In the final episode of “Currency Experiments & Value Conversions” Ferda Nur Demirci and Daromir Rudnyckyj discuss the 2023 article “’Every dollar has its own problem’: Discrepant dollars and the social topography of fungibility in multicurrency era Zimbabwe” with its author, Chris Vasantkumar, an anthropologist based at Macquarie University. The discussion addresses Zimbabwe’s complex monetary landscape, particularly during the “multi-currency era” (2009–2019). Vasantkumar explains how people navigated the overlapping currency forms that circulated in the country, including U.S. dollars, bond notes, RTGS balances, and EcoCash, in the context of chronic economic instability and hyperinflation. Vasantkumar challenges assumptions about the fungibility of money, drawing on Zimbabwean experiences to critique dominant theories such as Viviana Zelizer’s notion of “earmarking.” The discussion highlights how different forms of money were materially and symbolically non-interchangeable, creating arbitrage opportunities and shaping social relationships. The wide-ranging conversation also addresses the politics of cashlessness, the affective dimensions of monetary trust, and how divergent conceptions of value can inform a decolonial reorientation of economic anthropology.
Chris Vasantkumar is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology in the School of Communication, Society, & Culture at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He is also the co-convenor of the Future of Money Project, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. His work has two primary foci. First, since 2018, he has ethnographically investigated the crisis economy in contemporary Zimbabwe, with a focus on the collapse of trust in state currency and its effects on middle-class attitudes toward money, planning, and the future. Vasantkumar’s research interests include broader theoretical approaches to money and exchange. His in-progress book manuscript, Trinkets: Discordances of Value in More-Than-Human Economies, advocates the decolonizing of received settler-mercantile exchange theories, as developed out of his analysis of early encounters between Europeans and the Indigenous peoples of Africa and North America.
Podcast Co-Hosts
Ferda Nur Demirci, co-host of Currency Experiments & Value Conversions, is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, working in the Department of Economic Experimentation. Her research explores the intersections of financial inclusion policies, kinship obligations, resource extraction economies, and authoritarian governance, with a particular focus on the cycles of indebtedness affecting working-class families in Turkey. Her work has been published in both English and Turkish in outlets such as Antipode Online, Dialectical Anthropology, and 1+1. She is also a research associate in the Counter Currency Laboratory at the University of Victoria.
Daromir Rudnyckyj, co-host of Currency Experiments & Value Conversions is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Victoria, where he serves as Director of the Counter Currency Laboratory. His research addresses money, religion, development, capitalism, finance, and the state. Dr. Rudnyckyj’s current project examines the techno-politics of money, with a focus on experiments in producing complementary monetary forms. His most recent journal articles include “Econography: Approaches to Expert Capitalism,” in Current Anthropology and “The Protestantism of Neoliberalism” in Culture, Theory, & Critique. He is the author of Beyond Debt: Islamic Experiments in Global Finance (Chicago 2019) and Spiritual Economies: Islam, Globalization, and the Afterlife of Development (Cornell 2010), which was awarded a Sharon Stephens Prize by the American Ethnological Society.