innovation at the confluence of money and mobile technology. By documenting people’s creative uses of money outside of money’s traditional functions (store of value, means of exchange, method of payment and the like), Professor Maurer hopes provoke deeper reflection on the multiple meanings and pragmatics of money. His most recent book, How Would You Like To Pay? How Technology is Changing the Future of Money, seeks to bring this work to a broader public.

  Between 2009 and 2013, Professor Maurer was supported by the National Science Foundation for a project titled, “Mobile Money, Mobile Regulation: What the ‘Savings Challenge’ Means for Mobile Communications and Banking.” (See Project Outcomes Report). In this project, Professor Maurer explored the shifting regulatory debate over mobile money services. When telecommunications companies get into the business of money transfer and banking, there is the potential for a clash of cultures as well as risks to consumers, banks and the financial system itself. Who holds the deposits, how, and what do they do with them while they sit in accounts? If you lose your phone, do your savings go with it? This project relied on interviews with regulatory and industry participants; archival data collection and analysis; and ethnography in industry and regulatory sites to understand the debates and knowledge transfers around emerging regulations for mobile money. Professor Maurer is currently completing a book based on this research.

  With Paul Dourish (UC Irvine, Informatics) and Scott Mainwaring (Intel), Maurer founded and co-directed the Intel Science and Technology Center in Social Computing, devoted to using the tools of social science and humanistic inquiry to understand our digital lives. The ISTC-Social is winding down in 2014-15 after a successful 3 years, having supported over 40 faculty and graduate students on 5 campuses (UC Irvine, NYU, Cornell, Indiana University and Georgia Tech). Among other products, it resulted in Maurer’s co-edited book (with Tom Boellstorff), Data, Now Bigger and Better!

  ++++

  Selected Publications
  Publications below are divided into the following subcategories: Mobile/Digital Money, Anthropology of Finance and Money, Offshore Finance, Law and Globalization, Islamic Finance, Review Essays, and Personal Favorites. Scroll down for each topical area. These electronic articles are posted for individual, noncommercial use to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly work. They are intended for teaching and training purposes only. Articles may not be reposted or disseminated without permission by the copyright holder. Copyright holders retain all rights as indicated within each article.

  You may be able to access more of my publications on the University of California’s e-scholarship repository..

  Mobile/digital money

  Ledgers and law in the blockchain. Quinn DuPont and Bill Maurer. King’s Review, June 23, 2015.

  ‘When perhaps the real problem is money itself:’ The practical materiality of Bitcoin. Bill Maurer, Taylor Nelms and Lana Swartz. Social Semiotics, 2013. DOI:10.1080/10350330.2013.777594.

  ‘Bridges to cash:’ channeling agency in mobile money. Bill Maurer, Taylor Nelms and Stephen Rea. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 19(1):52-74, 2013.

  Late to the party: debt and data. Social Anthropology 20(4):474-481, 2012.

  Payment: Forms and Functions of Value Transfer in Contemporary Society. Cambridge Anthropology 30(2):15-35, 2012. Available here.

  Credit slips (but should not fall). Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory DOI:10.1080/1600910X.2012.697074, 2012.

  Mobile money: Communication, consumption and change in the payments space. Journal of Development Studies, 48(5): 589-604, 2012.

  An emerging platform: From money transfer system to mobile money ecosystem. Jake Kendall, Philip Machoka, Clara Veniard and Bill Maurer. Innovations 6(4):49-64, 2012.

  Regulation as retrospective ethnography: mobile money and the arts of cash. Banking and Finance Law Review 27 (2): 299-313, 2012.

  Mobile money, money magic, purse limits and pins: tracing monetary pragmatics. Journal of Cultural Economy, 2011, 4:3, 349-359.

  Finger counting money. Anthropological Theory, 10(1&2): 179-185, 2010.

  “Work in progress: Electronic payments systems” 2008. This is a review essay written mainly for a policy and philanthropy audience. It has since been supplanted by others’ review essays – notably, Duncombe and Boateng 2009 – but I leave it here since people have told me it remains useful to their work.

  From meiwaku to tokushita!: lessons for digital money design from Japan. Scott Mainwaring, Wendy March and Bill Maurer. Proceedings of the twenty-sixth annual SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems, pp.21-24. [Winner, Best Research Note Award, SIGCHI Conference] [also here]

  Anthropology of finance and money

  Lauren Tooker & Bill Maurer (2015): The pragmatics of payment: adventures in first-person economy with Bill Maurer, Journal of Cultural Economy, DOI: 10.1080/17530350.2015.1077157, or http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/hP6UnmFtZPZGMRtgatFU/full

  Materiality, Symbol, and Complexity in the Anthropology of Money. Taylor C. Nelms and Bill Maurer (2014). In The Psychological Science of Money. Edited by E.H. Bijleveld & H. Aarts. New York: Springer, 37-70.

  Transacting ontologies: Kockelman’s sieves and a Bayesian anthropology. Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. http://dx.doi.org/10.14318%2Fhau3.3.004, 2013.

  Postscript: Is There Money In Credit? Consumption, Markets and Culture, 2013.

  David Graeber’s Wunderkammer: Debt: The First 5000 Years. Anthropological Forum, 2013.

  The disunity of finance: alternative practices to western finance. In the Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Finance. Karin Knorr Cetina and Alex Preda, eds. Oxford University Press, pp. 413-430, 2013.

  Money Bodies. Bill Maurer and Elham Mireshghi. In Body/State. Angus Cameron, Jen Dickinson, and Nicole Smith, eds. Ashgate, pp. 85-94, 2013.

  Anthropology with business: plural programs and future financial worlds. Bill Maurer and Scott Mainwaring. Journal of Business Anthropology 1(2) 2012.

  Late to the party: debt and data. Social Anthropology 20(4):474-481, 2012.

  Payment: Forms and Functions of Value Transfer in Contemporary Society. Cambridge Anthropology 30(2):15-35, 2012.

  Credit slips (but should not fall). Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory DOI:10.1080/1600910X.2012.697074, 2012.

  Theorizing the Contemporary: Finance. Edited by Bill Maurer. Special online collection, Cultural Anthropology website, May, 2012.

  Accidents of equity and the aesthetics of Chinese offshore incorporation. Bill Maurer and Sylvia J. Martin. American Ethnologist 39(3): 597-544, 2012.

  Money Nutters. Economic Sociology_The European Electronic Newsletter 12(3): 5-12, July, 2011.

  Moral Economies, Economic Moralities: Consider the Possibilities! In Katherine Browne and Lynne Milgram, eds. Economics and Morality : Anthropological Approaches. Society for Economic Anthropology. AltaMira Press, 257-269, 2009.

  Re-socialising Finance? Or Dressing it in Mufti? Calculating Alternatives for Cultural Economies. Journal of Cultural Economy 1(1):65-78, 2008.

  “Does Money Matter? Abstraction and Substitution in Alternative Financial Forms.” In Daniel Miller, ed. Materiality. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005, pp.140-164.

  “Uncanny Exchanges: The Possibilities and Failures of Making Change with Alternative Monetary Forms.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2003, 21(3):317-340.

  “Repressed Futures: Financial Derivatives Theological Unconscious.” Economy and Society 31(1):15-36, 2002.

  “Forget Locke? From Proprietor to Risk-Bearer in New Logics of Finance.” Public Culture 11.2 (1999): 365-385.

  Offshore

  Jurisdiction in dialect: Sovereignty games in the British Virgin Islands. In European Integration and Postcolonial Sovereignty Games. R. Adler-Nissen and U. P. Gad, eds. Routledge, 2013, pp. 130-144.

  Accidents of equity and the aesthetics of Chinese offshore incorporation. Bill Maurer and Sylvia J. Martin. American Ethnologist 39(3): 597-544, 2012.

  From Anti-Money laundering to… what? The aftermath of “compliance” for offshore financial services. In Anne Clunan and Harold Trinkhaus, eds. Ungoverned Spaces: Alternatives to State Sovereignty in an Era of Softened Sovereignty. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010.

  From the Revenue Rule to Soft Law and Back Again: The Consequences for “Society” of the Social Governance of International Tax Competition. In Julia Eckert, Keebet von Benda Beckmann and Franz von Benda Beckmann, eds. Rules of Law and Laws of Ruling. London: Ashgate, pp.217-235, 2009.

  Re-regulating offshore finance? Geography Compass 2(1):155-175, 2008.

  Incalculable payments: money, scale and the South African offshore Grey Money Amnesty. African Studies Review 50(2):125-138, 2007.

  “Due Diligence and ‘Reasonable Man,’ Offshore.” Cultural Anthropology, 2005, 20(4):474-505.

  “Cyberspatial Properties: Taxing Questions about Proprietary Regimes.” In C. Humphrey and K. Verdery, eds. Property in Question: Value Transformation in the Global Economy. Oxford: Berg, 2004, pp. 297-318.

  “A Fish Story: Rethinking Globalization on Virgin Gorda.” American Ethnologist 27.3 (2000): 670-701. [available through AnthroSource, www.aaanet.org]

  “Cyberspatial Sovereignties: Offshore Finance, Digital Cash, and the Limits of Liberalism.” Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 5.2 (1998): 493-519.

  “Islands in the Net: Re-wiring Technological and Financial Circuits in the Offshore Caribbean.” Comparative Studies in Society and History. Summer 2001.

  “Complex Subjects: Offshore Finance, Complexity Theory, and the Dispersion of the Modern.” Socialist Review. 25 (3&4): 114-145.

  Law and globalization

  “In the Mirror: The Legitimation Work of Globalization.” Susan Coutin, Bill Maurer and Barbara Yngvesson. Law and Social Inquiry. 27(4): 801-843, 2002.

  “The Cultural Power of Law? Conjunctive Readings.” Law and Society Review, 2004, 38(4):843-850.

  “Got Language? Law, Property, and the Anthropological Imagination.” American Anthropologist, 2003, 105(4):775-781.

  “Visions of Fact, Languages of Evidence: History, Memory and the Trauma of Legal Research.” Law and Social Inquiry 26(4):893-909, 2001.

  Review essays

  Finance 2.0. In A Handbook of Economic Anthropology, Second Edition. James Carrier, ed. Edward Elgar Publishers, Ltd., pp. 183-201.

  Economy. In A Handbook of Sociocultural Anthropology. James Carrier and Deborah Gewertz, eds. Edward Elgar Publishers, in press.

  “In the Matter of Marxism,” in Chris Tilley et al., eds., Handbook of Material Culture. Oxford: Sage, 2006, 13-28.

  “The Anthropology of Money.” Annual Review of Anthropology, 2006, 35:15-36.

  “Introduction: Ethnographic Emergences.” American Anthropologist, 2005, 107(2):1-4. [available through AnthroSource, www.aaanet.org]

  Finance. In A Handbook of Economic Anthropology. James Carrier, ed. Edward Elgar Publishers, Ltd., 176-193.

  “Please Destabilize Ethnography Now: Against Anthropological Showbiz-as-Usual.” Reviews in Anthropology, 2003, 32(2):159-169.

  “Modern Reflex.” American Anthropologist 104(1): 324-326, 2002.

  Islamic finance

  Form versus Substance: AAOIFI Projects and Islamic Fundamentals in the case of Sukuk. Journal of Islamic Accounting and Business Research,1(1) 32-41, 2010.

  Faith in the Form: Islamic Home Financing and “American” Islamic Law. In Katherine Ewing, ed. New York: Russell Sage Press. 178-199, 2008.

  “Re-Formatting the Economy: Islamic Banking and Finance in World Politics. In Nelly Lahoud, A.H. Johns and Allan Patience, eds. Islam in World Politics. RoutledgeCurzon, 2005, pp.54-66.

  “Implementing Empirical Knowledge in Anthropology and Islamic Accountancy.” Eds. Aihwa Ong and Stephen Collier. Global Anthropology: Technology, Governmentality, Ethics. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004, pp.214-232. [expanded version of “Anthropological and Accounting Knowledge” article, below]

  “Anthropological and Accounting Knowledge in Islamic Banking and Finance: Rethinking Critical Accounts.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, new series, 8(4): 645-667, 2002.

  “Engineering an Islamic Future: Speculations on Islamic Financial Alternatives.” Anthropology Today. 17.1 (2001): 8-11.

  My Personal Favorites

  “On Divine Markets and the Problem of Justice: Empire as Theodicy.” In Paul Passavant and Jodi Dean, eds. Empires New Clothes. New York: Routledge, 2004, 57-72.

  “Redecorating the International Economy: Keynes, Grant, and the Queering of Bretton Woods.” In Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism, A. Cruz-Malave and M. Manalansan, eds. New York: New York University Press, 2002, pp. 100-133.

  “Fact and Fetish in Creolization Studies: Herskovits and the Problem of Induction, or, Guinea Coast, 1593.” New West Indian Guide/Nieuwe West-Indisches Gids 76 (1/2): 5-22, 2002.

  Anthropology of Money
  The Anthropology of Money in Southern California is an exhibition of the uses of money and money-like objects in the cultural, religious or ritual practices of various communities of Los Angeles and Orange Counties. It was created from original research conducted by the students in an undergraduate class at the University of California at Irvine, on the anthropology of money (Anthropology 125S) in the Fall of 2004 and the Winter of 2006 and 2008. For about four weeks out of a ten week quarter, in addition to conducting their regular assignments for this class, students worked in small groups to collect data on monetary uses of non-monetary objects and the non-monetary uses of legal tender. They employed participant-observation, interviews, archival and web-based research. The goals of the project were: (1) to introduce students to ethnographic research methods and to give them the opportunity to conduct independent, original research on a little-studied phenomenon; (2) to illuminate and document the diverse practices involving money and money-like objects in which many Southern Californians participate; (3) to contribute to research in the humanities and social sciences on the social meanings and uses of money.

  Since the first exhibit was launched, I have fielded many inquiries from journalists, lawyers, entrepreneurs, scholars and others seeking information and advice on alternative uses and forms of money in the United States and elsewhere. Thus, I have decided to maintain this site as best I can so that the students’ original research can continue to intrigue and inspire others to take another look at the coins and cash that change hands every day.

  During the course of these projects, my own research on alternative currencies and the anthropology of finance has been supported by two grants from the National Science Foundation (SES 9818258 and SES 0516861) as well as grants from the Russell Sage Foundation. Those grants did not directly support this project, but the synergy between the grant-funded research and this exhibit should be obvious. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors (including the students) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, or the University of California, Irvine.

  — Bill Maurer, Professor of Anthropology, UC Irvine

  UCI/Filene partner on credit union FinTech research
  Bill Maurer, anthropologist and soc sci dean, in PYMNTS.com, Feb. 16, 2017
  Feb 16, 2017 12:00 AM
  Paid: Tales of dongles, checks, and other money stuf...
  New book by social sciences dean Bill Maurer is reviewed in Wired, Jan. 31, 2017
  Jan 31, 2017 12:00 AM
  Nine named science fellows
  Tom Boellstorff and Bill Maurer, anthropology, in the Orange County Business Journal, Nov. 21, 2016
  Nov 21, 2016 12:00 AM
  9 UCI researchers named AAAS fellows
  Boellstorff and Maurer among those honored for distinguished contributions to their fields
  Nov 21, 2016 12:00 AM
  Words of wisdom for this year's college freshmen
  Bill Maurer, social sciences dean, offers advice via The Huffington Post, Sept. 22, 2016
  Sep 22, 2016 12:00 AM
  Welcome back!
  Message from dean Bill Maurer
  Sep 22, 2016 12:00 AM
  Digital currency for social good: A reading list
  Bill Maurer, social sciences dean and anthropologist, on digital currency, courtesy of Medium
  Jun 15, 2016 12:00 AM
  How to crack the mobile payments market
  Bill Maurer, anthropology professor and social sciences dean, is quoted by AlleyWatch and CNBC Jan. 6, 2016
  Jun 1, 2016 11:30 AM
  Researchers plan 'unstoppable' DAO to help whales sa...
  Bill Maurer, anthropology professor and law professor, on legal implications of advancements in blockchain technology via Coin Desk, May 20, 2016
  May 20, 2016 12:00 AM
  The Harriet Tubman $20 and other faces on money show...
  Bill Maurer, social sciences dean and anthropology professor, on the new $20 in the Los Angeles Times, April 25, 2016
  Apr 25, 2016 12:00 AM
  Change for the $20: Tubman to go on bill
  Bill Maurer, social sciences dean, on the face of the new $20, The Orange County Register, April 21, 2016
  Apr 21, 2016 10:27 PM
  Harriet Tubman to replace Andrew Jackson on front of...
  Bill Maurer, social sciences dean, on the face of the new $20, KTLA5, April 20, 2016
  Apr 20, 2016 10:16 PM
  An announcement is expected this year on who will be...
  Bill Maurer, anthropology professor and social sciences dean, is featured on KSBR Jan. 4, 2016
  Apr 1, 2016 2:05 AM
  Startup aims to unearth good consumer credit risks
  Bill Maurer, social sciences dean and Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion director, is quoted in the Orange County Business Jou...
  Feb 22, 2016 12:00 AM
  OC-LB ties displayed at 'State of Port;' CFOs and Sh...
  Bill Maurer, anthropology professor and social sciences dean, is featured in the Orange County Business Journal Jan. 25, 2016
  Jan 25, 2016 12:00 AM
  Irvine business forum sees demographics and improved...
  Bill Maurer, anthropology professor and social sciences dean, is featured in the Daily Pilot Jan. 22, 2016
  Jan 22, 2016 12:00 AM
  Pay dirt
  Bill Maurer, dean of social sciences, shares a trove of fun facts about money
  Jan 22, 2016 12:00 AM
  Keep your stash: Paper cash is here to stay
  Soc sci dean and cultural anthropologist Bill Maurer explains in OC Register feature
  Jan 18, 2016 12:00 AM
  Eight economics books to buy this Christmas
  A new book by Bill Maurer, anthropology professor and social sciences dean, is featured in The Economic Times Dec. 15, 2015
  Dec 15, 2015 12:00 AM
  Beyond the cash nexus
  Bill Maurer, anthropology professor and social sciences dean, is quoted by Inside Higher Ed Nov. 25, 2015
  Nov 25, 2015 12:00 AM
  Who do you want to see on the new $10 bill? Treasure...
  Bill Maurer, social sciences dean, is highlighted in the Orange County Register Oct. 30, 2015
  Oct 30, 2015 12:00 AM
  Fall 2015 dean's welcome
  From Bill Maurer, social sciences dean
  Sep 29, 2015 12:00 AM
  UCI to celebrate 50th with Festival of Discovery
  Bill Maurer, social sciences dean, is featured in the OC Register Sept 28, 2015
  Sep 28, 2015 9:23 PM
  Expert view: 'Any good financial inclusion policy mu...
  Bill Maurer, social sciences dean and anthropology professor, is featured by Inclusion Hub Sept. 14, 2015
  Sep 14, 2015 12:00 AM
  Harriet Tubman for new $10 note, say historians
  Bill Maurer, anthropology professor and social sciences dean, is quoted by Bloomberg Business and The Daily Herald Sept. 10, 2015
  Sep 10, 2015 5:16 PM
  Online money transfers and the "Skype" of money
  Bill Maurer, social sciences dean and anthropology professor, is featured in Forbes India Magazine Sept. 9, 2015
  Sep 9, 2015 7:51 PM
  Hudson grad tapped for $10 bill redesign
  Bill Maurer, anthropology professor and social sciences dean, is featured in The Register Star Aug. 5, 2015
  Aug 5, 2015 10:50 PM
  This Colombian town is trying to get rid of cash - b...
  Bill Maurer, anthropology professor and social sciences dean, is quoted by Fusion July 29, 2015
  Jul 29, 2015 10:49 PM
  6 multicultural money lessons worth learning
  Bill Maurer, anthropology professor and social sciences dean, is quoted by Credit Card Guide July 24, 2015
  Jul 24, 2015 10:51 PM
  Former congressman is new UCI visiting professor
  Bill Maurer, anthropology professor and social sciences dean, is quoted in the Orange County Register July 23, 2015
  Jul 23, 2015 7:05 PM
  Virtual currency by the bit
  Bill Maurer, anthropology and law professor, is quoted by AG Web June, 2015
  Jun 1, 2015 6:55 PM
  Biz News: Smart Customer Mobile wins energy award
  Bill Maurer, anthropology professor and social sciences dean, is featured in the Los Angeles Times Nov. 27, 2015
  Feb 12, 2015 2:50 AM

  Mobile Money
  Other Mobile Money Articles
  (non-peer reviewed; see Selected Publications for journal articles on mobile money and digital currencies)

  Lana Swartz and Bill Maurer, The Future of Money-Like Things. The Atlantic, May 22, 2014.

  Bill Maurer and Steven Rea, Guest blog entries for Credit Slips: A Discussion on Credit, Finance and Bankruptcy. Four guest blogs on “cashlessness”: Platform, Infrastructure, Utility?; Cash as Social Infrastructure; Cash: Killing it or Buildiing Bridges to it?; Toward Cashlessness? April, 2012.

  The Queue: Payment Platforms Lining Up. iHub Research Newsletter, Nairobi. Q2, 2012.

  How can you ‘see’ money moving? Charisma – Consumer Market Studies, January 14, 2012.

  Tips for 2012: Understanding Payment Behavior of African Households – A Vast and Untapped Market
  by Jake Kendall and Bill Maurer. Pymnts.com, February 10, 2012.

  Mobile money regulation: A story arc of best practices and emerging realizations, USAID/Microlinks Note From the Field, December, 2011.

  Money goes mobile. With Tatyana Mahmut and Leslie Witt. IDEO Pattern, 2011.

  Mobile money’s innovation crisis. With Olga Morawczynski. CGAP Technology blog, August, 2010.

• UCI - Faculty Profile - http://www.faculty.uci.edu/profile.cfm?faculty_id=4488

  Dean
  School of Social Sciences

  Professor, Anthropology
  School of Social Sciences

  Professor
  School of Law

  Director, Institute for Money, Technology, and Financial Inclusion
  School of Social Sciences

  Co-Director, Center for Social Computing

  Ph.D., Stanford University, 1994

  M.A., Stanford University, 1990

  A.B., Vassar College, 1989

• Center for Digital Transformation - http://www.centerfordigitaltransformation.org/speaker/bill-maurer-dean-school-social-sciences/

  Bill Maurer
  Dean, School of Social Sciences and Director, Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion

  Bill Maurer is a cultural anthropologist who conducts research on law, property, money and finance, focusing on the technological infrastructures and social relations of exchange and payment. He has particular expertise in emerging, alternative and experimental forms of money and finance, payment technologies, and their legal implications. He has published on topics ranging from offshore financial services to mobile phone-enabled money transfers, Islamic finance, alternative currencies, and the future of money. He is founding director of the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and was the founding co-director of the Intel Science and Technology Center in Social Computing.

  His research has been supported by several grants from the National Science Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, and other sources. He is the editor of six collections, as well as the author of Recharting the Caribbean: Land, Law and Citizenship in the British Virgin Islands (1997), Pious Property: Islamic Mortgages in the United States (2006), Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason (2005, recipient of the Victor Turner Prize), and How Would You Like to Pay? How Technology is Changing the Future of Money (2015). He has worked as a consultant in industry and the non-profit and philanthropic sector, and has also provided expert testimony on his areas of expertise.

  He is Associate Editor of the Journal of Cultural Economy and serves as a member of the Editorial Boards of the Journal of Islamic Accounting and Business Research, Cultural Anthropology, Cultural Critique, and PoLAR: The Political and Legal Anthropology Review. From 2007-09 he was President of the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology, and served in 2009-10 as a member of the Program Committee for the Law and Society Association meetings in Chicago, IL. He was Chair of the Department of Anthropology at UC Irvine from 2005-06 until 2010-11, during which time the Department solidified its standing among the very top cultural anthropology programs in the country. He was Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies in the Social Sciences from 2011-13.

  In July 2013, he assumed the role of Dean of the School of Social Sciences at UC Irvine. He maintains an active side interest in the experimental history of the Irvine School of Social Sciences, and has been involved in several curatorial projects related to that history. He has also been involved in curatorial work more directly associated with his research, represented most recently in an ongoing exhibit on the past, present and future of money at the British Museum. In 2015 he was appointed to the Board on Behavioral, Cognitive and Sensory Sciences of the National Academy of Sciences.

• Journal of Cultural Economy - http://www.journalofculturaleconomy.org/conversation-with-bill-maurer/

  IN CONVERSATION WITH ... BILL MAURER
  by LAUREN TOOKER March 3, 2015
  Bill Maurer
  We are delighted that Bill Maurer has joined the Journal of Cultural Economy editorial team. Here we reproduce an extract of an interview with him, conducted by Lauren Tooker the day of his recent talk at the University of Warwick. A version of this interview will be published in the journal in due course.
  Many thanks to Exchanges: the Warwick Research Journal, who kindly granted permission to republish this extract and to the Global Research Priority in Global Governance that sponsored Bill Maurer’s visit. The interview can be read in full here. The lecture took place at Warwick on September 8, 2014, and was titled: ‘Governing Money After Bitcoin and the “Sharing Economy”: Closed Payment Communities and the Public Good’.
  In the following extract, Tooker1 invites Maurer to explain his interest in payments and payment communities and why exactly payments matters.
  PAYMENTS – PUBLICS – POLITICS
  LT: I would like to move to what you’re working on now and why you’re at Warwick giving a talk on closed payment communities and the public good. What draws you to this area? A lot of people might say that payments are really quite banal, quotidian stuff. Why does this topic matter?
  BM: I came into this whole field of payment infrastructure by accident. I had been doing my work in money and finance and one day someone knocked on my door. It was Scott Mainwaring, who used to work at Intel. He introduced himself and said that he was thinking about digital payments and he had read my anthropology of money review essay and wanted to talk to me about it. And that led to a collaboration that continues. We ended up planning a conference where we brought together a bunch of people who were thinking about digital money and electronic payments, including some folks from the Gates Foundation who at that conference announced that they were going to be funding the institute that I direct that’s looking at the spread of mobile phone enabled payments systems in the developing world. So very quickly all of this came together. Scott and I were asking questions that we felt were not being asked in the electronic money world, namely, is electronic money all about security and electronic encryption– which is what everybody was saying – and we were saying ‘no’. If we believe everything we’ve written and read about money –if we’ve read our Jane Guyer, our Viviana Zelizer and our Keith Hart – then we know that money is always carrying other kinds of meaning and doing other kinds of work. So what other kinds of work is money already doing in these digital networks, what other kinds of work is almost being forced on it as it’s being channelled through new private infrastructures? And then what are peopledoing? How are people hacking and remaking or personalising these things?
  All of us stumbled into the payments field around the same time and then a whole host of problems hit us in the face. They’re problems that people have done before, when Visa and Mastercard were being established, or when Diners Club was established before them, but they took on a new urgency because the mobile phone was spreading so quickly and mobile money seemed to be taking off in a number of places so forcefully and particularly among very vulnerable people. There were all of the questions about things like interchange fees that cut into the transactions or things like interoperability between systems, which in the States and in Europe had been regulated. For me this opened up the whole question of payment as a public good and led me to dig back into the history of the establishment of currency itself as a kind of public good. It’s odd to think about this but money is a kind of public infrastructure that allows people to do other kinds of things that we call the economy. Since the nineteenth century, it’s been seen primarily as a function of the state to provide this mechanism of exchange and payment so that then you get the spill-over effects of the economy. Yet here we have so many instances where companies and other entities are trying to close off bits of it, or to get people’s transactions within a closed loop so that they are only using one method of payment and that method of payment is only accepted in four or five venues or shops or online market places. It’s almost like a company store – keeping a person sutured into one little sub-economy and especially where the poor are concerned, that raises a whole bunch of issues. It raises issues now, post-global financial crisis (GFC), when even for the not-poor, the banking and payment services that we are offered increasingly come with higher fees or fees that are not disclosed, and the whole normal banking sector starts to look more and more like the fringe banking sector.
  So I think that like many people, even in the payments industry itself, I kind of stumbled into payments and once I was there I went ‘wow’. Number one, this is not capitalism as usual. The business models of the payments industry are all based on tolls and fees. There is not a price mechanism at work here, it’s not the market. And in fact in the States, when the card networks have been taken to court for anti-trust violations, which means contorting the market in various ways, they’ve almost always settled out of court. They’re saying ‘yep, you’re right, that’s what we’ve been doing, that’s how it works’. That in itself in my own academic programme is an important thing to say. The systems that do the transit of value for us when we are doing our capitalism thing themselves operate according to principles that are not capitalist. There’s a wonderful kind of Gibson-Grahamian thing right there.
  LT: Yes, and if you are talking about currency being a public good, then obviously Bitcoin flashes up as a question. What’s your position on Bitcoin?
  BM: Well it’s certainly evolving. I work very closely with Taylor Nelms (UC Irvine) and Lana Swartz (USC) on this. We started watching Bitcoin from the moment the Satoshi paper was published and did an article (Maurer et al., 2013) where we basically went through all of the Bitcoin forums and did a kind of discourse analysis of what was happening. I’ve pretty much come to realise that I need to be a better anthropologist when it comes to Bitcoin people because it’s very easy for me to slam it, and say this is really stupid libertarian mumbo-jumbo and they have a commodity theory of money that’s stupid, that nobody really believes in except for Hayekians, and it will never work anyway and it’s only really a tiny little blip – I mean 8 billion capitalisation is nothing in the wide world – and it is posing all of these regulatory questions. But I’m starting to see, particularly among some of the younger folks who are involved in Bitcoin, reconfigurations and rewiring of ideologies into new configurations that I certainly was not prepared for. So I feel that it’s time for me to start trying to get my head into their head, or to put myself in their shoes a bit more and really think about what Bitcoin means, for instance, for people whose investment in technology was shaped profoundly by PayPal freezing contributions to WikiLeaks, or people for whom the suicide of Aaron Swartz really affected them.2 I think that it’s really stitching together a new kind of configuration of what I’ve been content to call libertarianism, where there’s a sense that indeed, government has failed. Over here there was austerity in response to the GFC; back home we had Obama who tried to do all kinds of things but kind of failed and has been rather disappointing to many people on that score. So there’s your government, right! You can talk about various kinds of protections and so on that it affords and then at the same time the NSA thing explodes.
  So I’ve been trying to think through that, and to hear what the other possibilities are in things like Bitcoin. I’m also utterly captivated by the playfulness that has emerged. There’s the Dogecoin phenomena, the playfulness of creating all kinds of cryptocurrencies initially to poke fun at the phenomenon but which then become something, take on a life of their own and still have that sense of irony. Or the way that people are using the blockchain database that lies behind Bitcoin to chronicle their own little stories, almost using it like a microblogging twitter sort of thing but for whatever reason putting it all to the blockchain.
  LT: Wow!
  BM: The ‘whatever reason’ speaks, I think, to the passionate need or ability to chronicle one’s story and one’s engagement with the world in a way that is completely attentive to what Twitter and Facebook mean in terms of the corporatisation of our personal stories and narratives and the harvesting of our personal data for various kinds of return. It’s also completely attuned to issues around NSA surveillance and state monitoring and so forth. Here you have these folks who are microblogging or doing other playful things with the blockchain, right! So it ain’t Twitter and it ain’t NSAable– although it is, of course – but it taps into this irrepressible desire to tell our stories in new ways. So I’m curious to see where that takes me.
  References
  Maurer, B., T. C. Nelms and L. Swartz (2013), ‘“When Perhaps the Real Problem is Money Itself!”: The Practical Materiality of Bitcoin’, Social Semiotics23 (2), 261-277.
  Notes
  1. Lauren Tooker is a doctoral researcher in Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick and the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Lauren works in the broad areas of finance, political economy and cultural and political theory. Her PhD thesis examines the everyday politics and ethics of debt resistance after the global financial crisis.
  2. Computer programmer and political organiser Aaron Swartz committed suicide in 2013 while being prosecuted for downloading a large number of academic articles from JSTOR.

• -

3/1/17, 4:20 PM
Print Marked Items
Maurer, Bill. How would you like to pay?: how technology is changing the future of money
A.R. Sanderson
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 53.8 (Apr. 2016): p1208. From Book Review Index Plus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Sanderson, A.R. "Maurer, Bill. How would you like to pay?: how technology is changing the future of money."
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Apr. 2016, p. 1208. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA449661715&it=r&asid=f9bff9abdb47678cd1cd3b34f58fb4db. Accessed 1 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A449661715
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Internet Gambling Offshore: Caribbean Struggles over Casino Capitalism
Bill Maurer
New West Indian Guide.
87.1-2 (Summer 2013): p186. From Book Review Index Plus. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/22134360-12340028 COPYRIGHT 2013 Brill Academic Publishers, Inc. http://www.kitlv-journals.nl/index.php/nwig
Full Text:
Internet Gambling Offshore: Caribbean Struggles over Casino Capitalism. Andrew F. Cooper. Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. xvii + 201 pp. (Cloth US$ 85.00)
Chronicling the dispute between Antigua and the United States over offshore Internet gambling, this book is set against the backdrop of the historic speculative boom in finance that precipitated the global financial crisis. Antigua hosted offshore gambling operations that eventually brought it to the World Trade Organization (WTO) to argue--and win--its case against the United States. Other Caribbean islands meanwhile served booking functions for derivatives, insurance, and complicated subsidiary structures. Yet even in the wake of the financial crisis that began in 2008, official sanctions against financial speculation have been significantly weaker than those against offshore gambling. Furthermore, despite Antigua's win at the WTO, the United States was able to stop offshore Internet gambling. The international effort against Caribbean tax havens has not been as successful. This fascinating book helps explain why: U.S. politics are full of strange bedfellows, regulatory carve-outs for specific industries, and unlikely alliances that thwart easy International Relations (IR) accounts of power in the global political economy.
Since ancient times, gambling has faced moral stigma. One reason is the confounding of media of value with mechanisms of chance. States thus have sought to segregate gambling spatially from other economic activities (think Las Vegas... or Wall Street). The Internet complicates this enclaving. If you are physically in Ohio but logged into a server in Antigua, what is the connection--metaphysical, moral, legal--between the actions of your fingers, the transmission of data through wireless and fiber optic networks, and the act of gambling? There are obvious parallels to offshore finance: registering a company offshore creates a legal fiction that confounds space. Cooper argues that offshore gambling has been an easier target for international actors than offshore finance because the former is not as "decoupled" from the "real" economy as the latter: it relies on local ancillary labor, media, and advertising in order to achieve the scale to make it profitable (p. 43). Internet gambling is a mass phenomenon; its market is not the high net worth individuals of offshore finance but the common man, sitting at his computer, bored, looking to play some online poker or off-track betting.
A brief summary of the plot of this morality play: American and Israeli entrepreneurs sought to locate Internet gambling operations offshore to avoid U.S. regulations. The initial players were Silicon Valley-inspired start-ups. U.S. legislators reacted along somewhat predictable lines, American self-appointed guardians of morality wanting to stamp it out and progressive civil libertarians adopting a laissez-faire attitude. Other right-wing conservatives, staunch states' rights advocates (latter day Confederates) who are against federal power and taxation allied with the progressives--as they would later in light of efforts to curtail offshore finance. Still, the stigmatizers carried the day, tarring offshore gambling with the brush usually wielded by citizens' groups and NGOs that seek to shame bad corporate and state actors. This is an important point, as it problematizes IR theory about shaming in international politics (p. 64). Antigua's response was to activate the WTO. The normal international order of things was inverted, for often multilateral organizations serve the interests of their larger, more powerful members. The government of Antigua was able to operate quite effectively as a sovereign on the world stage despite the political perversities of the Bird administration. Cooper attributes this to a "resilience" (p. 65) borne of private-public partnerships between the government and several key individuals. The story appears at times to be one of "Antigua without Antiguans" (p. 67),
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but the centrality of Sir Ronald Sanders, former High Commissioner for Antigua, and the country's history in international affairs as a staunch advocate for democracy (ironically, given politics at home [p. 71]) tempers that assessment. Antigua had an "agility of purpose" on the international stage (p. 71), while its traditional allies, the United Kingdom and the European Union, chose not to come to its aid.
The win at the WTO was a hollow one, however: multilateral organizations operate through soft law rather than actual sanction. After its loss, the United States pursued offshore gambling unilaterally, arresting key figures and adopting an enforcement regime that gradually eroded the industry by blocking Internet advertising. The effort culminated, in 2006, with legislative prohibition.
Regardless, this is not the usual "script of an asymmetrical struggle" between a superpower and a small state (p. 168). There was no decisive victory for anyone here: Antigua could claim vindication from the WTO and a significant projection of its sovereignty globally--remarkable, for Jamaica Kincaid's "small place" of only 70,000 people--yet not without the bitterness of its own internal disharmony. The United States could claim victory over vice, but it almost offered compensation and development aid--an implicit gesture of reparation--and was forced to negotiate (p. 166). Despite the Antigua/U.S. row, there has not been "a fundamental transformation in the United States about the legitimization of [Internet gambling]" (p. 148). Whether the same can be said about the legitimation of finance itself is another matter.
Cooper leans heavily on the late Susan Strange's appropriation of Keynes's "casino" metaphor (1986). For Keynes, speculation is not necessarily bad; but "when enterprise becomes the bubble on a whirlpool of speculation" and "the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done" (1965:159). Cooper literalizes the metaphor, through a trenchant analysis of the economics, politics, and personalities of one Caribbean country's attempt to establish itself as a global power in a technologically innovative economic niche. The Internet brought gambling directly into the home; those self-same homes were about to become the star players in a gigantic morality tale about casino capitalism.
DOI: 10.1163/22134360-12340028
Bill Maurer
Department of Anthropology, University of California, Irvine
Irvine CA 92697, U.S.A.
wmmaurer@uci.edu
References
Keynes, John Maynard, 1965. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. London: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Strange, Susan, 1986. Casino Capitalism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Maurer, Bill
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Maurer, Bill. "Internet Gambling Offshore: Caribbean Struggles over Casino Capitalism." New West Indian Guide, vol.
87, no. 1-2, 2013, p. 186+. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA346627726&it=r&asid=ccd2bcc1e3b40901041c0a04bf111a16. Accessed 1 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A346627726
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Colonizing Hawai'i: The Cultural Power of Law
Bill Maurer
Law & Society Review.
38.4 (Dec. 2004): p843-849. From Book Review Index Plus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Maurer, Bill. "Colonizing Hawai'i: The Cultural Power of Law." Law & Society Review, Dec. 2004, pp. 843-849.
PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA127628192&it=r&asid=00b4712c4c41bb87bc65600a5af3e600. Accessed 1 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A127628192
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Pious Property: Islamic Mortgages in the United States
Roderic Vassie
Journal of American Studies.
41.3 (Dec. 2007): p701. From Book Review Index Plus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Vassie, Roderic. "Pious Property: Islamic Mortgages in the United States." Journal of American Studies, vol. 41, no. 3,
2007, p. 701+. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA175706654&it=r&asid=08617ff25718cefebf76396f22b271d3. Accessed 1 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A175706654
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Accelerating Possession: Global Futures of Property and Personhood
Clare Talwalker
PoLAR: The Political and Legal Anthropology Review. 32.1 (May 2009): p152-155. From Book Review Index Plus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Talwalker, Clare. "Accelerating Possession: Global Futures of Property and Personhood." PoLAR: The Political and
Legal Anthropology Review, May 2009, pp. 152-155. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA210496660&it=r&asid=b77ac129498c4f506caa6eab1102c286. Accessed 1 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A210496660

QUOTED: "Bill Maurer attempts to make an abstract, complex, potentially dry subject into one that can be read and understood by nonspecialists. He has provided an in-depth, germinal study that should increase interest in both Muslims in the United States and alternative financing."
"Maurer's book provides a welcome addition and a benchmark for future research."

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Pious Property: Islamic Mortgages in the United States
Aisha Sobh
Journal of American Ethnic History.
26.3 (Spring 2007): p117. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2007 University of Illinois Press http://www.iehs.org/journal.html
Full Text:
Pious Property: Islamic Mortgages in the United States. By Bill Maurer. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006. xi + 123 pp. Tables, graphs, glossary, notes, bibliography, and index. $24.95 (cloth).
To comply with Sharia law, Islamic mortgages provide an interest-free means for Muslims to purchase homes. Bill Maurer attempts to make an abstract, complex, potentially dry subject into one that can be read and understood by nonspecialists. He has provided an in-depth, germinal study that should increase interest in both Muslims in the United States and alternative financing. Maurer's argument is that, "Islamic mortgages in the United States provide a window into an ongoing transformation in Muslim American understanding of Islamic law and that this transformation has been spurred as much by American government and bureaucracy as by shari'a scholarship or traditional religious interpretation" (p. 2). He does not attempt to decide what constitutes the best financing schema, nor does he provide the authoritative interpretation of Islamic finance. An important intervention is Maurer's discussion of legal and scholarly authority among American Muslims.
Maurer, an anthropologist, became interested in the use of the Islamic mortgage as illustrative of Islamic ideas about financial activities. He conducted his fieldwork between 2002 and 2004 in southern California among Muslim Americans interested in Islamic financing (particularly housing), via email, telephone, and interviews. His archives included stories in the mass media, legal documents, religious and regulatory rulings, and the opinions of prominent individuals in the field. Maurer also examined the applicant pools from two prominent Islamic home financing companies. The author wants this book to "set a baseline against which future data on this emerging field can be compared" (p. 4). In addition to both quantitative and qualitative work, he makes successful theoretical assertions illustrating how economic fields are embedded within larger social systems. His praxis uses anthropology as a successful lens of social analysis. Illustrations are well placed and enhance his quantitative work.
A few criticisms: the Arabic glossary is somewhat misleading. Maurer discounts the significance of early failed attempts of Islamic home buying, usually sponsored by a community or Islamic organization. However, I would argue that these attempts were important for creating the desire for Islamic-based mortgages and future institutionalized alternatives.
Maurer sees a paradox where progressive Muslims tend to use Islamic financial programs that seem to comply more rigorously with the prohibition against interest, while traditional Muslims assume mortgages that look more like the American interest-based type (including anonymity and standardized forms), yet terms like "progressive" and "traditional" are ill-defined. I would also caution that southern California may be oriented more towards particular sub- groups within the American Muslim population, perhaps predominantly Indo-Pakistani in origin. Thus ethnic differences are elided in favor of an American Muslim identity. Additionally, Muslims who have taken out traditional mortgages believing they have complied with Islam (predominantly Arab-Americans), are glossed over.
Maurer notes that appearances play an important part in how these Islamic financing companies are perceived. Companies using both American and Islamic legalese (with the accompanying forms, stamps, and signatures of experts and scholars) and that have a polished appearance will be successful in attracting Muslims, who equate this with being more halal (Islamically allowed). Maurer attributes the professionalization of Islamic financing to the development of
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the regulation of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) (which recognizes lease purchase and cost-plus contracts as under the purview of banks' mortgage powers), the Dow Jones Islamic market indexes tracking Islamic- compliant portfolios, and the entrance of the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac) and the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae). Maurer believes the increased desire for Islamic home purchasing is due to the renewed sense of Muslim identity after 9/11, the fall of the stock market, and historically low interest rates (p. 98). I would add that the entrance of Muslims into American financial fields also contributed to this development and reemphasize the historic notion of home ownership as symbolic of attaining an accepted American identity similar to obtaining citizenship. Maurer's book provides a welcome addition and a benchmark for future research.
Aisha Sobh
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Sobh, Aisha
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Sobh, Aisha. "Pious Property: Islamic Mortgages in the United States." Journal of American Ethnic History, vol. 26,
no. 3, 2007, p. 117+. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA413170574&it=r&asid=ecc37c70fa92ca34bb03eb11673e2b78. Accessed 1 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A413170574
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Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason
Erik Larson
Law & Society Review.
40.4 (Dec. 2006): p976-978. From Book Review Index Plus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Larson, Erik. "Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason." Law & Society Review,
Dec. 2006, pp. 976-978. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA157835476&it=r&asid=31438a69b9b0961730337ae103579b34. Accessed 1 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A157835476
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Pious Property: Islamic Mortgages in the United States
Contemporary Sociology.
35.6 (Nov. 2006): p640. From Book Review Index Plus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Pious Property: Islamic Mortgages in the United States." Contemporary Sociology, vol. 35, no. 6, 2006, p. 640+.
PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA157932308&it=r&asid=ce005d53ac64db862bbd4018ce930e34 Accessed 1 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A157932308
.

QUOTED: "The book is so heavy on theory, abstraction, and specialized terminology, that it is difficult to recommend it to non- specialized readers or to readers with passing interest in its subject matter. It is, however, quite possibly the best study ... on the topic and, to those involved in banking, currencies, and anthropological facets of economies, should prove of unquestionable value."

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Mutual Life Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Curriences, Lateral Reason
Haidar Moukdad
Digest of Middle East Studies.
15.1 (Spring 2006): p106. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2006 Policy Studies Organization https://pantherfile.uwm.edu/aman/www/DOMES/
Full Text:
Mutual Life Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Curriences, Lateral Reaso n Bill Maurer
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005.
217p. $55.00. ISBN:0691121974. Pbk: $19.95. ISBN:0691121966.
Islamic banking and alternative currencies might sound like tedious and abstract subjects to non-specialist readers with casual interests in different aspects of Islamic societies and monetary systems. However, the book in hand offers a fascinating study of these subjects that makes the chapters read like an intriguing and well crafted mix of anthropological, ethnographical, philosophical, and sociological essays. Maurer begins his study with a detailed narration of how he had become interested in the topic of Islamic banking; and ends it with philosophical analyses and a clever restaging of others' writings on commodities, ethics, and language. In between, we are treated to in-depth surveys and documentations of Islamic banking and alternative currencies; of the role of Islamic jurisprudence in shaping Islamic economics; of comparing an experimental American alternative currency system and Islamic banking; of Islamic mutual funds; and of a case study conducted in Indonesia on gold coins and Islamic insurance.
Attempting to define the concepts of Islamic banking and alternative currencies is not an easy task. Maurer approaches the definition issue with a philosophical method of investigation, and argues that people involved in Islamic banking and alternative currencies should be familiar with the picture he painted for these two concepts. His argument leads the way to an almost metaphysical reflection on alternative economies as results of constant modifications and alterations of banking systems. Then, he moves on to tackle the issues of law and religious beliefs, drawing, on the legal front, on an example from the United States, namely Ithaca HOURS, a local currency system developed in Ithaca, N.Y. to promote local economic strength and community self-reliance. Maurer asks the question if Ithaca HOURS and Islamic banking have anything in common, and analyses the jurisprudential practices of Islamic economies and Islamic banking. He also tries to address the charges and claims that alternative currencies and Islamic banking are void of meaning and do not represent the realities of global economies.
Maurer's treatment of the topic of Islamic mutual funds system is captivating to say the least. He manages to mix the religious characteristics of this system with a comparative look at the farmers' market transactions in Ithaca HOURS, going into abstractedly detailed descriptions of currencies and the nature of commercial and financial exchanges. To Maurer, the exchange of money to complete transaction is by itself the underlying cause of the unavoidable problem of abstraction: substituting the value of a commodity or a necessity of life with the value of abstract paper or metal.
Perhaps the most down-to-earth treatment of the subject matter in Maurer's book is the devotion of two chapters to a case study placed in Indonesia; he covers by example abstract concepts treated in previous chapters, focusing on alternative currencies in the form of gold coins and on Islamic insurance and cooperative societies. The gold coins have been used by devout Muslims in Indonesia to save for the compulsory pilgrimage; the business of Islamic insurance and cooperative societies in Indonesia is complex and presents challenges even to the most experienced of financial
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analysts and economists. Maurer uses many illustrative examples and situations to provide the reader with a clear picture of his observations on Indonesia and his understanding of the complexities underlying its banking and currency systems.
The book is so heavy on theory, abstraction, and specialized terminology, that it is difficult to recommend it to non- specialized readers or to readers with passing interest in its subject matter. It is, however, quite possibly the best study in the English language on the topic and, to those involved in banking, currencies, and anthropological facets of economies, should prove of unquestionable value.
Review by
Haidar Moukdad, Ph.D. Dalhousie University Moukdad, Haidar
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Moukdad, Haidar. "Mutual Life Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Curriences, Lateral Reason." Digest of Middle
East Studies, vol. 15, no. 1, 2006, p. 106+. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA240488206&it=r&asid=6ec89c599605c7e6d6c856e2897133c6. Accessed 1 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A240488206
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Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason
Brooke Harrington
The American Journal of Sociology.
111.5 (Mar. 2006): p1606. From Book Review Index Plus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Harrington, Brooke. "Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason." The American
Journal of Sociology, vol. 111, no. 5, 2006, p. 1606+. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA146971137&it=r&asid=bee6ac9eaafd9bd099045742d0c27f97. Accessed 1 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A146971137

QUOTED: "While the book brings a different and extremely important theoretical perspective to Caribbean studies, it is somewhat lacking in ethnography."
"The book does make a worthwhile contribution to the literature, but it also makes for dry reading."

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Recharting the Caribbean: Land, Law and Citizenship in the British Virgin Islands
Francis Henry
International Migration Review.
33.1 (Spring 1999): p212. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 1999 Center for Migration Studies of New York, Inc. http://www.cmsny.org/
Full Text:
By Bill Maurer. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. 1997. Pp. 299. FRANCIS HENRY York University
One of the aims of this book is to challenge the scholarship of the Caribbean and to present a different analysis of the "Caribbean experience." Maurer notes that earlier research concentrated on social structure, household, family and kinship whereas much of the present scholarship sees the Caribbean as a microcosm of a changing world order which emphasizes hybridity, globalization and the movement of people and commodities across national borders. The present work, however, concentrates on the role of the state and how law, land and citizenship are used to construct a particular social order.
The social hierarchy in this territory is such that half the population do not belong and are denied the rights of citizenship. This is a result of the exclusionary politics of small states and their response to free trade initiatives which encourage the movement of money at the expense of the well-being of people. Nationalist and anti-immigrant sentiments are used to excuse the exploitation and criminalization of migrants whose labor is necessary to maintain the system. This is the true Caribbean experience as defined by the author who is somewhat dismissive of the importance of studies which emphasize the globalization and transnational aspect of the Caribbean experience.
Maurer examines inequalities and hierarchy in this island society, still a dependent territory of the United Kingdom, and discusses, somewhat briefly the importance of what he calls "nature" and "choice" in determining the quality of life. BVI society differs from much of the Caribbean because of its dependent political status as well as its emphasis on tourism and offshore financial services. In earlier times, there was substantial outmigration of its people to the United States and the Dominican Republic. The increasing centralization of the state and its apparatus helped in shaping the identity of BVIslanders as "belongers" separate from nonbelongers or immigrants who came to service the rapidly growing tourist industry. Immigrants, primarily from the Dominican Republic and Guyana, are characterized as self- serving and clannish, and there is a strong anti-immigrant sentiment in the country.
The author conducted fieldwork on the island of Tortola and conducted short trips to other islands during the early 1990s. While the book brings a different and extremely important theoretical perspective to Caribbean studies, it is somewhat lacking in ethnography. Perhaps because it is written as an abstract analytic work, one misses the voice of the people. While Maurer uses quotes, they are often short and nondescriptive, and even in the chapter on family, his cases are already abstracted summaries of events and experiences. The book does make a worthwhile contribution to the literature, but it also makes for dry reading.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Henry, Francis. "Recharting the Caribbean: Land, Law and Citizenship in the British Virgin Islands." International
Migration Review, vol. 33, no. 1, 1999, p. 212. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA54482435&it=r&asid=53730a32125b2be965ca4ceb54b37494. Accessed 1 Mar. 2017.
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Gale Document Number: GALE|A54482435

QUOTED: "This book is a welcome addition to the growing anthropological literature on the significance of the Caribbean in global context."

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Recharting the Caribbean: land, law, and citizenship in the British Virgin Islands
Jean Besson
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. 5.3 (Sept. 9, 1999): p506. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 1999 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. http:/www.therai.org.uk/pubs/jrai/jrai.html
Full Text:
MAURER, BILL. xviii, 301 pp., illus., maps, bibliogr. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1997. $44.50
This book is a welcome addition to the growing anthropological literature on the significance of the Caribbean in global context. Through a case study of the British Virgin Islands (BVI) Bill Maurer engages with the challenge set by James Clifford and others - in terms of the Caribbean experience of creolization or the reinvention of traditions - to Claude Levi-Strauss's vision in Tristes tropiques (trans. John Russell, New York: Criterion Books, 1961) of an invincible monoculture embracing the entire world since the second world war (p. 10). While Maurer sympathizes with the view that the Caribbean may be seen as a microcosm of the contemporary world, he posits an urgent need to rechart the Caribbean experience in four main areas of anthropological debate (pp. 12-16). First, while agreeing that reformulation of identities among West Indian immigrant communities in North America and Britain may be seen as reflecting post-modern processes, Maurer questions romanticization of this experience in terms of mixing and hybridization (p. 13); for (drawing on the work of Marilyn Strathern and Verena Stolcke) such notions of 'nature' may also generate new cultural rhetorics of exclusion. Such has been the case in the BVI, a colonial territory which became a self-governing Colony in 1956 after the dissolution of the wider Leeward Island Colony governed from Antigua, where new categories of nationals and foreigners have been created out of former British subjects since the 1981 British Nationality Act.
Maurer's second aim is to rechart Caribbean Studies - with its emphasis on either social structure, household and family or African retentions and culture change - by turning attention to the role of the state and law in shaping family or in changing cultures, and thereby to highlight the problematics of colonialism, colonial discourse and national identity in state contexts (p. 13). Throughout the book Maurer explores the paradox of the BVI as a self-governing territory with its own laws and legislature, symbolizing its nation-statehood, and its colonial relationship with Britain whose common law is the foundation of BVI law-and-order society. This stability provides the basis for tourist development and global financial offshore services. Third, by focusing on BVI exclusion of immigrants (in a context where race-class hierarchies are supposedly diminishing) Maurer identifies the potential of liberal law, based on equality, for generating hierarchical inequalities of race, class and gender in other New World societies. Fourth, the book aims to show by exploring the legal reformulation of the natures of land, kinship, race, place and nation in the BVI, how liberal state law may constitute new kinds of persons and identities (p. 16).
Maurer concludes that not only does globalization foster BVI national identity, but also BVI national law-writing has entrenched colonial rule and reinforced the world economy by creating a major tax haven for global finance markets. He argues that BVI discourses do not challenge the system of dominance for both BV Islanders and immigrants (from elsewhere in the Caribbean) stress liberal individualism. 'Choice' is perceived to work through creolizing 'articulatory practices', which 'produce momentary stabilizations of and sources for identity' such as '"ethnic" stereotypes; "races" and communities bound to "places"; "families" and "genealogies"; "land" and "country"; "classes" and "parties"; "states" and "societies"; "individuals" who owe nothing to society; and "nations", (p. 264). For Maurer, 'The "Caribbeanization of the world" narrative is itself one such transition narrative, one that stabilizes "the Caribbean" and "the world" just at a moment when offshore finance (among other things) makes that separation more a fiction than ever' (p. 264). In this way, the Caribbean may provide paradigms for recharting postmodern identities.
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In chapter 6, 'Making family, making genealogy: one hundred years of family land', Maurer addresses the family-land literature to elaborate his thesis. Drawing on my own argument that Caribbean family land is a creole institution rooted in unrestricted cognatic descent (which maximizes scarce land rights and formerly forbidden kinship lines among descendants of chattel slaves), rather than in restrictive colonial codes or in African restricted unilineal retentions, he further highlights the role of family land in creating Caribbean identities. However, he sees his analysis as shifting ground in the so-called 'family-land debate', which includes the questions of whether family land is an 'institution' and whether the landholding kin groups are restricted. Substituting 'phenomenon' for 'institution', Maurer argues that BVI (and Barbadian) descent groups are restricted; stresses the centrality of law in creating Caribbean identities; and highlights the link between British common law and Caribbean 'custom'. He also asserts that my analysis of unrestricted descent depends 'on a weak notion of "family"', while Charles Carnegie stresses ambiguous 'genealogy'; contends that neither view explains how Caribbean people think about family land (p. 203); and concludes that the '[T]he family/genealogy distinction maps almost too neatly onto the so-called plural society debate' (p. 204).
However, both Carnegie and I advanced 'intersystem' analyses of 'law' and 'custom' in contrast to M.G. Smith's plural society approach. I have also argued (1974) that, even at a conceptual level, custom and law in Jamaica are not as separate as Edith Clarke and M.G. Smith contended, for Jamaica's legal system not only differs from but also draws on English common law in certain ways. In addition, I have shown that since the days of slavery, family land has overturned British West Indian primogeniture and is shaping the writing of Commonwealth Caribbean law through such culture-building. Indeed, Maurer might himself have taken more account of the articulation of law and custom by exploring the institution-building rooted in the slavery past and its contribution to Caribbean perceptions of family land; and had he followed through the culture-building thesis beyond 1988 it would have been difficult to overlook my portrayal of the strength of Caribbean kinship (genealogy and family). Moreover, Maurer's attempt to establish restriction focuses on affinity (pp. 198, 201) rather than on descent; while his own delineation elsewhere of BVI land tenure richly portrays a British West Indian landholding system recharted through creolizing unrestricted cognatic descent (Bill Maurer: 'The land, the law and legitimate children: thinking through gender, kinship and nation in the British Virgin Islands'. In Gender, kinship, power (eds) M.J. Maynes et al. Routledge, 1996, pp. 353-54).
JEAN BESSON
Goldsmith College, University of London
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Besson, Jean. "Recharting the Caribbean: land, law, and citizenship in the British Virgin Islands." Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute, vol. 5, no. 3, 1999, p. 506. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA57050214&it=r&asid=081313e28e86a37a6e17610e42155c3c. Accessed 1 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A57050214
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Recharting the Caribbean: Land, Law and Citizenship in the British Virgin Islands
Donald Robotham
American Ethnologist.
27.2 (May 2000): p511. From Book Review Index Plus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Robotham, Donald. "Recharting the Caribbean: Land, Law and Citizenship in the British Virgin Islands." American
Ethnologist, vol. 27, no. 2, 2000, p. 511+. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA64981745&it=r&asid=ee6bf6060778094a47f143fe8068d1b9. Accessed 1 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A64981745
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Recharting the Caribbean: Land, Law, and Citizenship in the British Virgin Islands
Eve Darian-Smith
Law & Society Review.
34.3 (Oct. 2000): p809-828. From Book Review Index Plus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Darian-Smith, Eve. "Recharting the Caribbean: Land, Law, and Citizenship in the British Virgin Islands." Law &
Society Review, Oct. 2000, pp. 809-828. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA70029129&it=r&asid=7af683fedaedae1b9629acabf393ee69. Accessed 1 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A70029129
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Recharting the Caribbean: Land, Law, and Citizenship in the British Virgin Islands
Karen Judd
American Anthropologist.
100.2 (June 1998): p544. From Book Review Index Plus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Judd, Karen. "Recharting the Caribbean: Land, Law, and Citizenship in the British Virgin Islands." American
Anthropologist, vol. 100, no. 2, 1998, p. 544+. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA20997246&it=r&asid=8dcc854f5692e4a325f9eb5d5f58795d. Accessed 1 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A20997246
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Recharting the Caribbean
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 35 (Jan. 1998): p880. From Book Review Index Plus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Recharting the Caribbean." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Jan. 1998, p. 880. PowerSearch,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA34673047&it=r&asid=1776ff30f8bee5c713a33a8894a21560. Accessed 1 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A34673047
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Sanderson, A.R. "Maurer, Bill. How would you like to pay?: how technology is changing the future of money." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Apr. 2016, p. 1208. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA449661715&it=r. Accessed 1 Mar. 2017. Maurer, Bill. "Internet Gambling Offshore: Caribbean Struggles over Casino Capitalism." New West Indian Guide, vol. 87, no. 1-2, 2013, p. 186+. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA346627726&it=r. Accessed 1 Mar. 2017. Maurer, Bill. "Colonizing Hawai'i: The Cultural Power of Law." Law & Society Review, Dec. 2004, pp. 843-849. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA127628192&it=r. Accessed 1 Mar. 2017. Vassie, Roderic. "Pious Property: Islamic Mortgages in the United States." Journal of American Studies, vol. 41, no. 3, 2007, p. 701+. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA175706654&it=r. Accessed 1 Mar. 2017. Talwalker, Clare. "Accelerating Possession: Global Futures of Property and Personhood." PoLAR: The Political and Legal Anthropology Review, May 2009, pp. 152-155. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA210496660&it=r. Accessed 1 Mar. 2017. Sobh, Aisha. "Pious Property: Islamic Mortgages in the United States." Journal of American Ethnic History, vol. 26, no. 3, 2007, p. 117+. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA413170574&it=r. Accessed 1 Mar. 2017. Larson, Erik. "Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason." Law & Society Review, Dec. 2006, pp. 976-978. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA157835476&it=r. Accessed 1 Mar. 2017. "Pious Property: Islamic Mortgages in the United States." Contemporary Sociology, vol. 35, no. 6, 2006, p. 640+. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA157932308&it=r. Accessed 1 Mar. 2017. Moukdad, Haidar. "Mutual Life Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Curriences, Lateral Reason." Digest of Middle East Studies, vol. 15, no. 1, 2006, p. 106+. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA240488206&it=r. Accessed 1 Mar. 2017. Harrington, Brooke. "Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason." The American Journal of Sociology, vol. 111, no. 5, 2006, p. 1606+. PowerSearch, about:blank Page 1 of 2 3/1/17, 4:19 PM go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA146971137&it=r. Accessed 1 Mar. 2017. Henry, Francis. "Recharting the Caribbean: Land, Law and Citizenship in the British Virgin Islands." International Migration Review, vol. 33, no. 1, 1999, p. 212. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA54482435&it=r. Accessed 1 Mar. 2017. Besson, Jean. "Recharting the Caribbean: land, law, and citizenship in the British Virgin Islands." Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, vol. 5, no. 3, 1999, p. 506. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA57050214&it=r. Accessed 1 Mar. 2017. Robotham, Donald. "Recharting the Caribbean: Land, Law and Citizenship in the British Virgin Islands." American Ethnologist, vol. 27, no. 2, 2000, p. 511+. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA64981745&it=r. Accessed 1 Mar. 2017. Darian-Smith, Eve. "Recharting the Caribbean: Land, Law, and Citizenship in the British Virgin Islands." Law & Society Review, Oct. 2000, pp. 809-828. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA70029129&it=r. Accessed 1 Mar. 2017. Judd, Karen. "Recharting the Caribbean: Land, Law, and Citizenship in the British Virgin Islands." American Anthropologist, vol. 100, no. 2, 1998, p. 544+. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA20997246&it=r. Accessed 1 Mar. 2017. "Recharting the Caribbean." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Jan. 1998, p. 880. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA34673047&it=r. Accessed 1 Mar. 2017.

• Inside Higher Ed
  https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2015/11/25/review-bill-maurer-how-would-you-pay-how-technology-changing-future-money
  Word count: 1108

  QUOTED: "How Would You Like to Pay? is of interest less for what it says about the future (the author makes no predictions–which, given the Isis debacle, seems prudent) than for how it encourages the reader to pay attention to nuances of the present. It’s a primer of the anthropological imagination–and a reminder that money is too important a matter to leave to the economists."

  Beyond the Cash Nexus
  How Would You Like to Pay? explores the anthropology of the expanding new world of smartphone wallets and other forms of mobile payments, writes Scott McLemee.
  By Scott McLemee
  November 25, 2015
  1 COMMENT

  Five years ago this month, a consortium of major telecommunications carriers (AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon) announced that it was developing a new application that would enable customers to pay for goods and services using their smartphones. This “mobile wallet,” as such technology is commonly called now, would make credit card and debit account information available to merchants by wireless.
  Other enterprises, including banks and American Express, soon joined the partnership. The application seemed well positioned to enter the market for hyperconvenient consumerism, even to dominate it. But things did not work out that way. A demo during the plenary session of a major conference on new payment technologies in 2013 went badly. Consumers complained that the app’s “setup and payment processes were cumbersome and frustrating,” in the words of Chris Welch in The Verge. But those were minor scratches compared to the self-inflicted fatality of the app’s name: Isis. It gets worse. A gift card with the words “serve ISIS” was circulating even after the product’s name was changed to Softcard in 2014.
  “Probably few consumers even knew of its existence until the media bump it received from its rebranding,” Bill Maurer notes in How Would You Like to Pay? How Technology Is Changing the Future of Money (Duke University Press). That bump was clearly not enough: Softcard shut down early this spring. At the same time, the range of mobile wallets on sale has only been increasing. The information technology research firm Gartner estimated the value of mobile payments for 2012 was $163 billion worldwide and anticipates it will reach $720 billion by 2017.
  “This is definitely an ecosystem in flux,” one business and technology columnist wrote last month, “partly because there are so many players offering so many different solutions -- and so many questions about compatibility and security.”
  “Ecosystem” seems an interesting choice of words, in this context. Maurer, an anthropologist who is also dean of the school of social sciences at the University of California at Irvine, also uses it -- but in a much thicker sense than as a synonym, more or less, for “market.” The smartphone wallet represents only one means of mobile payment, limited mainly to the world’s more prosperous sectors. It’s in the poorer countries of the global South that mobile payment (using phones with text-messaging capabilities and maybe a little built-in flashlight) looms as a much larger part of everyday life: an economic and social link between urban and rural areas.
  In Kenya, the M-Pesa mobile payment service launched in 2007, and within three years, more people were using it than had bank accounts. Over half of the country’s households had adopted it by 2011, and Maurer writes that M-Pesa “processed in that year more transactions within Kenya than Western Union had done globally.”
  The contrasting fortunes of Isis/Softcard and M-Pesa (where M stands for “mobile” and “pesa” is the Swahili word for money) are striking; how well each met the demands of the people using them obviously differed significantly. But Maurer’s interest runs deeper than the great disparities between the respective societies.
  We’re prone to think of money as a medium of exchange originally created to get around the vagaries of barter (e.g., it’s hard to make change for a goat) and also as a tool notoriously indifferent to how it’s used. With $10,000, you can furnish your apartment or hire a contract killer. Money itself, so understood, is both fungible and morally inert. And from that perspective of money, the recent technological innovations in how it can be transferred from one person or place to another are significant chiefly for whatever changes are made in speed, ease or degree of anonymity of the exchange.
  Maurer’s subtitle seems to promise speculation on how money will change, but his stress on the idea of payment (or, better, payment systems) has a decidedly retrospective component. In the abstract, the value of $10,000 in cash is the same as that of $10,000 in diamonds, bitcoins or traveler's checks. Each can be used as a form of money, for exchange.
  But in practice, different kinds of social infrastructure are involved in making the transaction feasible -- or even possible -- with considerable implications about the relationships among the people involved. I have not made the experiment, but I doubt you can buy furniture using diamonds, and paying a hit man with a money order seems like a bad idea.
  At some point, bitcoins might have the nearly universal acceptance that cash now does; both are fungible and, in principle, anonymous. But those qualities do not inhere in the paper or digital currency themselves: each is part of a payment system, without which it would be worthless. The same is true of credit cards, of course, or smartphones-turned-wallets.
  Money of whatever sort is an “index,” the author says, of “relationships of obligation, rank, clientage, social belonging or state sanction.” Furthermore, old payment systems don’t necessarily die off; more than one can be operating in a given society at the same time. Maurer describes the interesting and intricate ways long-distance charge cards have become integrated into African economies where cash and barter also have a place. Aware of the fantastically destructive effects of the last financial crisis, he is clearly concerned that the advantages of being integrated into the global economy could be wiped out in the long term, through no fault of the continent's mobile users themselves.
  In the end, How Would You Like to Pay? is of interest less for what it says about the future (the author makes no predictions -- which, given the Isis debacle, seems prudent) than for how it encourages the reader to pay attention to nuances of the present. It’s a primer of the anthropological imagination -- and a reminder that money is too important a matter to leave to the economists.
  Read more byScott McLemee

• The Independent Review
  http://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?a=1120
  Word count: 1511

  QUOTED: "Bill Maurer opens his book by saying that his aim is to “spur innovative thinking in anyone interested in the future of money” (p. 3). In this sense, his work should be judged as a success, if nothing else for his inspired tour through the latest innovations in money. For the anthropologist or aspiring tech entrepreneur, this alone makes it worth a read."
  "Whether you’re studying new payment systems like M-Pesa, PayPal, GCASH, and Apple Pay or new monies like Bitcoin or Ripple, the role that the regulatory environment plays in either stymying or promoting these innovative new technologies must come to the forefront of any discussion of the “future of money.” Here’s to hoping that Maurer’s book will inspire a new line of research in this promising area."

  Book Title: How Would You Like to Pay? How Technology is Changing the Future of Money
  Author: By Bill Maurer
  Published: Durham and London. Duke University Press, 2015.
  Price: $54.86 (Hardcover)
  $9.99 (Kindle)
  Pages: Pp. i, 176.
  Reviewer: Scott Burns
  Affiliation: George Mason University
  This book review appeared in the Spring 2016 issue of The Independent Review
  59 0 8 48
  As an anthropologist, Bill Maurer has spent the past two decades researching the cultural and social dynamics of money. In his latest book, he manages to condense his life’s research into one gripping, bite-sized read that is accessible to a diverse range of readers from the artist and software programmer to the financial regulator or economist.

  The key questions that Maurer addresses are fairly straightforward: what is money, and how has technology changed the way we use it and the meanings we ascribe to it? The questions might not be wholly original. But in today’s continually changing technological landscape, he argues that thinking about money in new ways is absolutely essential (p. 7).

  Most of us are so immersed in monetary economies that it becomes easy to lose sight of just how radically the way we use and conceive of money has evolved over time and across continents. One of the best aspects of Maurer’s work, then, is the vivid imagery that he scatters throughout the book depicting the marvel of our wonderfully advanced money and payment ecology. Much of this landscape has been drastically altered in recent years by technological innovations in money. Yet as Maurer is always quick to point out, “Money is not just a technology. It is an extension of relationships, between ourselves and others, our pasts and futures, our world, and the worlds we can imagine” (p. 143). That is, money is fundamentally a social phenomena.

  This emphasis on the social context of money is important. As Maurer observes, “People rarely see the interpersonal relationships and regulatory infrastructures underlying their money” (p. 79). The job of the economist (and monetary anthropologist), therefore, is to bring these hidden social relationships and political infrastructures into sharp focus.

  At times, Maurer succeeds in highlighting the critical factors that support our diverse “monetary repertoires.” In the introduction, for instance, he notes that we should not assume that successful mobile payment services like M-Pesa or crypto-currencies like Bitcoin are the inevitable next step in the evolution of money. To do so, he argues, would be to “...overlook the persistence of millennia-old traditions and institutions” that created the socio-political landscape that enabled these new technologies to arise (p. 6). As he aptly summarizes: “Those traditions and institutions matter.”

  Unfortunately, the rest of Maurer’s analysis tends to downplay the fundamental role that these institutions (both formal and informal) play in setting the stage for technological revolutions in money. It is true, as Maurer (p. 37-49) extensively documents, that money was not created in a vacuum; it is a social convention. But what is most important—and what Maurer does not emphasize enough—is that successful monies and payment systems can only arise under “rules of the game” that protect property, contract, and the rule of law. (See, for instance, Lawrence H. White. The Theory of Monetary Institutions. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1999, pp. 1–18 and Steven Horwitz. “Do We Need a Distinct Monetary Constitution?” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 80 [2009]: 331–338).

  Carl Menger (“On the Origins of Money.” Economic Journal 2 [1892]: 239–55) explained more than a century ago how sound money emerges not through the top-down design of benevolent kings but spontaneously through what Adam Smith called the “truck, barter, and exchange” activity between individuals throughout the market economy. Today, there are hundreds of examples of successful money and payments systems that have evolved in precisely this “bottom-up” fashion. Although more sophisticated technologies like Bitcoin and Apply Pay have received the lion’s share of the media attention, the star player in Maurer’s account of how technology is changing the future of money—particularly in the developing world—remains the “simple feature phone” (p. 9), as evidenced by the “mobile money revolution” currently sweeping across Sub-Saharan Africa (see, for instance, Simon Batchelor. M-banking: An African Financial Revolution? Copenhagen: International Books, 2009; and Jenny C. Aker and Isaac M. Mbiti. “Mobile Phones and Economics Development in Africa.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 24 [Summer 2010], 207–232)). The most successful case thus far has been M-Pesa in Kenya. Launched in April 2007 by the nation’s largest mobile provider, Safaricom, M-Pesa allows Kenyans to cheaply send money anywhere in the country via a simple SIM-card application on their mobile phones. By 2011, M-Pesa had processed more transactions within Kenya than Western Union had done globally (p. 21). Today, Kenya is the world leader in mobile money, boasting more active accounts (26 million) than adults in its population.

  Numerous authors (including Maurer) have investigated the various socio-political reasons why the mobile money revolution has taken root in some countries and not others (see, for instance, Jake Kendall, Bill Maurer, Phillip Machoka, and Clara Veniard. “An Emerging Platform: From Money Transfer System to Mobile Money Ecosystem.” Innovations 6 [Fall 2011], 49–64). Maurer acknowledges (pp. 18–19) that one of the reasons that M-Pesa grew so rapidly was because it relied on existing behavior, existing infrastructure, and background technology—that is, it was fairly easy for Kenyans to adopt since most had cell phones that they used to send messages everyday. But this social emphasis only captures part of the picture.

  The core reason why M-Pesa has succeeded where so many others have failed is because Kenya has fostered a far more fertile political-legal environment that promoted commercial activity and financial innovation. Realizing the enormous benefits that M-Pesa might confer to the unbanked poor, Kenyan regulators worked directly with Safaricom and microfinance agencies to foster an “enabling” regulatory environment that encouraged rather than stifled experimentation (see, for instance, David Porteous. The Enabling Environment for Mobile Banking in Africa. London, DFID, 2008; and Nick Hughes and Susie Lonie. “M-Pesa: Mobile money for the ‘Unbanked’ Turning Cell Phones into 24-hour Tellers in Kenya.” Innovations 2 [Winter/Spring 2007]: pp. 63–81). They agreed, for instance, not to subject the thousands of “agent” branches that Safaricom had licensed across the country to the same rigorous “know your customer” requirements and capital and liquidity regulations as ordinary banks. They also encouraged commercial banks to develop M-Pesa-linked checking and savings accounts to reach poor, rural customers that had previously been beyond their reach.

  The result of this more “laissez-faire” approach to financial innovation has been an explosion in financial inclusion. According to the GSMA 2014 Mobile Money Deployment Tracker, the percentage of Kenyans with access to formal institutions (prudential or non-prudential), in general, rose from less than 25 percent in 2006 to more than 67 percent in 2013. The GSMA reports that mobile monies have been launched in nearly 300 countries across the globe serving more than 300 million customers, so its growth potential is enormous. Although mobile money represents only one frontier in the “future of money” in less-developed countries, the critical question that researchers like Maurer should be asking is: what can other countries learn from the successful launch of new money and payment technologies in Kenya, Tanzania and the Philippines?

  Bill Maurer opens his book by saying that his aim is to “spur innovative thinking in anyone interested in the future of money” (p. 3). In this sense, his work should be judged as a success, if nothing else for his inspired tour through the latest innovations in money. For the anthropologist or aspiring tech entrepreneur, this alone makes it worth a read. But there nevertheless remains a need for political economists to dig deeper into the fundamental question of what types of institutional rules and regulatory practices are most conducive to allowing these entrepreneurial innovations to take off. Whether you’re studying new payment systems like M-Pesa, PayPal, GCASH, and Apple Pay or new monies like Bitcoin or Ripple, the role that the regulatory environment plays in either stymying or promoting these innovative new technologies must come to the forefront of any discussion of the “future of money.” Here’s to hoping that Maurer’s book will inspire a new line of research in this promising area.

  SCOTT BURNS George Mason University

• Wired
  https://www.wired.com/beyond-the-beyond/2017/01/paid-tales-dongles-checks-money-stuff/
  Word count: 441

  QUOTED: "Paid’s authors describe these payment-adjacent objects so engagingly that for a moment, financial leftovers seem more interesting than finance."

  *I WROTE THE intro to this scholarly book on the subject of obsolete money technologies.

  https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/paid

  9780262035750.jpg

  Paid
  Tales of Dongles, Checks, and Other Money Stuff
  Edited by Bill Maurer and Lana Swartz
  Foreword by Bruce Sterling
  Overview

  Museums are full of the coins, notes, beads, shells, stones, and other objects people have exchanged for millennia. But what about the debris, the things that allow a transaction to take place and are left its wake? How would a museum go about curating our scrawls on electronic keypads, the receipts wadded in our wallets, that vast information infrastructure that runs the card networks? This book is a catalog for a museum exhibition that never happened. It offers a series of short essays, paired with striking images, on these often ephemeral, invisible, or unnoticed transactional objects—money stuff.

  Although we’ve been told for years that we’re heading toward total cashlessness, payment is increasingly dependent on things. Consider, for example, the dongle, a clever gizmo that processes card payments by turning information from a card’s magnetic stripe into audio information that can be read by a smart phone’s headphone jack. Or dogecoin, a meme of a smiling, bewildered dog’s interior monologue that fueled a virtual currency similar to Bitcoin. Or go further back and contemplate the paper currency printed with leaves by Benjamin Franklin to foil counterfeiters, or khipu, Incan records kept in knotted string.

  Paid’s authors describe these payment-adjacent objects so engagingly that for a moment, financial leftovers seem more interesting than finance. Paid encourages us to take a moment to look at the nuts and bolts of our everyday transactions by looking at the stuff that surrounds them.

  Contributors
  Bernardo Bátiz-Lazo, Maria Bezaitis, Finn Brunton, Lynn H. Gamble, David Graeber, Jane I. Guyer, Keith Hart, Sarah Jeong, Alexandra Lippman, Julien Mailland, Scott Mainwaring, Bill Maurer, Taylor C. Nelms, Rachel O’Dwyer, Michael Palm, Lisa Servon, David L. Stearns, Bruce Sterling, Lana Swartz, Whitney Anne Trettien, Gary Urton
  About the Editors

  Bill Maurer is Dean of the School of Social Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of How Would You Like to Pay: How Technology Is Changing the Future of Money and other books.

  Lana Swartz is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia.

• Kitlv
  http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/docserver/22134360/74/1-2/13822373_074_01-02_s06_text.pdf?expires=1488574598&id=id&accname=guest&checksum=36CAD61AB1929611980268BC26F41D1E
  Word count: 5396

  A. Khan
  Ecumen(ical) texts: Caribbean nation-states and the global ecumene
  In: New West Indian Guide/ Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 74 (2000), no: 1/2, Leiden, 107-118
  This PDF-file was downloaded from http://www.kitlv-journals.nl
  AISHA KHAN
  ECUMEN(ICAL) TEXTS: CARIBBEAN NATION-STATES AND THE GLOBAL ECUMENE
  The Haunting Past: Politics, Economics and Race in Caribbean Life. ALVIN O. THOMPSON. Kingston: Ian Randle, 1997. xvi + 283 pp. (Cloth US$ 70.95, Paper US$ 27.95)
  Nationalism and Identity: Culture and the Imagination in a Caribbean Diaspora. STEFANO HARNEY. Kingston: University of the West Indies; London: Zed Books, 1996. 216 pp. (Paper J$ 350.00, US$ 10.00, £6.00)
  Recharting the Caribbean: Land, Law, and Citizenship in the British Virgin Islands. BILL MAURER. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. xvii + 301 pp. (Cloth US$ 44.50)
  Building on views espoused by the American Enterprise Institute, colum- nist George Will solves the dilemma of unequal development among con- temporary nation-states in one fell swoop: Western Europe and North America outstripped Latin America and its environs, among other places, for one reason - culture.
  Much meaning must be unpacked from that word, but the conclusion is: The spread of democracy, free markets, technology, and information is not enough to rescue ... nations, from the consequences of their cul- tural deficits. Such deficits, although not incurable, are intractable. (Will 1999:64)
  Another "lesson to be drawn," he says, is that "Government cannot revise culture, wholesale, but government has - it cannot help but have - cultural consequences" (Will 1999:64). Even as we embark on the twenty-first cen- tury, we cling to hoary, Age of Imperialism presumptions about the charac- ter and role of culture - signaled implicitly with a capital C. Such pre- sumptions fuel statements like the above; governments convey material and
  108 New West Indian GuidelNieuwe West-Indische Gids vol. 74 no. 1 & 2 (2000)
  moral improvements but these do not take hold in culturally inadequate environments.
  Alvin Thompson, Stefano Harney, and Bill Maurer are concerned with unequal development in contemporary Caribbean nation-states, and, one might say, the relationship between culture and government, though from premises antithetical to Will's. They show that "government" - as state and nation — indeed has cultural consequences for what it administers, though not in terms of rehabilitation. Rather than viewing governing apparatuses as potentially rescuing people from themselves, these authors approach such apparatuses as the means of promoting ideologies and practices that, in local cultural realities, often do not foster positive environments of autono- my, equity, or creativity.
  Thompson offers a political science-inflected history of colonialism and its aftermath in the Caribbean region; Harney trains his lens of literary crit- icism on Trinidadian authors; Maurer is an anthropologist looking at law and statecraft in the British Virgin Islands. Each, then, has a distinct under- standing of "culture" and "nation," but each in his own fashion inquires into the nature of colonial and post-independence Caribbean states, the ideolo- gies of community that sustain them, and the relationship between these creations called nation-states and the populations they claim - at home and abroad. Alluding to the problem of positionality - material, ideological, and cultural place in the world - the books explore alternative ways of under- standing the Caribbean region. One is to re-situate the Caribbean within intellectual paradigms that can propel it into a central position out of the margins. Another is to rethink the role of "democracy, free markets, tech- nology, and information" (Will 1999:64) in shaping Caribbean culture and identity and the way these are meaningful to those who share and contest it.
  Writing as an insider, and writing, Thompson says, for Caribbean read- ers, the tone of The Haunting Past is didactic, an introductory survey that might be based on a series of university lectures. Covering an expansive ter- rain - Amerindians to Bob Marley; Bahamas to Brazil; British, Spanish, French, Dutch possessions - Thompson sees the central issue in Caribbean life lying in a conundrum: its troubled past, exposing ever more "haunting revelations" with each new disclosure (p. xiv), must be faced; the ghosts of history that continue to possess the region nonetheless require confrontation and exorcising. These ghosts comprise the "unholy trinity" (p. xv) of poli- tics, economics, and race which channel, if you will, the subjugation of the region's populations. Thompson's claim is that contemporary underdevelop- ment in Less Developed Countries is fostered by "external forces," read colonialism, whose foundations are entrenched and thereby keep "our past
  ... very much alive" (pp. 25-26). This living past reflects the nexus of colo- nialism and the problem of history in the Caribbean: Europe's civilizing mis- sion justified its exploitative agenda, and the shame of the colonized at their
  REVIEW ARTICLES 109
  alleged lack of heritage increases their vulnerability. The denial of history - in terms of both the ability to claim one's own and acknowledging unwill- ing participation in another's - has had, Thompson posits, a profound influ- ence on culture, psyche, and perception of self among Caribbean peoples.
  This most promising premise frames the chapters of the book, which are grouped into three sections: "Politics," "Economics," and "Race." The "haunt- ing past" as an organizing principle is most persuasive as a means of illus- trating the structural connections between past and present; less effective is its use in highlighting the symbolic connections of this legacy. For exam- ple, the systematic pollution of the region by developed countries is more forcefully critiqued in terms of the unfettered activities of foreign firms and World Bank policies than by means of metaphors like the attitude of "a for- mer era" when "human waste" was dumped in the Caribbean by "power- brokers in Europe" (p. 163). Thus, although the mechanisms of haunting are well illustrated in some chapters, others rely as much on asserting the tenac- ity of Euro-colonizer world-views. Beliefs and values certainly shape policy and practice but Thompson is not always specific as to how this might work.
  In this way, however, Thompson usefully raises key problematics in understanding the region. One concerns the Caribbean as locus of creativi- ty or degradation. Thompson is not alone in grappling with how we might celebrate creative resilience while emphasizing oppression, though reliance on V.S. Naipaul's (1974) caustic pessimism must spur his conviction that the legacy of disunity and dependency in Caribbean societies dulls its "spir- it of creativity and inventiveness" (p. 27). Another issue is how the past shapes consciousness and discourse — does creating a "more positive future" require "first and foremost" developing a "new sense of pride," which entails "a kind of revolutionary consciousness" (p. 246)? Does change lie ultimate- ly in mentality and perception? Finally, if so, from where will alternative visions emerge?
  The first section, "Politics," contains two chapters that overview the for- mation and deformation of political structures in the region, and the forms of violence on which colonialism has been predicated. Particularly useful is the summary of U.S. imperialism in the region. Some insights are made cursorily, however. For example, the apparent paradox that U.S. efforts to promote democracy in the Caribbean has at times strengthened despotic traditions there (p. 88) is an important point, raised yet not developed. Elaborating it would have been an opportunity for detailed cross examina- tion of democracy's dark side; not pursuing it renders the argument more polemic than analytical.
  Whether "true" democracy is actually possible is arguable; more to the point is how Thompson sees Caribbean societies striving toward it, given the contemporary global system within which they are exploited, and the ghosts of history that maintain them thus. One of the burdens of the colo-
  110 New West Indian GuidelNieuwe West-Indische Gids vol. 74 no. 1 & 2 (2000)
  nial era in the Caribbean is its fragmentation, being "the most balkanised place on earth" (p. 62). Thompson argues throughout the book that some form of integration is necessary to eliminate dependency and promote equal opportunities (p. 62 et passim), but unity has been thwarted by contradicto- ry impulses, like the wish to sustain North American or European hegemo- ny, cesessionist tendencies within the region, and the failure of federation. Thompson seems to imply that greater cooperation within the region will result in alleviating inequality within a nation-state. Linking macro with micro in this way is treated as a kind of domino effect, where the benefits of unity at the state level will somehow naturally reach local populations, spurring greater, and better, democracy.
  The section on "Economics" (three chapters) is the book's strongest. Caribbean economies are "small, fragile, open," reflecting the "sad legacies of colonialism" (p. 102). With the premise that since the "Columbian inva- sion" (p. 132) Caribbean production, distribution, and exchange have large- ly been in absentee or expatriate hands, Thompson makes a good case for the distortion of local economies over time, debunking familiar assump- tions about why the Caribbean is underdeveloped, such as allegedly limit- ed resources, size, and population density. However, the puzzle of how to characterize power relations arises. In his very good discussion of the crip- pling effect of extracting profit out of the Caribbean into Euro-colonial hands, the metaphor of maternal nurturing is inverted: "The infant [Caribbean], robbed, never came to adulthood in the true sense of the word, but remained a feeble, underdeveloped and dependent creature" (p. 136). This bleak image is powerful politics, but conjuring creativity, cultural or otherwise, from it remains a daunting task.
  The book's final section, "Race," contains two chapters on stereotypes and racial and color hierarchies. In a sub-section entitled, "The unacknowl- edged legacy," Thompson wishes to underscore the heroic and admirable "Africans and their miscegenated offspring" (p. 191) whom the Europeans encountered. He presents selected Africans "famous throughout Europe," whose "greatness has been affirmed in extant writing, painting and sculp- ture" (p. 191) - from Pope Victor I, to Hannibal, to Pushkin, to European royalty "infused with African blood" (p. 192). The dilemma is not whether to recuperate Western images of Africans but how to do so, whose standards to emulate? Thompson asserts that "through their system of brainwashing [Europeans] managed to get the oppressed to see life through their own dis- torted prism" (p. 206). Ultimately, then, a change in modes of thinking is nec- essary. Yet his own examples here arguably do not break free of that prism.
  Is there an absence of ruins? Has dependence and disunity stifled cre- ativity, or is creativity only allegedly stifled (a perception of inferiority also produced from dependence and disunity)? What comes through clearly is Thompson's genuine concern for the state of nation-states caught up in cur-
  REVIEW ARTICLES 111
  rents not of their own making nor in their own interests. The "most chal- lenging task ... is to divest our people of the colonial mentality, which is the most deep-rooted aspect of colonialism" (p. 248). Basically, he charges Caribbean masses to learn to think in a different way and unanimously agree upon an anti-colonial agenda, and to get more involved politically; and for Caribbean leadership to achieve political cooperation and — ideally - federation. The resolutions may be Utopian but his call for emancipatory change is well intended and generous, perhaps plaintive. They are, howev- er, also haunted by unrequited calls of a similar nature long made by colo- nized peoples. Avowing the structural constraints of the world-system and the contradictions within liberal democracies still begs the question of extrication: how much sovereignty - material, mental, or cultural - can exist, and who will articulate as much?
  In Nationalism and Identity, Stefano Harney locates this articulation within fictional texts. Contemporary theories of nationalism, Harney argues, contain "a certain Eurocentrism in their perspective" (p. 195), which overlook nationalism's affective (psychological, emotional, spiritu- al) dimensions. Instead, structures and official discourses (metadiscourses) tend to be the focus, which, in turn, overdetermine any analysis. Caribbean fiction has come to be included in a new literary criticism that collapses postcolonial discourse into a contrast between center and periphery in a '"world-systems theory' of literature" (p. 5), which Harney contends is tan- tamount to "neocolonial exploitation in postcolonial theory" (p. 5). What we are left with is only an inadequate understanding of the persistence of nationalism in the world. An antidote is the "writerly imagination" (p. 26) that is contained, for instance, in the novel, the dominant art form of post- independence Trinidad. This imagination enables exploring the discourse on nationalism from a more inclusive yet dynamic angle. Harney's aim is not to explore the nation-state through a historical or sociological analysis. Concepts like nationhood and peoplehood often do not lend themselves to "hard data and reasoned argument" (p. 2). Following Jacques Derrida, Harney sees literature as able to interrogate the nation, where structures like legislation and law are fictionalized, contingent phenomena whose reality is indeterminate. Trinidadian authors, by means of the cultural forms that constitute their palette, illuminate the tension between defining national identity in terms of a sovereign political whole and perceiving the nation as individuals creatively engaged in cultural practices ("habitus") that produce the "cultural consistencies" (p. 18) from which nationalism emerges.
  Beginning with C.L.R. James's observation that "the good life" consists of harmony between individual and state (p. 1), Harney argues that in being engaged with what the imagination has to offer, Trinidadian writers empha- size the vitality of Trinidad's "carnival of identity," and its ability to incor- porate the "vagaries of a global mediascape and technoscape" (p. 158).
  112 New West Indian GuidelNieuwe West-lndische Gids vol. 74 no. 1 &2 (2000)
  Harney's concern with imagination resonates with Arjun Appadurai's approach, where it is a social practice with the power to "move the glacial force of the habitus into the quickened beat of improvisation" (Appadurai 1996:6). But Harney's coupling of imagination and global cultural process- es is meant to underscore the importance of creative artists in the Third World as a kind of cosmopolitan social force in themselves, which departs from Appadurai's focus on the workings of imagination as a property of collectives and not simply emanating from gifted individuals (Appadurai 1996:8). The authors Harney features (Earl Lovelace, Michael Anthony, Valerie Belgrave, Willi Chen, Samuel Selvon, Neil Bissoondath, V.S. Naipaul, and C.L.R. James) imagine the nation - Trinidad - in ways that "make it visible to its people" (p. 25). In doing so, they challenge models of nationalism that unduly emphasize structure, counter literary criticism's Eurocentric interpretation of postcolonial texts, and assert the creative inventiveness of mass culture. Among Harney's most forceful deliberations are those on Selvon and Naipaul.
  Harney argues that Selvon's Moses trilogy (The Lonely Londoners, Moses Migrating, Moses Ascending) is a case for understanding the cre- olizing cultures of Caribbean immigrants as much more than simply an image of decay and loss through colonization. We need to see Caribbean immigrants in metropolitan societies, for example, in terms of equally matched, mutually affecting populations, not as debilitated shadow cul- tures. Selvon, Harney posits, is a corrective to literary criticism's idea that Caribbean culture is only developed when it meets British national culture. Instead, creolism constitutes an assertive act of self-realization, a "predato- ry creolization" that "devourfs] and transform [s] cultures local and alien" (pp. 114-15). In recognizing how "culturally closed" 1950s London was, for example, Selvon shows the active role Trinidadian (and other Caribbean) immigrants played in "transforming that parochialism into a cosmopolitan creolism" (p. 112).
  Harney's interest is not in problematizing the concept of creolization. He takes it as an abstract process expressed in empirical fact (basically, cul- ture contact), and inverts its symbolism to signify vitality, in terms of both vigor and centrality, as opposed to enervation - loss, or transformations that are weaker than what was transformed. Harney sees this way of under- standing creolization as possible if we recognize Selvon's treatment of cre- olization as a transforming power that is dynamic rather than progressive. That is, without implicit direction or purpose, creolization need not be a model of dilution and, ultimately, inferiority. How far can this artful claim take us toward his goal that Trinidadians (and presumably all colonized peoples) "arrive at a liberated imagination and a liberated nation" (p. 49)? Granted, freeing our minds so as to perceive the cultural relationship between colonized and colonizer as a "clash of stubborn equals" (p. 107) is
  REVIEW ARTICLES 113
  a critical step toward dismantling structural inequalities and the ideologies that sustain them. And repositioning Caribbean literature is clearly an important part of that project as long as culture is represented as art. Harney asserts that in the Caribbean, national culture has always been internation- al because its economy has always been so; hence, there is no way to take the global out of the local there (p. 164). Later, he concludes that the imag- ination is this study's concern and other studies must focus on the econom- ics of nationalism in the Caribbean and its diaspora (p. 195). Both state- ments speak to (though do not answer) the difficult question of the connec- tion between imagination and nation. Only if the economy, as its own dis- tinct kind of entity, is simply the vehicle of cultural diffusion, the de facto precondition for "creole" forms of identity, can it be the subject of a sepa- rate study, distinguished from a study of the imagination. Asking similar questions, though coming from a different premise, Alvin Thompson would likely take issue with this particular binary fracture.
  V.S. Naipaul represents something of a paradox in seeking alternative discourses of nationalism in literature. On the one hand, as Harney won- derfully phrases it, Naipaul "imagines the history of Trinidad as a psycho- logical absence in the mind of the nation" (p. 12). In a masterful recent essay, Naipaul exhibits Harney's characterization, albeit tempering a bit his usual pessimism with introspection:
  Unlike the metropolitan writer I had no knowledge of a past... the fic- tion one did, about one's immediate circumstances, hung in a void, without a context, without the larger self-knowledge that was always implied in a metropolitan novel. (Naipaul 1999:18)
  With Naipaul's premise it would be difficult to recover the nation where it, in a sense, does not, cannot, even exist. On the other hand, however, Harney discerns an opportunity to rehabilitate Naipaul's place in literature. In their enthusiasm to deride Naipaul's ridicule of the Third World, critics have pre- sented a distorted nationalist argument, where Utopian or conspiracy theo- ries smooth over ambiguities and ignore internal contradictions. So, if noth- ing else, Naipaul's work stands as a challenge to the assertions of unifor- mity among a people and the depictions of "inflexible" and "ambivalent" nationalism (p. 147). This line of reasoning seems a bit weak to me, since, essentially, Harney is shrugging, saying that what may be objectionable about Naipaul throws into relief the shortcomings of other, contrary views. This is not exactly effective persuasion to forgive. More compelling is Harney's point that in denigrating Naipaul's cosmopolitan (anti-local) per- spective, critics miss that they are by the same token denying the global, cosmopolitan character of Trinidad itself. It is as if to say, Naipaul's view is counterfeit because his country, and others like it, are in fact not subject
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  to worldly influence, are not actors in the grand arena, that the "real peo- ple's" national culture - of which Naipaul does not share — is somehow parochial. While hesitant to "paint Naipaul as a heroic figure" (p. 144), Harney probes the implicit assumptions underlying putatively progressive critiques of his work: there is an implicit denigration of allegedly provin- cial (backward) postcolonial nation-states when the only code for "cosmo- politan" is loyalty to the empire.
  Even as he decries metadiscourses of nationalism as obfuscating the ingenuity of local forms, Harney treats the individual, the state, and the nation as reified and distinct entities which draw on each other, rather than as mutually constitutive representations. Autonomy, however, permits greater empowerment for each entity, and fictional texts can celebrate the creative agency of the local. Indeed, Harney's final portrait is of C.L.R. James, whom he estimates to have "used history to level nationalism" (p.
  187). What Harney means here is a kind of encapsulation of the theme of his book. James highlighted ordinary genius, always linking great Caribbean figures to the turbulence from which they emerged. In doing so, James rein- troduced what was missing from Caribbean state nationalism: an interior, egalitarian history from the bottom up (p. 187). Therein lies an interesting paradox: perhaps it is only in fictional texts that individual, nation, and state are literally separate, and separable; that lived experience outside these works is a matter of representation - of individual, nation, and state as mutu- ally constitutive discourses rather than as distinct entities. Whether or not this is because the texts of real life are perhaps more uncertain than those of the printed page is moot: Harney doubtless would reject such a premise.
  Mutually constitutive discourses is the point of departure from which Bill Maurer is Recharting the Caribbean. Leaving us neither as Thompson did - dubiously hopeful - nor with Harney's optimistic redress, Maurer's focus is a debilitating contradiction in liberal democratic states: an ideology of equality and achievement through rational individuals' efforts remains com- pelling even as people live according to social hierarchies in their everyday lives. Using the British Virgin Islands (BVI), a dependent territory of the United Kingdom, as a case in point, he examines notions of law and order, nature and culture, and "objective reality" in liberal democracies, asking how it is reconciled that individuals are seen as self-determining and yet also as possessing inherent, "natural" abilities. Foregrounding the role of the state in Caribbean colonialism and national identity, Maurer's premise is that the liberal state is central in creating this determining nature, managing the conflicts among individuals whose roots lie in their putative natural dif- ferences, by means of such statecraft as law. Nature and law create each other, and produce the effects they name (p. 34). The strength of these insights is to point to the ways that concepts of nature and culture articulate within particular ideologies and thereby create or perpetuate various forms
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  of inequality. What gives one pause is that overreliance on phenomena being mutually constitutive can veer too closely to tautology.
  If nature and law are equally cultural, we must understand how things are "naturalized" without reproducing the idea of "nature." Juxtaposed with nature is its paradoxical flip side, "choice." Identities like nationality and ethnicity, for example, which are seen in the BVI as inheritable, can under certain conditions appear to be "matters of choice and preference, at the same time that their bases appear deeply embedded in 'nature'" (p. 34). "BVI" identity itself coalesced through such state practices as authoring laws claimed to be uniquely suited to its own special national character and citizenry of "belongers." Legislation like the International Business Companies Ordinance (1984) called attention to the BVFs ability to write its own destiny, in a sense, through crafting legislation that created the spe- cialized niche of tax haven for itself in the world economy (and, not coin- cidently, establishing a marketable profile). The development of the BVI as a tourist destination drew in immigrant workers, who reinforced BVI national identity in being "non-belongers" and who are also participants in a hierarchical social order that is organized according to purportedly natu- ral dictates orchestrated by individual choice.
  The BVI presents particularly fertile ground for this research because BVI identity is intimately tied to modern statecraft, given its anomalous character. It has a shorter history than many of its Caribbean neighbors, it has no plantation legacy, and its racial, ethnic, and class hierarchies are of relatively recent vintage (not being well established until the mid-twentieth century). In establishing itself as profitably and conspicuously as possible in an ever-globalizing, competitive world, the BVI demonstrates that rather than globalization stifling distinct national identities, it stimulates them. And contrary to the idea that globalization is making the state obsolete, the BVI is an example of the way the state works (e.g., through law) in concert with global trends. In this regard Maurer is particularly good at showing how apparently disparate phenomena are inextricably linked. For example, estab- lishing their own citizenship enabled BVIslanders to devise a tax system that could shelter new classes of foreigners from British tax laws. But tax havens must offer political stability. This stability was promised with the enactment of the British Nationality Act (1981), which, in denying citizenship (thus, voting) rights to half the territory's population, ensured that no voting blocks of disgruntled immigrants could be formed (p. 149). The Act equated Britishness with whiteness, and increased racial discourse in the BVI, man- ifested, in part, as distinctions between BVIslanders and Caribbean immi- grant non-belongers — even as neither of these groups is equated with white- ness. Racial discourse was also amplified as tax haven investors worried about "mixed marriages" (immigrant/citizen offspring) populations (p. 133) who, even if without voting rights, ostensibly jeopardize political stability.
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  Maurer makes the fascinating point that BVI identity becomes enraced through the children of immigrant and citizen union becoming designated "half breeds," another refraction of the Nationality Act. The law plays its part, too: non-citizens' inequality is not allayed by law; law in liberal democracies affirms it. (Note an interesting contrast between Harney's tri- umph of immigrants in fictional texts and Maurer's immigrant subordina- tion in legislative texts.)
  That its very existence as a particular kind of place is tied to legislative practices enables Maurer to devote each chapter to a different way that articulatory practices, or creolizing technologies, produce momentary sta- bilizations (reified entities) which become sources of identity in a world that always seems in flux. Maurer's theorizing, drawn from Bruno Latour, Marilyn Strathern, and Verena Stolke, among others, is based on a rethink- ing of the familiar Caribbean concept of creolization. Briefly, instead of being a blending of distinct things, creolization, Maurer states, is a process that produces the object that it attests to rather than being derived from it (p. 29). An important example of creolizing technologies in the BVI are what Maurer calls transition narratives, BVIslander discourse about immi- grants and the changes allegedly wrought by them. Transition narratives are teleological stories that recall a "natural" past whose unfolding has been made to deviate from its "'original' and 'true' course" (p. 21). Non- belonger workers are depicted as eroding law and order, spoiling nature, and introducing class disparities to a putatively homogeneous and equal BVI nation. Premised on inevitabilities, these narratives point to "real objects" that have "real effects" (p. 25), and thus it is necessary to see how realities derive, ultimately, from discourse. Employing Judith Butler's (1993) concept of reiteration, Maurer understands transition narratives (cre- olizing technologies, articulatory practices, discourses) as producing the objects that are the basis for their commentaries. Continuously repeated (reiterated) in everyday life, transition narratives materialize a supposedly stable reality of choices constrained by nature. Challenging the premise that there "really" is a reality underlying cultural constructions, Maurer follows Butler's lead in suggesting that cognitive categories are themselves ephemeral, emanating out of "citational practices" (creolizing technolo- gies). Effects, rather than enduring conditions, obtain.
  Both locals and immigrants live through the ideology of rational indi- viduals negotiating nature through choice. In asserting they are individuals and not members of groups, immigrants "share with BVIslanders a moral discourse of individual contribution" (p. 263), claiming similar natures and equality with BVIslanders. This helps maintain the status quo; they do not challenge the system that subordinates them because the system offers them a way to get their piece of the pie. Because they are ranked lower in the hierarchy than BVIslanders, immigrants by definition have "bad" natures,
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  but these "bad" natures can also explain the immigrants who do get ahead: they are the immoral means that let immigrants succeed at the expense of "good" BVIslanders. This dichotomy, however, seems a bit neat. The recognition that badness can be its own reward implies that there must be some degree of ambivalence on the part of BVIslanders and immigrants, a pressure on the conviction that goodness rises to the top. It is hard to imag- ine that BVIslanders have no grudging allowance for Indo-Guyanese immigrants' successes, for example, such as exists in the Trinidadian view of Indos in Trinidad.
  We need to hear more directly from immigrant non-belongers. I think Maurer is correct that for a change in consciousness to result in resistance, Guyanese immigrants would have to stop participating in the dominant dis- course of the moral world they share with BVIslanders, and where class would have to supersede the individual as point of reference (p. 121-2). But relegating these processes to discursive modes does not leave as much room for agency as would be necessary to consider how these changes might actually be enacted. Maurer asserts that "in no case is the overarch- ing system of dominance challenged" (p. 263). That there would be no fis- sures anywhere, no ambivalence, seems improbable. One way for emphases on discourse not to appear hermetically sealed would be to speak more about consciousness. Consciousness involves modes of knowing. As Jean and John Comaroff (1991:29) argue, between a continuum of hegemonic (submerged) and ideological (apprehended) knowledge and experience lies "the realm ... of inchoate awareness, of ambiguous perception, and some- times, of creative tension." We could use more of this in Maurer's otherwise penetrating argument.
  If reality is ever-created, then studying these processes seems to call for a focus on experience. We do not get a deep inspection of BVIslander expe- rience as Islanders know it, possibly because of extensive theorizing rela- tive to ethnographic data. Further, if things are only objectively "real" for people through their reiteration, then does the larger Caribbean "ordering system of inequality" (p. 206) that Maurer acknowledges, conjoin with any- thing more? Perhaps structural power, "the power to deploy and allocate social labor" (Wolf 1999:5)? This is not to fault Maurer, who deftly deploys his theoretical apparatus of choice. Rather, it is to reiterate, so to speak, that the mysteries of power remain unsolved.
  These books tell us much about different theoretical and methodologi- cal approaches to power. The authors arrive at a not entirely dissimilar place, however: power (as authoritative and transformative force) is signif- icantly, perhaps largely, expressed in the domain of ideation - whether it be mentality, imagination, or discourse. We remain haunted by our own intel- lectual questions, if also by historical legacies and socio-cultural processes. As Maurer, among others, correctly observes, that it is constructed does not
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  make lived experience any less concrete. W e need, therefore, to focus on meaning in lived experience in ways that engage both the "material" and the "materialized," the visceral with the ephemeral.
  While there is good reason to reject most claims of universal character- istics among human beings, perhaps one undeniable quality is our creativi- ty - that unpredictable and often contradictory energy that moves us to act on, and against, the constraints that are also of our own making. The still tenacious commonsense that interprets global issues like unequal develop- ment, nationalist stances, and (neo-)colonial exploitation in terms of "cul- tural deficits" (Will 1999:64), misses (or ignores) this dimension of human creativity. In contrast, Thompson, Harney, and Maurer engage it. Each goes a long way in demonstrating far more constructive ways to apprehend the Caribbean. Of course, one of the challenges remaining, for us all, is to lessen the divide between pervasive popular wisdom and often circum- scribed academic meditations.
  REFERENCES
  APPADURAI, ARJUN, 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
  BUTLER, JUDITH, 1993. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex." London: Routledge.
  COMAROFF, JEAN & JOHN COMAROFF, 1991. OfRevelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa. Vol. I. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  NAIPAUL, V.S., 1974. The Middle Passage: Impressions of Five Societies - British, French and Dutch - in the West Indies and South America. London: Andre Deutsch.
  —, 1999. Reading and Writing. New York Review ofBooks, February 18,pp. 13-18. WILL, GEORGE, 1999. The Primacy of Culture. Newsweek, January 18, p. 64.
  WOLF, ERIC R., 1999. Envisioning Power: Ideologies of Dominance and Crisis. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  AISHA KHAN
  Department of Africana Studies and Department of Anthropology State University of New York
  Stony Brook NY 11794-4340, U.S.A.

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