Ester Barinaga

Professor

The shock of the old : How a local currency’s transition from digital to paper deepened monetary conscientization

Författare

Ester Barinaga

Summary, in English

“Now that it doesn’t come from the phone, where is the money coming from?” asks a member of Wazee Hukumbuka during one of the farmer-cooperative’s community meetings. Silas, a local leader knowledgeable about community currencies answers swiftly. “As Wazee Hukumbuka, you are paying members for their seeds from a sort of cooperative fund. That’s where the money is coming from. It’s just that you are not aware of it.” Soon after, members excitedly discuss activities and goods to include in the rules governing the creation of their local money: waste collection and up-cycling into fertiliser, a member’s honey, the labour of plowing and weeding the land. They have become aware that how their local currency is issued shapes the social, political and material space in which they live. Building on empirical material generated through individual and group interviews as well as ethnographic participation, the article analyses the process of monetary learning ignited by the transition from digital to paper of a community currency in Aboke, rural Kenya. Inspired by Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the article develops the concept of “monetary conscientization” as the process that expands the agency of money users. In Aboke, monetary conscientization was provoked by the transparency of old technologies, which visualised for money users how to relate to money politically as money issuers.

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