From Bitcoin to Apple Pay, big changes seem to be afoot in the world of money. Yet the use of coins and paper bills has persisted for 3,000 years. In How Would You Like to Pay?, leading anthropologist Bill Maurer narrates money's history, considers its role in everyday life, and discusses the implications of how new technologies are changing how we pay. These changes are especially important in the developing world, where people who lack access to banks are using cell phones in creative ways to send and save money. To truly understand money, Maurer explains, is to understand and appreciate the complex infrastructures and social relationships it relies on. Engaging and straightforward, How Would You Like to Pay? rethinks something so familiar and fundamental in new and exciting ways. Ultimately, considering how we would like to pay gives insights into determining how we would like to live.  

Product Description: Why are people continually surprised to discover that money is "just" meaning? Mutual Life, Limited spends time among those who, in acknowledging the fictions of finance, are making money anew. It documents ongoing efforts to remake money and finance by Islamic bankers who seek to avoid interest and local currency proponents who would stand outside of national economies...read more

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If, as many cultural critics have asserted, the world is becoming more like the Caribbean, then the task of charting what we mean by "the Caribbean" is an urgent one. This careful study of the British Virgin Islands (BVI) calls attention to the ways in which ideas about nature and choice have come to justify a social order in which half the population is deemed not to belong and is denied legal rights.The BVI, one of Britain's few remaining colonial possessions, has become an important destination point for Caribbean migrants and a center for international financial services. Bill Maurer traces how the BVI came to be defined, legally and popularly, as a territorial entity, and how BVIslanders came to define themselves as a "people" sharing a "culture." He argues that law has been central to the construction of ethnic, racial, and cultural differences that create boundaries between peoples and places and that facilitate the exploitation of labor, the exclusion of people from the political process, and the globalization of capital.Recharting the Caribbean will be important reading for anthropologist, legal scholars, and historians of colonial discourse.Bill Maurer is Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of California at Irvine. (view table of contents)

For the past twenty years, the work of Michelle Z. Rosaldo has had a profound impact on feminism and anthropology. Gender Matters commemorates her central role in shaping anthropological work and points toward new directions for critical inquiry based on a reconsideration of Rosaldo's theoretical and political interventions.With the publication of Woman, Culture, and Society in 1974, Michelle Rosaldo initiated nothing less than a reconstruction of anthropology that placed feminist analysis at the center of the discipline. Through a rereading of Rosaldo's ideas and arguments, this collection provides in-depth analysis of Rosaldo's many contributions to anthropology and feminism. Each of the essays derives theoretically and politically useful insights from Rosaldo's work and sets them in motion for new intellectual and political practices. The authors do not always share Rosaldo's perspectives, nor do they necessarily agree with each other. But, together, they point to exciting syntheses of old and new feminist theory and practice.Alejandro Lugo is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Latina/o Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Bill Maurer is Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of California at Irvine. (view table of contents)