Mapping the intermediate: lived technologies of money and value

Abstract

As financial transactions are increasingly digitized, old and new kinds of intermediaries are only expanding in importance. Intermediaries, mediators and brokers sit at critical junctures and operate between diverse financial arenas and pathways. We argue that mapping the intermediate entails identifying how different kinds of actors-human and non-human, objects and interfaces, institutions and practices-delimit or reify but also stitch together and overcome spatial and temporal differences in people's financial lives, while taking on varying burdens of risk. Mapping the intermediate is both an empirical and methodological exercise. Empirically, it requires following the agents and traders, brokers and material objects that facilitate transactions and add, extract, or rework different kinds of value. Methodologically, intermediaries and the intermediate are not only the objects of analysis but act as analytical tools in their own right, making the process and politics of transactions visible and tangible. Attending to the intermediate in our inquiries around money, currency and new digital financial technologies, thereby, offers new directions for grounding finance in politics and history and better connecting micro and macro and local and global economic processes.

Detained settlements: The infrastructures and temporalities of digital financial transactions between the United States and Cuba

“…Scholars question the professed role of mobile money as the silver bullet solution to “financial inclusion” (Schwittay 2011) in delivering financial services to those excluded from traditional banking and financial institutions. Others critique mobile money's one‐size‐fits‐all approach by highlighting: the different ways new payment technologies interact with local histories or get repurposed to align with people's diverse life projects and value systems (Musaraj and Small 2018; Rea et al 2016; Tankha 2016); the agency of existing and new intermediaries in channeling, but also transforming, value in digital financial transactions (Kusimba, Yang, and Chawla 2016; Maurer, Nelms, and Rea 2013; Oreglia and Srinivasan 2020; Tankha and Dalinghaus 2020); and how social ties and hierarchies are broken, cemented, or rearranged in engagements with mobile phones and mobile money (Kenny 2016; Kusimba 2018). Much of this research documents a persistence of cash alongside electronic and digital payment systems (Dzokoto et al 2016; Lazzolino and Wasike 2015; Tankha 2016), suggesting that rather than thinking of cash and digital systems as separate, it is more useful to think of how people operate within “monetary ecologies” (Maurer 2015; Tankha 2016; Tankha and Dalinghaus 2020) or an assemblage of diverse technologies and instruments that they mobilize to transact and create meaning in their financial lives.…”

“…Remittance services like VaCuba operate much like how Maurer, Nelms, and Rea (2013) view mobile money agents, as “human ATMs” or “bridges to cash” that enable cashing out of an inoperable electronic money transfer system. But VaCuba also acts as a mediator that not only conducts but also transforms value (Latour 2005; Tankha and Dalinghaus 2020) by converting the cash from USD to CUC and withholding and delaying payments that do not have the same purchasing power when they are eventually received. Second, since these digital infrastructures are governed by U.S. sanctions, they create new forms of exclusion and unevenly distribute risk across Cubans who have access to foreign bank accounts and those forced to wait for cash payouts from Airbnb.…”