Category Archives: Features

Blog, Features, The Social Life of Inflation

Quirin Rieder: Drinking tea with the IMF: sticking to prices and protesting inflation in Aliabad, Northern Pakistan

Image 1: A Taxi driver during a tea break in Aliabad, 2023, photo by the author

Aziz put down the newspaper and sighed. “This is bad, the situation is bad”. Sitting in his small tea shop, he had just finished his routine practice of reading out loud some articles from the local Urdu newspaper K2, that publishes on issues in Gilgit-Baltistan (one of the Pakistani parts of Kashmir). Normally this is much appreciated not only by some of the town’s senior residents with bad eyesight, but also by the German anthropologist who sometimes struggled to decipher the miniature Urdu letters. Aziz had just read about the new hike in petrol and gas prices that was announced by the national government and would only increase the inflation in Pakistan, which had been soaring at that point, with an annual food inflation rate of over 50 per cent. Daado (an older regular customer; all names changed) and I were sitting around the small table in Aziz’s shop, while his 25-year-old son Farhan stood behind the counter and silently listened to our conversation while he prepared more chai or checked his phone. Aziz and Farhan’s chai shop stood next to the KKH, the Karakoram Highway, that links Pakistan’s capital Islamabad to China’s Xinyang province, passing through Aliabad in Hunza, where I conducted ethnographic fieldwork between November 2022 and August 2023. During that time, I visited their shop nearly daily and became good friends with Aziz, Farhan and regular customers, keeping up with local news and gossip.

On that day at the end of February 2023, Aziz was not happy and folded away the newspaper. The headline stated that the IMF had imposed tight conditions on completing its current review phase that would release an urgently needed tranche of $1.1 billion to Pakistan. The country had been undergoing a constitutional crisis since former Prime Minister Imran Khan had lost a vote of confidence in March 2022, and massive floods submerged large parts of territory in the following summer, with the global energy and food crisis already hitting hard. Drained of foreign exchange reserves that were needed to import foodstuffs and energy resources, the national government had to radically devalue its currency and increase electricity and fuel prices (key IMF conditions), triggering an unprecedented inflation. The currency exchange rate went up from a relatively stable rate of US $1 = 170Rs (Pakistani Rupees) in the years 2019–2021, to 230Rs in 2022 and even reached 280Rs in January and February 2023. Daado shook his head and wearily sipped his tea. Aziz threw a last glimpse at the international news section reporting on the war in Ukraine, when he also shook his head and repeated: “These are hard times, it’s a very bad situation (haalat kharab hai)”. He then told me that he and his family had planned to visit Karachi, Pakistan’s biggest city, to meet friends and relatives, and get some routine medical check-ups in the renowned health facilities there, but the one-way bus ticket alone was 14.000Rs (for a ride of 20-26 hours). Overall, it would have cost them around 4 lakh (400.000Rs) for the whole trip, so they cancelled.

This text looks at practices of negotiating and un-doing inflation in everyday life. While rising prices routinely bring economic hardship for ordinary people, they also open up possibilities to contest the capitalist dynamics that trigger inflation in the first place. I explore this question through two examples: negotiations over the price of tea, and protests against cutting essential wheat flour subsidies. In Aliabad, inflation was far from being a supernatural economic force, and was instead understood as something that was done to the town’s residents by international, national and regional actors. As such, it could also be undone, at least to some extent.

The value of a cup of tea

Later that day, regular customers were scarce, and Aziz had left to prepare his family’s small plot of land for the upcoming seasonal opening of the water channels that Hunza is famous for. Only Farhan and I remained in the tea shop. I asked him whether these days fewer customers were coming because of the inflation. He shook his head: “No, I don’t think so. Not really actually.” I asked him why he kept the price for a cup of tea at 50Rs, given that in other places nearby, prices had gone up to 60Rs and sometimes even 70Rs. “Yes, I know”, he said wearily, then adding defensively “but why should I make my customers worry (parishaan)? For me, it’s okay like that. 50Rs, bas.” A little taken aback, I asked again: “But you also have higher costs, don’t you?” Farhan’s voice grew louder for a second: “Sure, for everything! Milk, tea powder, cooking gas… but 50Rs for a cup of tea is okay. “During the rest of my fieldwork and many months after, Aziz and Farhan stuck to this price, even though both frequently complained of the ingredients’ rising prices. Their refusal to increase the price of tea was an active act of affirming socio-cultural values like sociality, community, and accessibility of chai to customers over merely economic considerations in times of crisis. Whereas many other tea shops in Aliabad were quick to adapt their prices to the inflation rate, Farhan and his father kept it at 50Rs. Notably, these other tea shops were drawing on a different group of (also regular) local customers, mainly neighboring bazaar shop owners, who themself had also increased the prices for their goods and services. Every time I asked Farhan and his father about their reasons for not doing the same, they told me that they don’t want their customers to worry. That way, they emphasized the importance of chai as an essential good that should be provided to their regular customers that were largely older and not very affluent customers (and often neighbors and friends too) who might otherwise not be able to afford it.

Amidst the rapid inflation and unable to postpone the family’s medical trips indefinitely, their rejection of the impulse to raise prices was all the more remarkable. In situations of economic instability, people make price hikes relatable by, for example, complaining or blaming politicians for it (Amri 2023), and frequently – depending on a place’s economic history and imagined future – fall into narratives of despair (Muir 2016). However, such interpretations might overlook how local engagements with inflation are never only passive representations of broader economic developments, but also make for opportunities to actively mediate and navigate the meanings and consequences of inflation. Looking at inflation and price hikes this way means acknowledging that actors can reframe capitalist dynamics, even if they do not make their choices under self-selected circumstances (Narotzky and Besnier 2014; Thompson 1971).

This becomes especially visible when approaching inflation as shifts in the way people value certain things and activities. They thereby engage in “boundary struggles” (Fraser 2022) over, conceptually speaking, the relationships between exchange value and use value – in this instance, of chai. Farhan’s insistence on not changing prices means putting the use value over the exchange value of chai. Use value incorporates here not only tea as something you drink when thirsty, but also its cultural values like facilitating social life, and being affordable to customers. The reasoning behind not wanting to bother their customers is in line with these values of chai in facilitating community and participation in social life. Further, the refusal to increase prices also ensured the continuous coming of customers, and therefore was not entirely contrary to economic considerations.

Given that Aziz and Farhan didn’t make a fortune by their insistence on the 50Rs, their prioritization of social ideals while struggling with rising production costs shows that the relationship between use values and exchange value is never clear-cut nor predetermined. And especially processes like inflation open up avenues for redefining their (albeit fuzzy) boundaries. Adhering to ideas of socio-cultural provision while also ensuring clientele to come, ultimately meant that refusing to play along with the dynamics of global inflation came down to a cup of tea.

Un-doing inflation?

The newspaper that Aziz was reading on that morning in February 2023 also described how the crucial monthly bags of subsidized wheat flour would soon cost 36Rs per kg and might even rise to 58Rs per kg, and not 20Rs anymore. This was not even the first hike. The sub headline read that the rise was condemned by the “Awami Action Committee” that organizes public protests on various issues in the region. For the last few months, the value of the Pakistani Rupee had been decreasing significantly, leading to higher prices for imported oil and gas, among other things. And, it seemed, the regional and national government had decided to translate that price rise into higher prices for flour. When Aziz finished reading, Daado, the older customer next to me, exclaimed: “Listen, this flour subsidy, this is not a gift (tohfa) by the government! It’s our right (qanon), it’s the law of the UN, United Nations!” He said this twice, and with much emphasis.

Image 2: Charter of Demands and English Translation by Pamir Times 2024

Over the course of 2023, nation-wide protests against rising costs of living broke out, which the Pakistani sociologist Umair Javed (2023) described as “a product of total frustration at the state for violating its basic obligations towards citizens”. But in Aliabad, many like Daado saw not just a moral obligation on the side of state authorities to care for its people (Thompson 1971), but also a legal one, given the constitutional limbo and the lack of full citizenship rights (such as voting in national elections) of the region due to its relation to the Kashmir conflict (Ali 2019). So, in Gilgit-Baltistan, the rising inequalities, as well as the fact that the government appeared to directly relay inflation and IMF’s austerity measurements into cutting the flour subsidies of the already marginalized region, provided the context for protests against this move. A series of decentralized, often women-led protests and road blocks emerged in summer 2023. And when local state officials made only excuses and empty promises, an enormous, region-wide protest march to the main town Gilgit was organized by the Awami Action Committee that Aziz had read about.

In January and February 2024, huge sit-ins in Gilgit demanded a full reinstatement of the flour subsidy, but also presented a more fundamental 15 Point Charter of Demands. These included constitutional recognition of Gilgit-Baltistan as a full province of Pakistan, protection of communal land rights, a withdrawal of new direct taxes, enhanced transport, medical and energy infrastructure, and improved educational opportunities, especially for women. After weeks of protests (and also briefly before the country’s national elections in February 2024, in which residents of Gilgit-Baltistan tellingly couldn’t even participate), the flour subsidy was reinstated at full rate. The inflation and its impact on the flour rates had mobilized large parts of the population in Gilgit-Baltistan and united them in a broader political struggle. Resisting and even reversing inflation, and through it also forms of political marginalization, suddenly appeared to be possible.

Conclusion

Ethnography allows studying inflation by paying attention to how it is done and undone by various actors with different degrees of power. One avenue for this is looking at how the relationship between exchange and use value is actively re-negotiated. Shop-owners like Farhan and Aziz, for example, did not reproduce inflation in a straight-forward way, and instead prioritized communal values over exchange value. However, given the structural dependency on the cash economy and imports, the question remains how many trips or medical check-ups they can postpone before their refusal to raise the tea price will falter. Equally, the political organizers and the protestors in Gilgit-Baltistan did not agree with inflation leading to subsidy cuts and further deteriorating their economic resources and symbolic recognition in a situation of political marginalization. Their protest actually enabled the lowering of prices, by means of the reinstatement of the flour subsidy.

In their own ways, these two examples represent different facets of how people politicize and seek to un-do inflation. Highly aware of IMF conditions and their peculiar political situation, Aliabad’s residents concerned themselves deeply with inflation and came up with various forms of engaging with it. For my interlocutors, drinking tea and sharing bread with the IMF, then, did not mean falling into despair or normalizing inflation as something given. Instead, they embarked on different ways of politicizing, refusing, and resisting the effects of inflation as an unavoidable part of our economic system.

This text is part of the feature The Social Life of Inflation edited by Sian Lazar, Evan van Roeckel, and Ståle Wig. 

Quirin Rieder is a PhD candidate at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University Vienna. His doctoral research analyzes how access to electricity shapes social organization in Northern Pakistan.

References

Ali, Nosheen. 2019. Delusional States: Feeling Rule and Development in Pakistan’s Northern Frontier. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Amri, Myriam. 2023. ‘Inflation as Talk, Economy as Feel: Notes Towards an Anthropology of Inflation’. Anthropology of the Middle East 18 (2): 27–45.

Fraser, Nancy. 2022. Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System Is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet – and What We Can Do about It. London: Verso.

Javed, Umair. 2023. ‘Burning Bills’. Dawn, 4 September 2023. https://www.dawn.com/news/1773941/burning-bills.

Muir, Sarah. 2016. ‘On Historical Exhaustion: Argentine Critique in an Era of “Total Corruption”’. Comparative Studies in Society and History 58 (1): 129–58.

Narotzky, Susana, and Niko Besnier. 2014. ‘Crisis, Value, and Hope: Rethinking the Economy: An Introduction’. Current Anthropology 55 (S9): S4–16.

Thompson, E.P. 1971. ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’. Past & Present, no. 50, 76–136.

Cite as: Rieder, Quirin 2024. “Drinking tea with the IMF: sticking to prices and protesting inflation in Aliabad, Northern Pakistan” Focaalblog 10 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/12/10/quirin-rieder-drinking-tea-with-the-imf-sticking-to-prices-and-protesting-inflation-in-aliabad-northern-pakistan/

Blog, Features, The Social Life of Inflation

Daromir Rudnyckyj: When is inflation a problem?

Image 1: A hand lettered sign promoting the Comox Valley LETS, photo by author

Amidst the media frenzy in recent years regarding inflation, it is worth asking when, and for whom, is inflation actually a problem? As economists are quick to point out, in the conventional monetary system the upsides and downsides of inflation are not equally distributed across populations. To illustrate, those on fixed incomes or who hold little debt (typically retirees of advanced age, such as baby boomers), are adversely affected by inflation because their spending power is effectively reduced. In contrast, those who hold large amounts of debt and the prospect of present and future wage increases (typically younger people holding student loans or with large mortgages, such as millennials) can actually benefit to a certain extent. This is because inflation effectively reduces the value of previously borrowed money. This elementary economics lesson reminds us that the adverse effects of inflation do not map neatly onto a class politics. Whereas for a poor pensioner inflation is a huge problem, for a poor student with a lot of debt, inflation may offer some benefits. Indeed, there is a generational politics to inflation.

To further explore the politics of inflation, here I analyze the expansion of what I term “the credit field” in the conventional monetary system and in a local currency system called the Comox Valley Local Exchange Trading System (LETS). The Comox Valley LETS (the LETSystem) was a pioneering community currency that was founded on central Vancouver Island in British Columbia in the 1980s. The LETSystem was a grassroots effort to redress economic downturns by fostering local liquidity and facilitating mutual credit among community members. The Comox Valley LETS became the prototype for a range of similar LETS that spread around the world and took hold in places as diverse as Japan, Australia, the UK, and Ecuador.

The Comox Valley LETSystem consisted of a network and three devices: the green dollar, a registry, and listings. The network was the community of users who had registered accounts with the LETS. The green dollar was the unit of account for the LETSystem. It was completely virtual—there was no paper currency and users could create money (as credit) whenever they needed simply out of the promise to repay the network at some future time. The registry was the central ledger in which the debits, credits, and balances of network members were recorded. The listings were essentially the marketplace for the LETSystem: a catalogue, printed monthly, of the goods and services either wanted or on offer by the members of the network.

The logistics of a transaction were not complex. In a hypothetical transaction a painter, Peter, might agree to paint Sue’s fence for $40/hour and accept payment in 50% green dollars. If he completed the job in 5 hours, Sue would owe him $100 in Canadian and $100 in green dollars. The portion of the debt denominated in Canadian dollars could be cleared using either cash or bank credit. The remaining debt was cleared when Peter called into the central office and recorded the transaction on the answering machine. Sometime later, typically the following day, a clerk in the central office would then credit $100 green dollars to Peter’s account and a debt of $100 to Sue’s account. This meant that Peter had accumulated an increased balance of $100 that was available as credit with the entire community of users at some future time. Sue, in contrast, had now had a commitment to the network of $100: she had essentially agreed to recompensate the network with $100 in goods and/or services at some future juncture.

The Credit Field

One useful concept I have sought to develop to understand how a LETS works is what I term “the credit field.” The credit field is the space-time of exchange possibility. In other words, it is the possibility that enables members of a network to participate in commercial exchange. It is in the credit field that inflation emerges as an issue, because expanding the credit field creates more money.

Expanding the credit field provides sufficient liquidity to enable commerce. It is one of the primary reasons that precious metal standards are an ineffective means of administering the supply of money in an economy. In the conventional money system, expanding the credit field is undertaken exclusively by two institutions that have the power to create money: the state and commercial banks. The state does so through printing money to buy goods and services or through techniques such as quantitative easing. Banks create money through issuing loans. The fractional reserve system ensures that banks only have to hold on deposit a small fraction of the money as liquidities, typically under 10%, when making new loans.

In contrast, in a LETS, any member of the network can create money. A LETS is similar to rotating savings systems and credit associations, insofar as they entail members of a network facilitating credit for one another. However, in a LETS the members do it in money that they create, rather than in state money. When one person issues a promise to repay (debt) the network, it creates credit for someone else in the network. In so doing, someone who incurs a commitment to the network benefits themselves by obtaining some good or service, but also benefits other members of the network by enhancing the opportunity for them to engage in exchanges. LETS credits are useless as assets because the credits earn no interest. Furthermore, these credits cannot be used for speculation—one can’t buy equities, bonds, or derivatives with LETS money.

Expanding the credit field and the problem of inflation

One potential response to the ability for users to create credit in this way is that it would lead to inflation, but when and for whom is inflation a problem? Compare again the different logics that undergird the conventional and LETS monetary systems.

The conventional money system is premised, in part, on the commodity theory of money, according to which the value of money stems from its scarcity (Menger 1892). Scarcity creates an incentive to accumulate, since one never knows what the future will bring, one is predisposed, proverbially, to “save for a rainy day.” The state seeks to regulate the creation of new money due to the danger of inflation. Too much money chasing too few goods can potentially cause inflation. The issuance of conventional money is premised on a zero-sum game: one person acquiring it, means someone else has lost it.

But LETSystem money is premised on a token theory of money (Ingham 2004; Vasantkumar 2019). As in language, symbols are infinitely abundant. Thus, rather than operating from the standpoint of scarcity, the operating concern is sufficiency: the amount of money should be commensurate with the needs of the network. One does not have to “save for a rainy day” because, whether one’s balance is positive or negative, one will always have sufficient money to meets one’s needs. LETSystem money is not zero-sum, but rather “positive sum” because one need not worry about not having it, because there is always a sufficient supply.

Because it is not scarce, there is no incentive to ensure its value. Network members decide the value of the goods/service they offer to the community. If a member accumulates credits, it creates an incentive to spend them, since there is not much benefit to the accumulation of credits. The incentive to spend, increases the volume of trade. (What an economist would call an increase in the velocity of money).

Two Theories of Money

The conventional money system attempts to reconcile the two main theories of money: the commodity (orthodox) theory and the token (heterodox) theory. In the conventional money system only the central bank and commercial banks can issue money that circulates widely. The restriction on the right to issue stems, at least in part, due to the fear of excessive inflation. This fear is based on the orthodox theory of money: that money’s value comes from its scarcity. To hold its value, the thinking goes, money should be treated at least partially, like gold, a commodity. But of course, some inflation is not deemed a problem, as long as it is kept within a certain circumscribed target, generally in the range of 2% per year (Holmes 2023). Nevertheless, in the conventional system, commercial banks and the central bank are empowered to create new money and do so all the time. The practices of creating money by printing it or issuing fractional reserve debt take place under the presumptions of a token theory of money.

In contrast, the LETSystem eschews the commodity theory of money and embraces the token (heterodox) theory of money that contends that money’s value comes from its recognition as a symbol of value by other members of a community. It can be issued by any user of the network at any time. In the LETSystem, inflation is not a problem in the same way, because creating money creates a credit for someone else in the system, which entails an incentive to spend that money. If someone knows that money is going to come back to them, they are more willing to part with their money in the first place. This has the effect of accelerating the exchange of goods and services, rather than hoarding of (scarce) money. This reduces the imperative to save money, which in the conventional system does not benefit anyone but the banks, who profit off savings through lending at interest. Facilitating the ability of members of a network to spend readily and at will benefits the members of a network by enabling the members to satisfy their real needs and wants, such as food, shelter, and clothing, rather than simply storing idle value for that ”rainy day.”

According to proponents and practitioners of the LETSystem, in general people were willing to pay more in green dollars than they were in federal dollars. Liberated from the imperative to hoard scarce money and empowered with the capacity to expand the credit field of their own accord, members of the network could spend freely to garner the goods and services they wanted or needed. As one participant in the system described to me, a babysitter who charged $3/hr in federal money realized quickly that she could charge $6/hr in green. This led to increased prices in green dollars, but given that money was not scarce, but rather abundant, the downside of such increases wasn’t really a problem.

In conclusion, often when I describe the LETSystem to colleagues, the usual surprised reaction is “people could issue money themselves, didn’t that lead to inflation!” Such a reaction makes two presumptions that might be worth reflecting on. First, we might ask, “when and for whom, exactly, is inflation a problem?” And second and more tellingly, we might also ask, “why are we so quick to trust bankers with stewarding the credit field as opposed to our neighbours?” After all, the recurrent economic crises that date back to 2007 and illiberal counterrevolution that has emerged in response suggests that they have not done a very good job.

This text is part of the feature The Social Life of Inflation edited by Sian Lazar, Evan van Roeckel, and Ståle Wig. 

Daromir Rudnyckyj is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Victoria, where he serves as Director of the Counter Currency Laboratory and is Past President of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion (2021-2023).  His research addresses money, religion, development, capitalism, finance, and the state. He is the author of Beyond Debt: Islamic Experiments in Global Finance and Spiritual Economies: Islam, Globalization, and the Afterlife of Development), which was awarded a Sharon Stephens Prize by the American Ethnological Society. He is also the co-editor, with Filippo Osella, of the volume Religion and the Morality of the Market.

References

Holmes, Douglas. 2023. “Quelling Inflation: The Role of the Public.” Anthropology Today 39 (2):6-11.

Ingham, Geoffrey. 2004. The Nature of Money. Polity Press.

Menger, Karl. 1892. “On the Origin of Money.” Economic Journal 2 (6):239–255.

Vasantkumar, Chris. 2019. “Towards a Commodity Theory of Token Money: On ‘Gold Standard Thinking’ in a Fiat Currency World.” Journal of Cultural Economy 12 (4):317-335.

Cite as: Rudnyckyj, Daromir 2024. “When is inflation a problem?” Focaalblog 10 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/12/10/daromir-rudnyckyj-when-is-inflation-a-problem/

Blog, Features, The Social Life of Inflation

Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier and Mélissa Gauthier: Inflation as pressure: coping mechanisms from Eastern Cuba

Image 1: Snapshot of Yoani Sanchez’s Twitter post, December 16, 2020. Source: “Mecardo negro en Cuba ya da señales de inflación: un carton de huevos a 300 pesos cubanos” by Rolando Nápoles

When the daily Miami-Santiago de Cuba flight landed in Cuba in May 2024, a passenger at the back of the plane shouted in Spanish: !Ya llegaron los dolares! “The dollars have arrived!” Everyone on board started laughing and clapping. In making that announcement, the Cuban passenger referred to the fact that visitors to Cuba were the main suppliers of hard currency on the island. It is extremely cumbersome, if not impossible for Cubans to exchange Cuban pesos to US dollars in official banks or in exchange offices. As a result, US dollars are effectively accessible only through the illicit market, fueled by foreign currencies entering the island thanks to travellers. In shouting that “the dollars” had arrived on the tarmac, the passenger also pointed to how everyone is looking for dollars in the hope of better life conditions. This vignette further speaks to the recent inflation phenomenon in Cuba, since the increased demand for foreign currency in the illicit market, caused by recent internal economic reforms, has created more inflation, subsequently deteriorating the value of the national currency (Truebas Acosta 2023).

We experienced this anecdote and many others similar to it while conducting fieldwork and teaching two ethnographic field schools during Summer 2023 and Spring 2024 in Santiago de Cuba. These stories, often full of sarcasm and humour, describe what the anthropologist Myriam Amri calls “inflation talk”, which she defines as “a mode of small talk that operates as critique and affect” (2023:29). “Inflation talk” further refers to anecdotes, jokes, conversations but also, as Amri shows, the sensorial experiences that relate to how inflation is lived every day. Stories also express how people cope with an “inflation bomb”, a term suggested by national economists to characterize the recent and ongoing inflation in Cuba.

The extreme escalation of prices in Cuba since 2021 is on everybody’s lips, generating anxiety and despair. In this blog, we engage with the following questions: how are Cubans responding to the current economic crisis? and, how do they respond to inflation rates while facing a complex economic system that is failing them? We use the increase of the price of eggs as a case study to explore how inflation is lived and dealt with every day. We investigate the phenomenon of inflation through the lense of pressure. Wiegratz, Dolan, Kimari, and Schmidt (2020) argue that pressure emerges at the convergence of “overarching ideology, economic structures, social webs of exchange, and the dynamics of capitalism,” and that pressure is the result of a disbalance between the reality of what people imagined being able to fulfill and the real economic burdens of their daily life. We argue that pressure allows for an in-depth understanding of the connections between how people live and how they strive to develop coping mechanisms to face pressure.

Inflation a lo Cubano

Based on their own data, the Cuban government reported an inflation of 77 per cent in 2021 and 39 per cent in 2022 (Estudios Economico de América Latina y el Caribe 2023). Other sources show more drastic figures. Cuban economists Pavel Vidal and Luis R. Luis (2024) report a “big-bang devaluation of the peso in 2021” with inflation rates ranging from 174 per cent to 700 per cent that same year. Such extreme figures reflect more accurately the increase of prices that were reported to us by Cubans. Inflation in Cuba is not characterized by a steady increase observed over a certain period. It corresponds to sudden inflation, and monetary instability, caused by a long stagnant economy, Donald Trump’s strict sanctions towards Cuba, the Covid-19 pandemic, and a failed economic reform (referred to as ordenamiento económico: money ordering). As a result, Cuba is undergoing its worst economic crisis in contemporary history; more than one million Cubans have left the island since 2021 in what is known as an unprecedented exodus.

In Cuba, the exchange rates between the Cuban pesos and the US dollar follow the rules of the informal sector. Rates are shared through internet communication technologies, mainly WhatsApp. Since 2022, the Cuban government exchanges Cuban pesos for US dollar at the fixed rate of 120 pesos to 1 US dollar. On the informal market, rates oscillate responding to supply and demand. As we write these lines, the exchange rate is approximately 310 pesos to 1 US dollar in Santiago de Cuba, and 320 pesos to 1 US dollar in Havana, according to local sources. In short, and as suggested by our opening vignette, nobody exchanges US dollars at the bank except tourists. To know the current informal exchange rate, Cubans join WhatsApp groups in which sellers and venders share their rate and how much money they wish to exchange.

In addition to accessing information about exchange rate tendencies on WhatsApp, Cubans also consult elTOQUE, an online platform which provides information about a broad range of topics, from music and literature to the oropouche epidemic ravaging Cuba. elTOQUE is associated with the Observatorio de Monedas y Finanzas de Cuba (OMFi: The Cuban Currency and Finance Observatory) led by Pavel Vidal, an economist who worked for the Cuban Central Bank but who now resides in Colombia, and Abraham Calás, the director of development of elTOQUE website. The site provides the daily exchange rate in the informal sector as well as analysis about the evolution of economic and financial indicators. As explained on the site, the OMFi monitors prices and other data related to remittances, using algorithms that they collect through online sales of currency. elTOQUE has become the reference for Cubans on the island and in the diaspora who wish to get the pulse of the daily exchange rate in Cuba (note that elTOQUE figures do not account for local variations). The site is not based in Cuba and is not approved by official Cuban authorities.

Eggs as indicator of inflation

In Cuba, the popular saying “Aqui todo cuesta un huevo” (Here everything costs an egg) is a way of criticizing the exorbitant prices of consumption products. Eggs are scarce, and when Cubans can find some, they are inaccessible because of their prices. In Fall 2024, the price of a carton of 30 eggs is oscillating between 3,000-4,000 Cuban pesos, close to the 5,000 pesos basic monthly salary of a family medical doctor. In recent years, complaining about the escalating price of eggs has become a reference point to discuss inflation and the harshness of life. For instance, the famous blogger Yoani Sánchez complained on Twitter that the price of a box of a carton of 30 eggs was 300 Cuban pesos. That was in 2021 (see image 1).

In April 2024, the price of the same carton reached 3,500 Cuban pesos, a monthly salary for a state worker (see image 2). These figures are hard to imagine for people living outside Cuba. How can a monthly salary cover only the price of a 30 eggs carton! When the monetary re-structuring was implemented in January 2021, the government adjusted positively the salaries in the state sector (covering a large portion of the population), pensions and social assistance. However, wage increases without adequate supply of goods provoked inflationary pressures (Truebas Acosta 2023).

In addition to the eggs, other proteins are often used as reference to inflation. The price of chicken often comes up in casual conversation. Queli, a cultural worker with a BA degree, is paid 4,5000 Cuban pesos per month. She told us that the day she received her monthly salary, she went to a local mipyme (a small grocery store privately owned) to buy 4 pounds of chicken which cost her exact salary. “We are going to eat chicken for a few days,” she shared with us, “but what about the rest!” she laughed sarcastically. Eggs and other protein products often serve to express the sense of despair associated with the current economic crisis. To collect the most up to date figure of the price of eggs in Cuba to write this blog entry, we sent a message on WhatsApp to a friend in Santiago de Cuba. He quickly responded: “Prices are crazy, easily 3,000 pesos for an egg carton, if you are lucky enough to find one. […] It’s so bad right now, I didn’t eat today, and I had to send my two daughters to the neighbour’s house [who could give them something to eat], it’s so painful.”

Screenshot

Until recently, the Cuban food rationing system sold 5 eggs per month to each Cuban. The price of eggs in the official ratio system remains stable and affordable. According to our data, the price of eggs increased by less than 0.01 US dollars between 2019 and 2024, a huge contrast with the informal economy sector, on which Cubans must rely in order to survive. The problem on the official and subsidized market is not cost, but scarcity. At the time of writing this blog entry, Cubans in Santiago de Cuba had not received any eggs through the official rationing system for the last 8 months. And the scarcity of eggs, and other products distributed through the official system is rampant all over Cuba; it is not a local problem.

Inflation as pressure

In 2005, Fidel Castro distributed 100,000 pressure cookers to Cubans as a response to the growing energy crisis, and to “reassert control over the nation’s economy.” The image of Cubans receiving pressure cookers offers a telling metaphor. Valves of pressure allow tensions to escape, at least momentarily, as frustrations towards periods of shortages grow. Cubans have lived under pressure almost permanently, or as Kapcia (2008) would argue, in a “permanent cycle of crises.” They have learned to luchar (struggle), to resolver (resolve), and to inventar (invent) ways to cope with the shortage of products and information, among other things. Inflation talk Amri argues “bring(s) together atmosphere and affect” or a “sense that something is in the air” (2023:39). In Cuba, economic tensions weight heavy in the air.

Image 3: “Old man, your blood pressure,” says a lady who hides the eyes of a man with a COVID mask who looking at prices of vegetables. Source: Martirena in “Con Filo: Sin desorden antes del ordenamiento,” written by Francisco Rodríguez. Trabajadores, 27 October 2020.

As mentioned, Cubans respond to inflation in various ways, sometimes in telling stories and jokes. But tensions are also embodied. Elsewhere, we argue that different forms of pressure (air, atmosphere, and economic) allow for grassroots (i.e. ethnographic), spontaneous and nuanced understanding of how an accumulation of tensions shapes bodies in moments of crisis (Boudreault-Fournier 2023). Inflation generates anxieties as people face serious material constraints and pressure provides an opportunity for exploring the ways in which people cope, deflect and deal with signs of pressure. Stress and anxiety caused by high pressure (systemic, economic and political) bend bodies in painful ways until they escape, they morph into another shape, or until they explode. To decompress, some Cubans take medical drugs, while others adopt meditative practices, cultivate medicinal plants or join religious groups. Hypertension caused by stress and lifestyle (i.e too much pressure), remains undertreated in Cuba, because of medication shortages (Rojas et al. 2019). This unbearable pressure pushed more than one million Cubans to leave the island in less than three years.

The current economic crisis leads to an increase of pressure. The current situation is worse than the Special Period in the 1990s, an economic crisis caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union, that left older generations traumatized. Cubans face unprecedented shortages of fuel and daily long blackouts, in addition to lack of food. The recent economic reforms implemented at the beginning of 2021 combined with other measures adopted by the government to attempt to stabilize the economy, to face serious problems of shortages and to respond to an infrastructural and energy crisis contribute to deteriorating health and life conditions for the Cuban population.

Conclusion

We have conducted fieldwork in Cuba since the year 2000. During our recent trips in 2023 and 2024, we observed a striking loss of confidence towards the government and an unprecedented level of dissatisfaction in comparison to pre-Covid time. The participation of Cubans in the illicit market which dictates the exchange rate suggests a clear transfer of confidence to the informal economy. Conversations about inflation in the street, on social media and through communications technologies show how Cubans have found a space in which they can more actively participate in the Cuban economy, reminding us of the agency of the public in monetary affairs (Holmes 2023). Even if the situation is extremely harsh, and even if many have lost hopes for a better future in Cuba, the informal economy offers Cubans a pressure valve to cope with difficult life conditions and to take action. That is, until the pressure goes up again.

This text is part of the feature The Social Life of Inflation edited by Sian Lazar, Evan van Roeckel, and Ståle Wig. 

Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier is an Associate Professor at the University of Victoria. Her research interests include media infrastructure, sound, electronic music, digital data consumption and circulation in Cuba. She wrote the book Aerial Imagination in Cuba: Stories from Above the Rooftops (2020), and co-edited the volume Audible Infrastructures: Music, Sound, Media (2021).

Mélissa Gauthier is based at the University of Victoria. She specializes in economic anthropology and border studies with particular attention to the interplay between state and society occurring via informal markets. Her work is based primarily along the Mexico-United States border and in Yucatán, Mexico.

References

Amri, M. 2023. Inflation as Talk, Economy as Feel: Notes Towards an Anthropology of Inflation. Anthropology of the Middle East, 18(2), 27–45.

Boudreault-Fournier, Alexandrine. 2023. “Under Pressure: Catching the Pulse of a Cuban Crisis.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 41(3): 392-412.

Estudios Economico de América Latina y el Caribe. 2023. Cuba. Cepal org. https://repositorio.cepal.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/3392278d-b1b7-46de-b047-b0c0d6aa11a9/content

Holmes, D.R. 2023. “Quelling inflation: The role of the public.” Anthropology Today 39: 6-11.

Kapcia, A (2008) Cuba in Revolution: A History Since the Fifties. London: Reaktion Books.

Rojas, N A et al. 2019. “Burden of Hypertension and Associated Risks for Cardiovascular Mortality in Cuba: A Prospective Cohort Study.” Lancet Public Health 4(2): E107-E115.

Truebas Acosta, Sergio. “Inflation in Cuba: An Analysis from the Perspective of the Main Nominal Anchors of Monetary Policy.” International Journal of Cuban Studies. 2023. Vol. 15(2):175-202.

Vidal P, Luis LR. 2024. “Cuba’s Monetary Reform and Triple-Digit Inflation.” Latin American Research Review. 59(2):274-291. doi:10.1017/lar.2023.59

Wiegratz J, Dessie E, Dolan C, Kimari W. M. Schmidt. 2020. “Pressure in the City.” Development Economics Blog. Available at: https://developingeconomics.org/2020/08/17/blog-series-pressure-in-the-global-south-stress-worry-and-anxiety-in-times-of-economic-crisis/

Cite as: Boudreault-Fournier, Alexandrine and Gauthier, Mélissa 2024. “Inflation as pressure: coping mechanisms from Eastern Cuba” Focaalblog 10 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/12/10/alexandrine-boudreault-fournier-and-melissa-gauthier-inflation-as-pressure-coping-mechanisms-from-eastern-cuba/

Blog, Features, The Social Life of Inflation

Eva van Roekel: Money and ruin: hyperinflation and moral loss in the complex humanitarian crisis in Venezuela

Image 1: Banknote of 5 bolívar soberano issued in 2021. Photo by author Eva van Roekel

A few months before the Covid-19 lockdowns were implemented globally I travelled to the border between Venezuela and Brazil for a stint of ethnographic fieldwork about the complex humanitarian crisis. By that time more than five million Venezuelans had left the country, and hyperinflation was mindboggling. Inflation had reached more than 9500%, making living and working with the national currency impossible. The steep currency breakdown not only intensified the exodus of millions of Venezuelans, but also a gold rush in the Venezuelan South. At the border with Brazil, many Venezuelans were going back and forth with fuel, food, gold, and foreignbanknotes.

When Covid-19 lockdowns were temporarily lifted in October 2021, I arrived in Caracas for another short field trip. The new bolívar digital had started circulating only five days previously—the digital was the third new analogue currency since 2008 to get rid ofyet anothersix digits. I have only ever once seen a bolívar digital, including during an additional six months stay in 2023. Venezuelans I spoke with over the years did not really care about their national currency anymore. The bolívar digital appeared to concentrate only in subsidized exchanges, tax payments, and public transport. Instead, US dollars, Brazilian reais, Colombian pesos, crypto currencies, and gold are now largely being used for ordinary trade and subsistence. These de facto currency substitutions during the period of Covid-19 lockdowns gave a significant boost to the crashed economy, at least temporarily. With so many different currencies in circulation, I became interested in the way the disappearance of the bolívar as accepted currency also seemed to involve a form of moral loss.

Since 2020 Venezuelans have found multiple ways to get hold of digital dollars through the steep increase of using new electronic payment systems, like Zelle which is – now I paraphrase their website: ‘an easy and quick way to send small amounts of money directly to almost any U.S. bank accounts with just an email or US mobile phone number.’ Without such linkages to the US finance system, Venezuelans were largely excluded from receiving cambio (spare change) at any shop in Venezuela. I have witnessed innumerable conflicts at shops and gas stations around lack of cambio, becauseone is simply forced to top up purchases or receive a bunch of unwanted candy.

Using multiple currencies is not only helpful for payments. Being new to the field of finance and economics, I quickly learnt that inflation is big business. Some of my friends had a remarkable knowledge of which banknotes and cryptocurrencies to trade and when to trade them. I must admit that I found these new businesses a bit of a sour promise from which very few really benefited, and far outweighed the daily frustrations of chronic lack of cambio and the utter confusion of constantly using different banknotes.

These everyday experiences of hyperinflation seem to be embedded in entrenched cultural and historical meanings attached to money and natural resources. What promises and everyday frustrations do people encounter in abandoning their national currency? What can the rapid shift to a multi-currency economy tell us about local ideas of autonomy and self-government? How does present monetary loss relate to previous economic bonanzas in people’s experiences of money? Ultimately, I am interested in what the moral, political, and economic critiques and assessments of “ordinary” Venezuelans around the complex humanitarian crisis can tell us about the moral loss and extinction of certain life forms.

A brief history of hyperinflation and de facto currency substitution in Venezuela

Between 2013 and 2019, Venezuela lost more than 60 per cent of its GDP (Bull and Rosales 2020, 2). The minimum wage plummeted far below the United Nations standard of extreme poverty ($1.25 a day) and, in 2019, nearly 90% of the population was poor or extremely poor. Although any statistic about Venezuela is unreliable, hyperinflation in 2018 was estimated to reach the incredible figure of ten million percent. That is 8-digit inflation.

Venezuela’s economic climate and its national currency is intimately tied to critical natural resources, and oil in particular. As a petro-state since the early twentieth century, Venezuelans are used to steep boom and bust cycles, but the recent runaway inflation has been on a scale unseen even by Venezuelans. It is even said to be the most significant economic collapse-outside of war-in over four decades (Corrales 2019). Yet, the current crisis shows clear parallels with economic crises in the 1990s, when Venezuela also faced the highest inflation rate of the continent (“only” 70 percent) (Coronil 1997).

Since 1983, soaring inflation has heavily affected Venezuela’s economy and its national currency the bolívar. In the early twenty-first century, thanks to another oil boom, inflation became temporarily manageable but was still in the double digits. Governments from this period implemented various new currencies. In 2008, the bolívar fuerte (the strong bolívar) saw the light of day, getting rid of three zeros. The government pegged its value to the US dollars creating immediately a parallel exchange rate market. In 2012 another abnormal inflation started which lasted for more than a decade. This prompted the introduction of another currency in 2018, the bolívar soberano (the sovereign bolívar), getting rid of another five zeros. And in 2021, the government introduced the already mentioned bolívar digital getting rid of six zeros. Formally, both the soberano and the digital were circulating until August 2024 when the government issued a decree removing from circulation bolívar soberano banknotes with denominations of 10,000, 20,000, 50,000, and 200,000. But in practice most analogue transaction happen in foreign currencies or gold.

Conjuring the morality of money

After more than forty years of experiencing inflation, it is fair to say that Venezuelans are used to navigating monetary volatility. The bolívar went from the strongest currency in the region in the 1970s to the world’s least-valued circulating currency in 2018. I do think there appears to lie a difference in degree when it comes to how people experience and assess inflation on their own terms. Double digit inflation is clearly something other than eight-digit inflation for Venezuelans. Ongoing loss of value for the bolívar had caused a form of ‘socially constructed perplexity’ as Matt Wilde (2023, 162) poignantly argues in his recent ethnography on oil politics and the Bolivarian Revolution. Given the chronic history of inflation, worthless money was perhaps still imaginable for some of my Venezuelan friends, but that their oil nation was facing such extreme levels of poverty and hunger baffled almost everyone.

How people position themselves to their currency and relate to money in general is culturally situated as Martin Holbraad (2017, 92) argues for the Cuban case: monetary relationality is also subject to moral change. Like the oil boom of 1973, when norms about money changed due to the immense flow of petrodollars into Venezuela (Coronil 1997, 11), the recent experience of hyperinflation is resignifying how Venezuelans value and use their currency, as part of a larger process of changing social and affective relations with the state and society. It is here where I want to conjure the moral value of oil money. The recent turn in moral anthropology is particularly supportive for exploring questions of moral loss and ethical being in times of runaway hyperinflation because it provides analytical space to explore, as James Laidlaw argued a decade ago (2014, 15), “the role of ethical thought and practice in understanding phenomena that span the range of anthropological topics and ethnographic contexts.”

To explore the ‘local ethos’ around the bolívar and experiences of its loss of value, I am for instance considering what is called a ‘moral exemplar’ in moral anthropology. A moral exemplar is, roughly speaking, not a set of ethical rules but an admired figure through which people cultivate themselves as ethical subjects (Humphrey 1997, 25). Simón Bolívar, the Venezuelan independence warrior, can be seen as such a moral exemplar for many Venezuelans. His exemplarity stands for autonomy and self-rule, and the Venezuelan national currency bolívar is named after him (see image 1). However, exemplars do not escape moral change. In the last two decades, Simón Bolívar’s figure has been coopted by Chávez’ twenty-first century socialism. Naming his movement the Bolivarian Revolution, twenty years of chavismo came to symbolize both the region’s rejection of postcolonial forms of oppression and neoliberal dependence (Wilde 2023, 6).

In 2024 Venezuela’s dependence on natural resources has not disappeared, it has instead diversified into other networks of power and oppression, while the process of coopting Simón Bolívar resignified popular cultural attachments to him as a moral exemplar and may have made it easier to abandon a once highly valued currency.

Money and nature

Ethnographically exploring the moral experiences of worthless oil money in Venezuela benefits from a local ethic in how Venezuelans experience and make sense of a powerful myth of a regional abundance of natural resources and tremendously rich subsoils (Peters 2019; Socorro 2021; Strønen 2017). The photo I took of an artwork of a high school student in Caracas in 2023 is insightful here (see image 2). It signifies the current expanding zones of gold mining that are disrupting vital parts of the Venezuela Amazon. The use of worthless bolivares is wrapped around jumper cables as, in the words of the artist, “an intentional critique of the mining activities and the plundering that this area suffers, in the knowledge that there is an eminently economic purpose.”

Image 2: Highschool art project with Venezuelan banknotes, Caracas 2023. Photo by author

This direct connection between land and money is critical to many Venezuelans. Fernando Coronil (1997, 88) has shown, for instance, how during the consolidation of the petrostate in the twentieth century, Venezuela came to be constituted not only by its people but also its main source of wealth—oil was what constituted venezolanidad. Bolívar’s liberalism became likewise grounded in Venezuela’s natural abundance and revalorized the national economic structures and social relations: citizens were not only to participate directly in national politics, but also in its natural wealth. When economies go bust the reverse appears to happen. Not only economic value, but also the moral value and affective attachment to a currency change in times of ruin. After a decade of hyperinflation, Venezuelans are now rebuilding and reevaluating their economic structures and moral relations, an outcome that is still in the making.

This text is part of the feature The Social Life of Inflation edited by Sian Lazar, Evan van Roeckel, and Ståle Wig. 

Eva van Roekel is assistant professor in cultural anthropology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She is author of the monograph Phenomenal Justice. Violence and Morality in Argentina (Rutgers University Press) and the edited volume A Collection of Creative Anthropologies. Drowning in Blue Light and Other Stories (Palgrave MacMillan).

References

Bull, Benedict and Antulio Rosales. 2020. “The crisis in Venezuela: Drivers, transitions, and pathways.” European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies 0 (109), 1-20.

Coronil, Fernando. (1997). The magical state: nature, money, and modernity in Venezuela. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Corrales, Javier et al. 2019. “Responses to the Venezuelan Migration Crisis: A Scorecard.” Americas Quarterly July 11, 2019.

Holbraad, Martin. 2017 “Money and the Morality of Commensuration: Currencies of Poverty in Post-Soviet Cuba.” Social Analysis 61 (4): 81-97.

Humphrey, Caroline. 1997. “Exemplars and Rules: Aspects of Discourse of Moralities in Mongolia.” In The Ethnography of Moralities, edited by Signe Howell. London: Routlegde.

Laidlaw, James. 2012. The Subject of Virtue. An Anthropoogy of Ethics and Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge Univeristy Press.

Peters, Stefan. 2019. “Sociedades Rentistas: Claves para Entender la Crisis Venezolana.” European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies 108, 1–19.

Socorro, Milagros. 2021. “El emblema de la abudancia.: Prodavinci (September 19). Available at: https://prodavinci.com/el-emblema-de-la-abundancia/ Accessed December 21, 2022.

Strønen, Iselin Åsedotter. 2017. Grassroots Politics and Oil Culture in Venezuela. The Revolutionary Petro-State. Cham: Palgrave McMillan.

Wilde, Matt. 2023. A Blessing and a Curse. Oil, Politics, and Morality in Bolivarian Venezuela. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Cite as: Van Roekel, Eva 2024. “Money and ruin: hyperinflation and moral loss in the complex humanitarian crisis in Venezuela” Focaalblog 10 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/12/10/eva-van-roekel-money-and-ruin-hyperinflation-and-moral-loss-in-the-complex-humanitarian-crisis-in-venezuela/

Blog, Features, The Social Life of Inflation

Sian Lazar and Dolores Señorans: Argentina: inflation, monetary disorder, and political experimentation

Image 1: Milei in the Casa Rosada. Right next to him is Federico Sturzenegger’s book published in 2021. Photo by Irina Werning for TIME Magazine

The election of Javier Milei, a chainsaw-wielding anarcho-libertarian, to the Presidency of Argentina promises to cement Argentina’s status as a prime experimental site for inflation-tackling policies; it also highlights how experiences of inflation can prompt electorates to turn to radical political alternatives. The country has a long history of inflationary crisis, dating back to the 1970s, with the worst episode occurring in 1989 when hyperinflation led to an annual rate of 5 digits. Argentina has changed its legal tender 4 times since the 1980s as a response to inflationary tendencies and the US dollar has become increasingly important for the economic lives of ordinary people (Luzzi and Wilkis 2023). So much so that the market for real estate has been in dollars since the 1970s and some estimate that 2 out of 10 US dollars in circulation outside of the United States are in Argentina, 10 per cent of the total amount of dollars in use worldwide.

By October 2023, a crucial time in the presidential election campaign, annual inflation had reached 140 per cent. News reports described daily price markups in supermarkets and increasing volumes of products being left at the till (an indication of the difficulties customers had in estimating the purchasing power of their money). The US dollar had more than 15 different exchange rates (official and unofficial, for different commodities, credit cards, tourist rates, and so on) and the government capped the number of dollars that could be legally purchased each month, in an attempt to prevent the continuous diminishing of national reserves, deeply affecting people’s capacity to save in the only stable store of value they trust. 

Most striking was the way that inflation, its alleged causes, and proposed solutions dominated public debate and every political party’s platform. But it was Milei who came through with the most extreme discourse, declaring that he would tackle what he defined as a ‘monstrous monetary disarray’ (Milei 2023) by dollarizing the economy and closing down the Central Bank. His rhetoric worked, and although as President he has subsequently been forced to backtrack on a number of his early propositions, including dollarization, he has not held back from what feels to many Argentines like a painful, extreme, and tragic adjustment in their economy and polity. His government has fired over 26,000 public sector workers, kept higher education budgets stable, and refused to increase salaries and pensions even though inflation remains stubbornly high, at a 271 per cent annual rate in June 2024. His focus on ‘deficit zero’ is a classic monetarist recipe for managing inflation and the state, and the IMF and foreign exchange markets seem reasonably content – although they haven’t (yet) given him any actual money.

Meanwhile, in the first half of 2024, poverty levels increased to over 50 per cent, with extreme poverty (‘indigencia’) at about 18 per cent, both significant increases since Milei assumed power. People of all classes have dampened down their everyday consumption, and many are very worried indeed about how they will reach the end of the month. September 2024 saw some early signs of the dollar stabilizing, even going down against the peso (from a high of about 1500 pesos per ‘dólar blue’ illegal rate a few months ago to about 1210 pesos at the end of September). Prices don’t appear to have reduced in the same timeframe, though. And many remain fearful of losing their job. Demonstrators, including pensioners, who protested the government’s refusal to bring the state pension up by an additional 8.1 per cent were tear-gassed, and university teachers and students are mobilizing to demand sufficient budget to keep buildings open and salaries enough to live on. 

Milei does not seem to care too much about the opposition on the streets: university scientists are, he says, members of ‘la casta’ (the political caste), the political establishment that he railed against as a candidate and continues to stigmatize as morally corrupt. Meanwhile, the 87 Congress deputies who voted against the rise in state pensions celebrated with a barbeque at the Presidential residence. The push and pull of a Congress majority that seeks to overturn or blunt the effects of his austerity decrees, street level mobilization (and repression of that mobilization), and continually wild rhetoric from the President is making for a hugely complex and quite inflammable political situation. The need to address inflation has opened up rhetorical and political space for an extreme version of neoliberalism, and at this point we can’t tell where that will end up. If it is successful in bringing down inflation, it will be evident to policymakers elsewhere that monetarist policies can work (to that end at least) but also that they bring with them a significant social cost.

The Return of the 1990s

The situation of painful inflation in 2023 opened voters’ minds to a very colorful character. On a number of occasions during the campaign Milei delivered speeches holding a chainsaw with which he said he would destroy the Central Bank and eliminate ‘la casta’. His followers produced cardboard versions of the chainsaw to wield at rallies (Vásquez 2023). He has described himself as a libertarian and an anarcho-capitalist, and aligns himself with extreme market fundamentalism. He admires Donald Trump and Margaret Thatcher and named his cloned English mastiffs after the US libertarian thinkers Murray Rothbard, Milton Friedman, and Robert Lucas. According to some news commentators, he discusses economic policy with his dogs. His speeches during the campaign and since are brash and – to many – vulgar, for example when he recently made an offensive gesture with his right hand during a speech about reducing public expenditure. Not everyone feels the same way about him, though. Depending on who you talk to, he’s an embarrassment, a disaster, a breath of fresh air, or a response to really fundamental exhaustion with business as usual. To many, it is very appealing that he sets himself aside rhetorically from the political establishment. 

Image 2: Carlos Menem campaign photo in 1989 and Javier Milei in 2024

Yet, Milei’s self-fashioning as a charismatic leader is also based on an aesthetic and narrative citation of the figure of Carlos Menem, President from 1989 to 1999. One of Milei’s early acts as President was inaugurating a bust of Menem in the presidential palace with the presence of his daughter, Zulemita, as a front row guest at the official ceremony; he has described Menem as ‘the best president in the history of the country’. Milei even has a similar hairstyle to Menem, a kind of visual intertextuality (Lazar 2015) that we should not overlook from this most symbolically-conscious of political actors. That all matters because of Menem’s relation to earlier periods of inflation. Menem is the main figure associated with neoliberal small-state ideologies and their implementation in Argentina, the ‘strong man’ who controlled the hyperinflation of 1989-1990 through an exercise of neoliberal shock therapy celebrated by the IMF as one of the most drastic in the world. Together with his Minister of the Economy, Domingo Cavallo, he brought both economic stability (via the Convertibility Plan that kept the peso at a 1:1 exchange rate with the US dollar during the 1990s) and its subsequent collapse, in one of the most acute economic crises the world has seen this century (in 2001). By associating himself with Menem, Milei is making the claim that he will be similarly successful; that his economic policies will usher in a similar period of stability and consumption. He is quiet on the subsequent collapse, of course, but that remains at the forefront of his opponents’ minds.

Terminator in Office

The invocation of the 1990s is combined also with a claim to novelty, to breaking with past assumptions, especially about the role of the state. In his first speech as president in December 2023, Milei addressed Congress and the population stating that it was the beginning of ‘a new era in Argentina’. Symbolically, he did not deliver the speech inside the Congress, but rather outside and turning his back on it. After the official speech, he addressed his supporters more directly, saying something that has by now become his trademark: ‘There is no money’. He added: ‘There is no alternative to adjustment and shock’ to the loud cheers of thousands of supporters.

But, despite the emphasis on a radical new approach in terms of the political responses to the crisis, non-linear continuities with the past also became noticeable. And while in rhetoric Milei condemned ‘la casta’, many prominent political figures from the past populate government ranks, including several members of the Menem family –or ‘Menem clan’ as journalist Gabriela Vulcano described them – who were given important political positions.

More important to the way Milei has addressed inflation are the leading economists in his team. Federico Sturzenegger and Luis ‘Toto’ Caputo were both key figures in economic policy-making (both presidents of the Central Bank) during Mauricio Macri’s administration (2015-19) and they are now both Ministers (of Deregulation and the Economy, respectively). In their hands, monetary policy has been focused on reducing the deficit and reaching ‘fiscal order’, terms that are supposed to ‘stabilize’ the economy. Milei also emphasizes privatization as a flagship policy, with arguments that could have come directly out of the early 1990s: that public companies drive deficits, drain public funds, and provide bad services. In a TV interview shortly after winning the elections, he claimed: ‘Everything that can be transferred to the private sector, it is best that it is in the hands of the private sector (…) Because it has been proven that everything that the public sector does, it does badly’. That said, while Menem had been swift in selling state assets and companies, Milei is having less success and experiencing far more opposition to those particular measures. To this day, no sales have actually been agreed.

It’s not clear how far Milei and his allies will be able to proceed in their goal of reducing the state as far as possible to its security apparatus and that which is needed to promote their own electoral goals (a strategy familiar to politicians well beyond just Menem and Milei). The debate has moved slightly on from inflation per se into a broader attack on the very concept of state care and of the public. In an interview given to the US media outlet The Free Press, Milei claimed that he would ‘destroy the state from within’ and compared himself to the sci-fi character Terminator who comes from an ‘apocalyptic future to prevent the advance of socialism’. This destruction is underway through a constant attack on the notion of the ‘public’ and the workers who bring it to life as de facto socialist and therefore evil. It’s a more aggressive version of the attitude revealed in the 1990s comedian Antonio Gasalla’s affectionate caricature of the ‘empleada pública’ (state employee) who extracts a bribe, exerts her authority, and sips mate while citizens queue up outside her office to put through a tramite (bureaucratic task), only for the piece of paper they bring to be ripped up and thrown into the trash once they turn their backs, while their 100 pesos is carefully pocketed.  

While Menem could reduce the fiscal deficit by moving national state expenditure on health and education to provincial budgets, Milei has less room for maneuver. A number of the people around him are instead promoting a more familiar transfer of resources from the middle/lower-middle classes to elites, via taxation concessions. His attempts to block labor rights are currently stalled due to a legal case brought by the General Trade Union Confederation (CGT), and his government’s refusal to meet its legal obligation to provide food for communal kitchens is also being challenged in the courts, with judge after judge ruling against the government. Not many are optimistic about the chances of inhibiting Milei’s worst excesses, but those who are optimistic point to the Legislature elections coming up next year, which might reduce his political legitimacy. Yet, it’s the attack on the state – and on public sector workers and politicians in particular – from which Milei derives much of his popular legitimacy, and it’s that which sounds so familiar to the debates about adjustment and privatization of the 1990s. It is a long-embedded way to understand politics and the state, but even that probably won’t last much longer into the future if prices continue to rise. 

This text is part of the feature The Social Life of Inflation edited by Sian Lazar, Evan van Roeckel, and Ståle Wig. 

Sian Lazar is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Her latest book is How we Struggle: A Political Anthropology of Labour (Pluto Press).

Dolores Señorans is Departmental Lecturer at the Oxford Department of International Development. Her research focuses on popular economies and collective labour politics in Argentina.

References

Lazar, S. (2015). ‘“This Is Not a Parade, It’s a Protest March”: Intertextuality, Citation, and Political Action on the Streets of Bolivia and Argentina.’ American Anthropologist, 117: 242-256. 

Luzzi, M., & Wilkis, A. (2023). Dollar: How the US Dollar Became a Popular Currency in Argentina (1930-2019). University of New Mexico Press

Milei, J. (2023). El fin de la inflación. Eliminar el Banco Central, terminar con la estafa del impuesto inflacionario y volver a ser un país en serio.Buenos Aires: Grupo Editorial Planeta.

Vázquez, M (2023) ‘Los picantes del liberalismo. Jovenes militantes de Milei y ‘nuevas derechas’’’; in Semán, P. (ed) Está entre Nosotros. ¿De dónde sale y hasta dónde puede llegar la extrema derecha que no vimos venir?. Buenos Aires: siglo veintiuno

Cite as: Lazar, Sian and Señorans, Dolores 2024. “Argentina: inflation, monetary disorder, and political experimentation” Focaalblog 10 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/12/10/sian-lazar-and-dolores-senorans-argentina-inflation-monetary-disorder-and-political-experimentation/

Blog, Features, The Social Life of Inflation

Harry Pettit: Theft, resistance, and the struggle over cash circulation in Beirut’s platform economy

Image 1: Drivers waiting to deposit money at BOB Finance, photo by author

In October 2023, I sat with Hameed in a café in Hamra in Beirut, nearby his flat. He had just collected his salary, a stack of green 100,000 notes of Lebanese lira that amounted to 12 million (around 130 dollars): “look,” he said despondently, “this is not going to last more than two weeks, the company are thieves.” I asked him how he would survive. Rather than saying out loud, he preceded to sheepishly get his phone out and start typing on the calculator how much money he owed to friends, 42 dollars, 38 dollars, 180 dollars, 72 dollars, he kept going. It came to 500 dollars, but these were only the amounts he remembered at the time.

Hameed had come to Beirut from Syria with his family in 2011, after the civil war broke out. He had worked multiple jobs, without a work or residence permit, in Beirut’s service economy. For the last 3 years he had worked as a driver for the Lebanese food delivery app Toters. Toters has grown rapidly in Lebanon in recent years. Its rise has been stimulated by the multiple crises that have crippled the Lebanese economy: the financial crisis of 2019 and subsequent economic downturn led to its competition exiting the market; the Covid-19 pandemic dramatically increased home delivery; and the Syrian war provided an army of cheap, undocumented Syrian labour.

The financial crisis has had other consequences. One has been the dramatic surge in Lebanon’s cash economy, which went from 14 per cent of GDP in 2020 to 46 per cent in 2022. This has rapidly produced a new set of infrastructures, actors, and practices for storing and circulating money – at a time of rapid currency devaluation and increased dollarization. Companies began operating in cash due to exorbitant bank fees and distrust, money transfer and exchange services with links to political parties have boomed, and new digital wallets (like the company Purpl) are trying to fill the void left by banks.

When I was following the lives of Syrian drivers working for Toters between January and October 2023, I became interested in the ways in which cash was moving around the mini-economy created by Toters, between customers, delivery drivers, team leaders, money storers, and the company itself. What I want to argue is that, by following cash around, we can see how infrastructures of money circulation become a terrain of struggle between different actors (Scott, 2022). In this instance, the circulation of cash became a way for Toters to extract extra value from its racialised workforce and customers. But it also opens up the possibility for fractured forms of resistance and survival for workers.

Theft through depreciation

Between January and April 2023, the value of the Lebanese lira plummeted. It lost 61 per cent of its value to the dollar. Customers ordering food on Toters had to pay in lira – although sometimes drivers accepted dollars and exchanged it themselves for a small extra fee, without the company’s knowledge. Customers paid in cash directly to the drivers as they delivered orders. When a driver collected three million lira, their account was automatically blocked and they could no longer take orders. To reopen it, they had to go to their team leader who waited at the same spot every day to deposit the money, or use BoB, a Lebanese money storage and transfer depository. This took time away from doing more orders. Any missing money – due to theft or miscalculation – always had to be made up by the driver. Once in BoB, this money was converted into dollars and transferred to a bank account in Dubai where Toters’ official headquarters is located.

Image 2: A driver’s account being blocked, photo by author

By doing this, Toters was able to protect itself from the currency devaluation of the lira. However, this was not the case for drivers. Drivers received a basic fee for each order, plus an extra fee based on distance. In addition, when fewer drivers were on the road, delivery competitions were organised by the company: e.g., if a driver did six orders in two hours, they got an additional amount. On a day of no interruptions drivers did 20-25 orders, which produced ten to twelve dollars (500,000-600,000 Lebanese lira) in earnings. The fees were accumulated, recorded on the mobile app and distributed to drivers in Lebanese lira at the end of each month. This delay meant they had to watch helplessly as the value of their labour plummeted over the month – for example in January 2023 drivers lost a third of the value of their earnings. Meanwhile, their expenses such as rent, electricity, internet, food, and petrol were either paid in dollars or went up with the dollar very quickly.

For Hameed, this induced much frustration, as he described while we sat in a café in mid-March 2023:

“I’m tired, I’m tired. The dollar reached 100,000 lira today, it will reach 200,000 as well. [He pointed to his pack of cigarettes] look, 50,000, the coffee 40,000, then petrol is now 400,000 a day, you spend 600,000 easily, and you don’t even make that from orders. I don’t understand why all the expenses like rent and electricity, even coffee goes up straight away when the dollar goes up, but the only thing that doesn’t go up is the salary. The company just makes extra money, the restaurants can raise their prices, but the workers paid in lira are just losing.”

Image 3: A call out on TikTok for drivers to participate in the strike, screenshot sent to author by Hameed

This depreciation was also a problem for restaurants, who had to wait two weeks before getting their revenue from Toters, which at times led to a 20-30 per cent devaluation of the money. As one restaurant owner told me: “[Toters] are worse than Riad Salameh (the former Lebanese Central Bank Governor), all this playing with money, they have an amazing cash flow…you know they told me ‘we are partners’, I said you are my partner in profit only.”

The way in which cash circulation was set up enabled Toters to extract extra value from the drivers and the restaurants. As Hameed mentioned, restaurants were at least able to raise their prices or start pricing in dollars. The organisation of a percentage fee between 20-25 per cent – with the restaurant paying the costs of VAT and discounts – ensured the platform’s income went up automatically. To keep pace with lira devaluation, drivers’ order fees would have had to increase by 155 per cent between January and April. However, for the month of January the fee did not change despite drivers’ complaints. Drivers demanded their salaries and fees be calculated in dollars. At the end of January, they organised a two-day strike through WhatsApp groups, word of mouth, and TikTok. While impossible to know the scale exactly, at its height 900 people were in the main WhatsApp group, and the Toters app was effectively shut down.

Toters tried to break the strike by punitively firing strike organisers and by sending messages telling drivers they had to do a minimum amount of orders or face firing. But eventually, as Toters’ reputation took a hit on critical media channels, it gave a 38 per cent increase in lira with very modest increases following later as the lira continued to rise. However, to compensate, Toters used its digital infrastructure to rapidly increase the delivery fee charged to customers, the vast majority of which went to the platform. Drivers complained that this had the cruel effect of suppressing tips as customers considered the fee the tip. Furthermore, after the order fee increase, for a while Toters stopped organising competitions for additional income, thus further suppressing driver wages.

Borrowing cash to survive

Amidst devaluing incomes, drivers were constantly pushed into situations where they could not pay expenses. Monthly incomes never reached more than 200 dollars, and were more often around 120-160 dollars. This was just about enough to afford food and rent – but the sickness of a child, a broken or stolen motorbike, or an issue at home, as one driver described, would easily break the delicate balance they were living with. One of the biggest issues they faced were the checkpoints set up by the ‘darak’ (Lebanese internal security forces) which, according to drivers, particularly targeted Toters workers because they were known to be undocumented Syrians – thus making them an easy target for bribes. Officers asked for a work permit, then confiscated the bike, which was only reclaimable upon payment of a fine – anything between 10 and 50 dollars.

Image 4: A driver being stopped by the ‘darak’, photo sent to author by Hameed

In this context, drivers needed to constantly borrow money to sustain their livelihood. I was introduced to this situation when I met Hameed in late-February after his account had been closed. I accompanied him to an online gaming shop. He went up to the man at the desk and took 900,000 lira (15 dollars at the time). Hameed then went straight to the coffee shop across the street where his team leader was waiting and handed over 3 million lira. When he came out, he explained how he had taken money collected from the customers to buy a new gas canister. He therefore needed to borrow from his friend to return the money to his team leader. After getting his account reopened, he would work for an hour and then pay his friend back, again from the customer’s money. When I responded in shock, Hameed shrugged and said: “one borrows from another and then one borrows from another, the money just goes around. That’s how it is here” (this is similar to the circulation of debt found by Isabelle Guérin (2014) in South India).

It was very common for drivers to use the cash from customers to pay for both daily expenses and emergencies. The salary disappeared quickly on rent, electricity costs, and food, while tips were highly unpredictable. As a result, the customer money was an immediate source of cash. If depositing this money in a money transfer service such as BoB, drivers would not have to return the whole amount they owed, just make sure they remained beneath the threshold of three million.

While team leaders were also there to collect customer cash for the company, they sometimes helped drivers out. This could be through raising their cash threshold, or reopening their account, but it also included more personal practices. One described such an occasion to me: “one of my drivers hurt his leg, and needed a gel. He came and gave me the customer’s money, but said he can’t work. I asked why he didn’t buy the gel, he said he has no money. So I gave him 250,000 from my personal money.” This team leader described how his positionality helped him act in this way: “management just think the drivers lie, but I know what they go through, so I can help them out. This was a friend situation, not a work situation, in work I am professional. I understand the company can’t become soft, drivers do lie, they can’t give exceptions to people.”

This practice of survival is directly enabled by the fact that money circulation took the cash form. Another delivery company actually formalised this practice of borrowing by lending money directly to drivers, but taking collateral such as a car, bike, or piece of jewellery in case they did not repay, and deducting directly from future salaries. But borrowing from Toters was not enough to meet monetary needs. On some occasions I heard about drivers who had stolen money from the company when they had just collected a huge order. These drivers earned heroic status among others. However, it was extremely risky as the company could mobilise their close connections with the police to locate drivers. For the most part, drivers relied on a network of communal support. This reflects what others have found especially in communities where formalised banking is not preferred (Wig, 2023). This took multiple forms, from borrowing electricity, internet, or food from neighbours, taking products from shops and paying back later, or borrowing small amounts from friends and other drivers. But it also took the form of taking larger amounts of several hundred or thousands of dollars – often from a relative abroad or a driver who had no dependents.

Drivers were therefore always in the process of paying someone back. Sometimes lenders were flexible because they were family or long-term friends. But this flexibility was precarious and open to sudden change. For Alaa, a 21-year-old driver who carried financial responsibility for his whole family, this veneer of stability was lost when several events occurred at the same time. It began with a bike accident that left him unable to work. This meant he was unable to pay the rent. Soon after the man from whom he had borrowed to buy his motorbike demanded repayment. To avoid the threat of arrest or violence, Ahmed gave the bike back until he could find the 500 dollars required. During this period, Ahmed complained about how Lebanon’s economic crisis was reducing generosity: “people are holding on tighter to their money nowadays”, he lamented. Eventually he did manage to scrape together the cash needed, only to quickly meet another request for money; this time from the police regarding a bike he had sold two years before but was still registered in his name – which had now accumulated various fines.

Conclusion

The stories described here demonstrate the vastly different means different actors have to control the circulation of cash. In a context of rapid inflation and currency devaluation, Toters was able to arrange this circulation in a way that enabled them to extract extra value from drivers and customers. They used temporal techniques and flexible digital infrastructures to control the flow of cash to their benefit. To counter this, the undocumented Syrian drivers had little room for manoeuvre – other than risky, arduous tactics such as borrowing, theft, and collective action. Instead, their liveability, and therefore the extractive operation of the company, relied on material and social networks of communal support to acquire the cash they needed.

This text is part of the feature The Social Life of Inflation edited by Sian Lazar, Evan van Roeckel, and Ståle Wig. 

Harry Pettit is an Assistant Professor in Economic Geography at Radboud University Nijmegen. He is interested in researching the new forms of extraction and livability opening up within late-capitalist systems, with a focus on the MENA region.

References

Guérin, I. 2014. ‘Juggling with Debt, Social Ties, and Values: The Everyday Use of Microcredit in Rural South India.’ Current Anthropology, 55 (9), pp. 40-50.

Scott, B. 2022. Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets. New York: Penguin.

Wig, S. 2023. ‘Infrabanking: Mobilizing capital in communist Cuba.’ Economic Anthropology 11 (1)l, pp. 59-70.

Cite as: Pettit, Harry 2024. “Theft, resistance, and the struggle over cash circulation in Beirut’s platform economy” Focaalblog 10 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/12/10/harry-pettit-theft-resistance-and-the-struggle-over-cash-circulation-in-beiruts-platform-economy/

Blog, Features, The Social Life of Inflation

Alexandrine Royer: ‘In Kigali, life is expensive’: how everyday inflation talk gives voice to political and class frustrations 

Image 1: Food vendors at Kigali’s central Kimironko market, photo by author

I encountered the phrase ‘in Kigali, life is expensive’ everywhere during my 15 months of fieldwork within the tech ecosystem of Rwanda. Official government figures stated that the price of common food staples had increased by 35% but residents estimated it to be much higher. Gas, electricity and housing prices were also soaring. My interlocutors asked whether I knew the cost of potatoes, bus transport, and rent, wondering if as a muzungu (white foreigner), I was shielded from these economic pressures. In Rwanda, where politics is an uneasy and potentially threatening topic, inflation was a shared device through which individuals across social classes could comfortably voice critiques of rising social and class inequality. I build on Amri’s (2023) concept of ‘inflation-talk’ to argue that small talk on the rising cost of living, with its outward apolitical nature and indefinite causes, provided a safe discursive space for disclosing class and political frustrations.

When I asked around the tech ecosystem why life in Kigali was getting so expensive, responses generally converged around the hypothesized causes of inflation, such as the war in Ukraine, low local agricultural productivity, and the continuous devaluation of the Rwandan franc. As one person commented, ‘there’s huge inequality now. The rich get richer, and the market follows the haves’. The rising inequality in Rwanda sat awkwardly with the Government of Rwanda’s confirmation of the country’s teleological trajectory towards becoming a prosperous ICT-based economy as outlined in the guiding policy document Vision 2050. During tech conferences, held in nicely air-conditioned halls with swanky Afro-fusion decorations, international delegates and heads of state would praise President Paul Kagame for his vision in transforming Rwanda from a country once torn apart by genocidal violence towards becoming a continental leader for ICT development. Yet, outside such spaces, interlocutors commented on how the rising cost of living made their participation in this tech universe more difficult. Founders let go of staff, cancelled their coworking memberships and confessed their worries about possible consequences for their social and business reputations.

In the economic literature, financial crises and a rapid rise in food prices are frequently correlated with civic action and social unrest (see Bellemare 2015). But very few of my interlocutors in Kigali openly criticized the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF), Rwanda’s ruling party for the past 30 years. Returnee diaspora, which made up a sizeable portion of the tech ecosystem, would actively participate in the online defence of president Kagame, most virulently on X, with hashtags such as #TeamPK. Following the announcement on 15 July 2024 of Kagame’s re-election with 99% of the vote, Rwandans were quick to defend the results after Human Rights Watch reported a lack of genuine political competition. As one tweet stated, “Rwanda is a sovereign country and its President doesn’t have anything to answer to Western colonisers trying to impose their so called order on it…”. The RPF’s post-genocide ‘Ndi Umunyarwanda’ (Kinyarwanda for ‘I am Rwandan’) strategy of national reconciliation criminalized references to ethnic identity and further obliged Rwandans to reject all forms of social division (Purdeková & Mwambari 2022) to embrace a front of unity. Lists of permissible and forbidden citizen behaviours were pasted on the walls of schools and at the entrance of villages. Talking negatively about the country was identified as subject to discipline and punishment. Publicly voicing political critiques could result in accusations of anti-patriotism or worse, of harbouring genocidal ideologies.

In studies of Rwanda, scholars, most notably Thomson (2013), have sought to identify through James C. Scott’s ‘weapons of the weak’ (1985) instances of resistance towards the Rwandan state. Yet, as Rollason (2019) underscores, such studies pre-suppose defiance in citizens’ engagements with authorities and reify a division between the ruling and the ruled. Yet, many of my interlocutors, like Rollason’s, navigated the same social circles as government functionaries and held varying levels of political privilege gained through patronage or familial connections. In private conversations, they expressed an ambivalence towards the country’s politics rather than a stark opposition or deference to power. Some Rwandans expressed continued indebtedness to Kagame for allowing their families’ return, whilst other African nationals saw restricted political freedom as part of a trade-off for government effectiveness, saying ‘here at least you know where the money is going’. Paul Kagame’s presidency was part of an accepted order that could just as easily be toppled over. As a friend related, ‘everyone here says that they are for the president. But the last president, before the genocide, he also got 99% of the vote’. There was a longer history of dissimulation in Rwanda and maintaining an image of stability in contrast to its more turbulent neighbours.

It is in this climate of ‘quiet insecurity’ (Grant 2015) that conversations about the cost of living, first described in apolitical economic terms as concerns over rising food prices or other essentials, became an avenue by which people voice political and class frustrations. When housesitting for friends in a predominantly expat neighbourhood, I was approached by their cleaner, Hope, who asked whether I was looking for additional house help. I awkwardly replied no but promised to keep an ear out. Mopping the floors of the study, Hope would occasionally pause to volunteer bits of her familial history. She narrated the loss of her father and siblings during the genocide, with herself and surviving members fleeing to Uganda before eventually settling back in Kigali in the early 2000s. Hope struggled to cover her monthly rent and feared eviction. As usual for discussions on politics in Rwanda, she began with praise for the President to avoid reproach before delving into frustrations. She said, “I like Kagame because he saved many people, but Rwanda has too many rules…working three days a week is not enough, the cost of food in Rwanda is now very high. I support my mother…. It’s very difficult being poor in Rwanda, the genocide was not nice, very sad. In Uganda, the poor can sell food on the street, the women can make money, but in Rwanda it’s illegal, you can get into big trouble…” Hope was referring to the RPF’s criminalization of hawking, petty trading and street food vending (Finn 2017). Such measures aimed at making Kigali a ‘clean and modern city’ constrained the urban poor’s ability to multiple hustles and weather rising costs.

More privileged Rwandans also felt government policies were often out of touch with the socio-economic realities of most Kigalians. I met up with a founder friend over lunch, Shema, who recounted how his startup had experienced some recent financial setbacks. He mentioned that the new school budgets introduced by the Ministry of Education were barely adjusted for inflation, leaving little room for schools to spend on ed-tech products. School directors were more concerned with retaining quality teaching staff than investing in e-learning. As Shema explained, “the cost of Irish potatoes for one 1kg has now gone up to 1500 Rwf [approx. 1.50 USD] but the average salary for a teacher in Rwanda is now 70 000 Rwf [approx. 70 USD], how can people afford that?”

Being the youngest child of a single-parent household, Shema was proud of how he had risen from kitchen staff to managerial positions in the hospitality industry before dedicating himself to his startup. He felt the city’s rich kids, who often occupied key positions in the Presidential office, would likely not understand his, or his clients’, financial struggles: “It’s almost as if these guys are not Rwandans, they can sometimes barely speak Kinyarwanda and in their summers, they go on vacation to France or the US or Canada…these guys have probably never shopped at Nymirambo market, they go and get their groceries from Sawa Citi or Simba [supermarket chains]… They are the ones who then go study abroad and come back and make policies, but they don’t know what life is like in Rwanda. You know Claire Kamanzi [CEO of Rwanda Development Board], she wasn’t even in Rwanda before, how can they know the country, they only know about it from reading reports…”. Picking up on his comments, I inquired further as to what needs to change in Rwanda, to which he replied, “it would be if the system was for the masses, here it is the elites who in charge”. As reflected in the conversation with Shema, talk on the felt effects of inflation opened a portal to discussions on middle-class and elite urban divides and how such schisms mapped onto political decision-making.

The rising cost-of-living further hindered my interlocutors’ aspirations to attain or preserve middle-class living in Kigali and its accompanying social norms. Like Nairobi’s peri-urban population studied by Lockwood (2020), current socio-economic inequalities in Kigali were not seen as a permanent condition, but as part of a challenge to ‘make it’ and achieve the standard of living possessed by others. Foreign entrepreneurs from the Global North could weather the franc’s continuous devaluation and primarily resided in upmarket neighbourhoods.

But local young founders, predominantly men, complained about how it was now impossible to save for a house within your twenties, adding that girls now were more interested in dating older men with money. Male homeownership in Rwanda remained a prerequisite for marriage and the social transition to adulthood. Many mentioned how their irregular incomes had caused issues with their girlfriends, as they cynically joked that ‘it was becoming too expensive to adult’. Some were equally forced to relocate to neighbourhoods on the outskirts of Kigali and expressed feeling squeezed out of the city. Economic pressure further caused a series of aches and pains, as colleagues and entrepreneurs complained of burnout, fatigue and anxiety.

In a context where politics is laden with couched terms, speaking on inflation and its felt effects allowed interlocutors to share pointed political critiques and reveal class-based social tensions. The cost-of-living crisis threatened the aspirational livelihoods of my predominantly middle-class interlocutors and undid the image of a prosperous nation that the government endeavoured to maintain. For my interlocutors, commentary on inflation did not stand alone; it provided a means of contextualizing and reflecting on the socio-economic, gendered and political make-up of life in post-genocide Kigali and its resultant inequalities. It further opened questions on who would ultimately profit from the country’s push towards modernization.

This text is part of the feature The Social Life of Inflation edited by Sian Lazar, Evan van Roeckel, and Ståle Wig. 

Alexandrine Royer is a doctoral candidate in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Her work centres on digital economies, startup culture and development practices in East Africa, with a focus on Rwanda.

References

Bellemare, M. F. (2015). Rising Food Prices, Food Price Volatility, and Social Unrest. American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 97(1), 1–21.

Grant, A. M. (2015). ‘Quiet Insecurity and Quiet Agency in Post-Genocide Rwanda’. Ethnofoor 27(2): 15-36

Finn, B. (2017). Quietly Chasing Kigali: Young Men and the Intolerance of Informality in Rwanda’s Capital City. Urban Forum (Johannesburg), 29(2), 205-218.

Lockwood, P. (2020). The Greedy Eaters: A moral politics of continuity and consumption in urbanising central Kenya [Apollo – University of Cambridge Repository]. https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.65545

Purdeková, A. & D. Mwambari (2022) Post-genocide identity politics and colonial durabilities in Rwanda, Critical African Studies, 14:1, 19-37, DOI: 10.1080/21681392.2021.1938404

Rollason, W. (2019) ‘Motorbike People Power and Politics on Rwandan Streets’. Lanham: Lexington Books. 

Thomson, S. 2013. Whispering Truth to Power: Everyday Resistance to Reconciliation in Postgenocide Rwanda. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Cite as: Royer, Alexandrine 2024. “‘In Kigali, life is expensive’: how everyday inflation talk gives voice to political and class frustrations” Focaalblog 10 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/12/10/alexandrine-royer-in-kigali-life-is-expensivehow-everyday-inflation-talk-gives-voice-to-political-and-class-frustrations/

Blog, Features, The Social Life of Inflation

Steffen Köhn: Tokens of survival: the rise of crypto gaming in Cuba’s inflationary economy

Image 1: Screenshot of elTOQUE’s daily listing of average exchange rates for various currencies and cryptocurrencies on the informal market as of August 28th, 2024

Cuba is currently facing one of its most severe economic crises in decades. The island nation is contending with the compounded effects of a global pandemic, tightening U.S. sanctions, and its own mismanaged monetary reforms, all of which have created a perfect storm of high inflation, scarcity, and social unrest. As the Cuban peso (CUP) loses value at a rapid pace, Cubans are increasingly turning to alternative currencies and unconventional economic activities to survive. Among these, play-to-earn crypto games like Axie Infinity have emerged as an unexpected source of income, offering a connection to the global digital economy for those who do not have access to remittances from abroad. However, the game’s economic model, which requires significant initial investment and relies heavily on exploitative “scholarship” arrangements, ended up reinforcing pre-existing social inequalities rather than addressing them. Moreover, Axie Infinity faced severe inflation issues itself, with the in-game currency devaluing rapidly due to an oversupply. Over time, its structure began to resemble the characteristics of a Ponzi scheme, where new investments were needed to sustain returns for existing players. This forced players to navigate an increasingly unstable digital economy, where opportunities for profit were outweighed by rising risks.

To understand the emergence of play-to-earn games as a significant economic practice in Cuba, we must first grasp the current economic landscape. Cuba’s economy has been hit hard by several overlapping crises. The Covid-19 pandemic brought tourism—the country’s economic backbone—to a near standstill. Concurrently, U.S. sanctions, particularly those tightened under the Trump administration, restricted remittances, cut off access to international financial systems, and further isolated Cuba from global financial flows.

Internally, the Cuban government’s decision to implement the Ordenamiento Monetario in January 2021—intended as a comprehensive monetary reform—eliminated the longstanding dual currency system that had kept the economy afloat. Before this reform, the Cuban peso (CUP) was used for domestic transactions and salaries, while the dollar-pegged convertible peso (CUC) was used for tourism, luxury goods, and international trade, which allowed the government to control access to foreign currency and manage economic disparities. By making the CUP the sole legal tender and devaluing it against the U.S. dollar, the reform triggered runaway inflation. The artificially low exchange rate of the CUP against the dollar could not be sustained, leading to a spiraling devaluation of the national currency.

Amid the financial turmoil, many Cubans are turning to alternative currencies to protect their savings in more stable forms and to manage everyday transactions. Cryptocurrencies, particularly USDT, a stablecoin pegged to the U.S. dollar and (theoretically) backed by dollar reserves, have gained significant popularity as a tool for receiving remittances and facilitating cross-border payments. Meanwhile, digital credits—ranging from balances on apps like Zelle and Tropipay to phone credits—emerged as vital tools within Cuba’s expanding informal economy. During the pandemic, the Cuban government introduced its own digital currency, the moneda libremente convertible (MLC), pegged to the dollar and meant to serve as a substitute for foreign currency in state-run stores selling essential goods. The MLC was specifically designed to capture hard currency for the state, as it could only be acquired through foreign currency deposits or remittances. However, as its acceptance became limited to a shrinking number of outlets and a thriving black market developed for exchanging MLC into other currencies, its value eroded, declining sharply against both the U.S. dollar and digital credits denominated in dollars on payment apps.

The Currency Black Market: A Disorderly Landscape

This monetary disorder has led to a burgeoning informal market for currency exchange, which operates largely through digital platforms like Telegram and WhatsApp. Here, Cubans negotiate the value of dollars, euros, MLC credits, and various cryptocurrencies, often using intermediaries to facilitate exchanges. elTOQUE, an independent news outlet based in Miami, has become a key player by publishing the informal exchange rates of these currencies daily. These rates are determined by bots scraping buy and sell offers from major Telegram groups, yet they remain contentious, with frequent accusations of manipulation, particularly from the Cuban government.

Image 2 : Screenshots of elTOQUE’s daily listing of average exchange rates for various currencies and cryptocurrencies on the informal market as of August 28th, 2024.

In this chaotic environment, cryptocurrencies offer another refuge from the collapsing Cuban peso, but they also introduce new complexities, particularly in converting digital assets into usable cash. Many Cubans now use stablecoins like USDT to preserve value and facilitate international payments, while digital platforms have become essential tools for managing remittances and cross-border transactions. However, the real challenge lies in bridging the gap between these digital currencies and local cash. On platforms like Telegram and Revolico, brokers facilitate exchanges from digital tokens to cash, often charging high fees and adding another layer of volatility and risk to an already unstable financial landscape.

Image 3: Listings of currency exchange offers posted in various Telegram groups

Gaming the System: How Axie Infinity Became an Economic Lifeline

Amid Cuba’s ongoing inflationary crisis, an unexpected means of accessing digital tokens emerged: play-to-earn crypto video games like Axie Infinity. Developed by the Vietnamese company Sky Mavis, Axie Infinity allows players to breed, battle, and trade digital pets known as Axies, which are unique digital assets or non-fungible tokens (NFTs) stored on the blockchain, enabling players to own, trade, and speculate with their in-game holdings. The game broke into the mainstream in many low- and lower-middle-income countries in the summer of 2021, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. It became a widespread phenomenon across much of the Global South, permitting players to earn substantial income in the game’s cryptocurrency, Smooth Love Potion (SLP). As global lockdowns cut off traditional jobs and informal income opportunities, the game (at least for a while) enabled players in countries like the Philippines, Venezuela, and Indonesia to earn hundreds of dollars per month—often well above their local median wage—and offering economic opportunities that their physical economies could not.

Image 4: Screenshot of a battle in Axie Infinity’s arena mode, where players from around the world compete using their Axies.

For thousands of Cubans, especially those without access to remittances, Axie Infinity quickly became a potential economic fallback. With traditional income sources disrupted by the pandemic and ongoing inflation, the game offers a rare opportunity to earn cryptocurrency, which can then be traded on the black market for pesos or other more stable currencies. However, participating in Axie Infinity is not without its challenges, and many Cuban players have had to navigate a complex landscape of intermediaries, scams, and volatile markets to turn their virtual earnings into real-world value.

Image 5: The study notes of an Axie Infinity scholarship holder

The entry barrier to Axie Infinity is steep. At its peak, in July 2021, even the cheapest team of three Axies required to start playing cost around $1,000—an impossible sum for most Cubans. This led to the emergence of a parallel economy where affluent players and companies, often based in wealthier countries, granted “scholarships” to aspiring players. Gaming guilds emerged on Telegram, offering training sessions and conducting entrance exams for those seeking scholarships. These scholarships involved lending Axies to players who couldn’t afford them in exchange for a share of their earnings, often up to 70 per cent. This system allowed Cuban players to participate in the game, but it also mirrored exploitative labor practices, with the scholars—typically from the Global South—bearing the brunt of the risk while the asset owners in more developed nations took the lion’s share of the profits.

Scholars were required to play for several hours every day, with their performance closely monitored—either by coaches hired by NFT owners to provide training but also to surveil them, or through surveillance software that tracked their activity. In my friend Juan’s guild, there were even two competitive leagues, and members could be relegated like football teams. Those who failed to meet performance targets were quickly replaced by other aspiring players, reinforcing a precarious labor market marked by a harsh hire-and-fire culture. In this context, Axie Infinity’s promise of decentralized and equitable opportunities increasingly resembled a new form of digital serfdom, perpetuating existing inequalities rather than alleviating them.

Trust and Mistrust in the Cuban Crypto Economy

Beyond the game itself, Cuban players encountered significant challenges when trying to convert their in-game earnings into usable currency. Due to U.S. sanctions, centralized cryptocurrency exchanges like Binance and Coinbase block users from Cuba, forcing players to depend on informal and often opaque networks for transactions. In the Telegram currency exchange groups where Cubans from across the country participate, the primary challenge was establishing trust, as no one wanted to be the first to send cryptocurrency or fiat money and risk relying on the trading partner to follow through. This led to the development of new intermediaries and trust mechanisms. To mitigate the risk of fraud, some Telegram groups set up their own escrow systems, where admins held funds from both parties for a fee until the exchange was finalized. Other groups introduced a VIP system, granting trusted status to users with multiple successful transactions who provided personal information to the group’s administrator and paid a monthly fee. While these systems offered a semblance of security, they also underscored the inherent contradictions of a supposedly “trustless” blockchain-based economy that, in reality, relied heavily on middlemen and trust-based social networks to work.

Despite the often exploitative working conditions and the complicated process of cashing out game tokens, Cuban Axie Infinity players demonstrated considerable agency in navigating these challenges. They used platforms like Discord or Telegram to create grassroots solidarity networks, actively sharing information about scholarship opportunities and educating others on gaming strategies. This sense of community and mutual support became a crucial resource for many players striving to make the most of the game’s economic opportunities.

For many Cubans, Axie Infinity also represented a rare chance to engage in the global digital economy at a time when Cuban society had only recently come online. It enabled some players to transition from mere participants to asset owners and investors by purchasing their own Axies. Many of the players I interviewed had eventually invested in the game, buying their own digital pets and exploring the speculative potential of this virtual economy. For these players, the game marked their first encounter with a global financial market, pushing them toward speculative behavior and exposing them to its inherent risks. The SLP token—like many cryptocurrencies—proved to be even more volatile than the Cuban peso, making it a highly unpredictable asset. Nevertheless, this volatility did not deter them from hoping to strike it big; rather, it underscored the precarious yet captivating nature of their engagement with digital economies.

Precarious Play

The experience of Cuban Axie Infinity players sheds light on a broader trend in the digital economy: the merging of play, work, and investment in ways that challenge traditional definitions of labor. Concepts like “gamification” (Robson 2015) and “playbor” (Kücklich 2005) have been used to describe how game-like elements are incorporated into non-game contexts to enhance engagement or extract value. However, play-to-earn games like Axie Infinity take this a step further by directly integrating financial incentives into gameplay, creating a highly speculative and precarious form of digital work.

Image 6: Screenshot from the website CoinMarketCap, showing the market trend of Axie’s highly volatile in-game cryptocurrency Smooth Love Potion (SLP).

For Cuban players, the volatility of the SLP token added another layer of uncertainty. In the early days, some players earned substantial sums, far exceeding local wages. But as new player growth slowed after the hype in the summer of 2021, the game’s revenue—and thus the value of in-game assets—plummeted. The in-game inflation began to mirror real-world inflation: the more players sought to extract value from the game without reinvesting, the faster the currency’s value declined. When North Korean hackers stole $620 million from the game’s blockchain in March 2022, the already fragile Axie economy collapsed further, leaving many players with worthless tokens (Harwell 2022).

The Fragile Promise of Blockchain

The case of Axie Infinity in Cuba exposes the limits of the promises made by blockchain evangelists (e.g. Tapscott and Tapscott 2016, Domjan et al. 2021, Kshetri 2023). Far from bringing financial inclusion and economic empowerment to the Global South, the game’s ecosystem often reproduced existing inequalities and inflationary dynamics. In theory, blockchain technology is supposed to offer a decentralized, transparent alternative to traditional financial systems. Yet, in practice, Cuban players found themselves entangled in a web of intermediaries, trust-based networks, and volatile markets, which reinforced rather than dismantled power imbalances.

The rise and fall of Axie Infinity in Cuba provides a stark reminder of the limitations and risks inherent in new digital economies. This became especially evident when Axie Infinity’s in-game inflation eventually surpassed the inflation in Cuba’s real economy that had driven many players to the game in the first place. While the game initially offered a lifeline to some, it also exposed the precarious nature of digital work, where players are subject to volatile earnings, insecure contracts, and exploitative conditions. The experience of Cuban players thus challenges the narrative that blockchain technology will bring about a more equitable global economy. Instead, these systems can easily replicate and even exacerbate existing inequalities, creating new forms of digital labor exploitation and financial speculation.

This text is part of the feature The Social Life of Inflation edited by Sian Lazar, Evan van Roeckel, and Ståle Wig.

Steffen Köhn is a filmmaker and associate professor of visual and multimodal anthropology at Aarhus University. He is the author of: Island In the Net. Emergent Digital Culture and its Social Consequences in Post-Castro Cuba (forthcoming with Princeton University Press) as well as Mediating Mobility. Visual Anthropology in the Age of Migration (Wallflower/Columbia University Press 2016). His films have been screened at the Berlinale, Slamdance, Rotterdam International Film Festival, BFI Film Festival London, and the Word Film Festival Montreal, among others.

References

Domjan, Paul, Gavin Serkin, Brandon Thomas, John Toshack. 2021. Chain Reaction: How Blockchain Will Transform the Developing World. Basel:Springer International Publishing.

Harwell, Drew. “U.S. Links Axie Infinity Crypto Heist to North Korean Hackers.” The Washington Post, April 14, 2022. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/04/14/us-links-axie-crypto-heist-north-korea/.

Kshetri, Nir. 2023. Blockchain in the Global South: Opportunities and Challenges for Businesses and Societies. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Kücklich, Julian 2005. Precarious playbour: Modders and the digital games industry. fibreculture 5 (1): 1-5.

Robson, Karen Kirk Plangger, Jan H. Kietzmann, Ian McCarthy,and Leyland Pitt. 2015. Is it all a game? Understanding the principles of gamification. Business Horizons 58 (4): 411-420.

Tapscott, Don and Alex Tapscott. 2016. Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World. New York: Penguin.

Cite as: Köhn, Steffen 2024 “Tokens of survival: the rise of crypto gaming in Cuba’s inflationary economy” Focaalblog 10 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/12/10/steffen-kohn-tokens-of-survival-the-rise-of-crypto-gaming-in-cubas-inflationary-economy/

Blog, Features, The Social Life of Inflation

Ståle Wig, Sian Lazar and Eva van Roekel: The social life of inflation: introduction

Image 1: Fruit and vegetables sales in Havana, Cuba, where inflation has sky-rocketed in recent years. Photo by Ingrid Evensen

After a period of relatively low inflation in many economies in the Global North, inflation has once again become a major world concern. The COVID-19 pandemic, which disrupted supply chains and labor markets, combined with increased government spending and rising energy prices due to the war in Ukraine, has contributed to a global surge in prices. Unsurprisingly, public debates have centered on how to stall this development. Bankers, policymakers, and economists negotiate which economic levers to pull, and when, to stabilize the prices. Amid discussions about rising interest rates, new monetary policy and government price caps, where does anthropology fit in? What can anthropology add to the academic study of inflation?

This blog series invites colleagues to explore the realities of inflation through ethnographic studies in their areas of expertise. How does global inflation effect people’s everyday lives? How do ordinary people navigate and experience price rises? Inflation, it turns out, is a fitting topic for anthropological research. The ethnographic method, known to focus on the fine-grained textures of everyday life, is suited to analyze not only why and how inflation occurs, but also how people try to sustain their lives and find new ways to attract and store value when the usefulness of their national currency starts melting away—like “a piece of chocolate in hand on a hot day,” as one disgruntled Cuban business owner recently put it.

As this collection reminds us, the causes and effects of inflation are discussed not only in government meeting rooms, Central Bank offices, or behind closed doors at lavish G7 summits but also in roadside cafes in Kashmir, among motorcycle delivery drivers in Beirut, high-school students in Caracas, and by aspiring tech entrepreneurs in Kigali. How inflation manifests in everyday conversations is of particular interest to anthropological research, because the way soaring prices become politicized—in other words, who or what is blamed for inflation—shapes its broader social and political consequences. Whether dissatisfaction with rising prices is expressed through electoral voting, union organizing, migration, or political protests, the everyday experience, framing and understanding of inflation remains crucial to its effects.

While inflation is on one level inherently political and moral, it is often perceived as technical, arguably due to the dominance of economics approaches to the issue. This very technicality can in turn have political effects. Based on fieldwork among aspiring tech entrepreneurs in Rwanda, Alexandrine Royer, for instance, describes how inflation becomes a way for disgruntled citizens to express political frustrations. As the Rwandan government has turned increasingly authoritarian, many are wary of openly directing their discontent at political leaders. “Inflation talk” (Amri 2023), being seemingly apolitical in nature, offers a safer avenue for articulating their concerns and complaints. The anthropology of inflation is well-suited to attune to these processes – investigating what political and moral modes of understanding underlie talk about and action directed at inflation. A striking case in this regard is Argentina, where the new president, a self-proclaimed anti-establishment candidate, rose to power by attributing the responsibility for inflation to his political opponents, as described by Sian Lazar and Dolores Señorans in their blog piece.

Another area for anthropological research concerns how ordinary people both produce and respond to prices. Arguably, since the work of historian E.P. Thompson (1971), economic anthropologists have recognized that even a seemingly technical issue like the pricing of goods is shaped by social and political processes beyond the economic forces of supply and demand. As Thompson famously showed, bread is not just another commodity but part of the “moral economy” of the working class, a share of the common good to which people feel they have a rightful claim. The makeup of the moral economy differs across geography and history. Drawing on field research in Pakistan, Quirin Rieder investigates the fascinating case of tea prices in rural Kashmir, showing how ordinary people may not only react to and protest inflation but also contribute, to some extent, to shaping the phenomenon itself. As it turns out, there are limits to how much people will accept to pay for a cup of tea, or indeed other staple items, like a basket of eggs, a bottle of water, or a pack of tampons.

Ethnographic research can reveal how such consumer preferences are defined by specific social and political histories, which in turn shape people’s reactions to, and attempts to handle, inflation. The point may seem obvious but is worth emphasizing. Not only does inflation unfold in economies that are historically and socially constituted, but as Neiburg (2023: 10) has put it, inflation itself is a “social and cultural fact”. Culturally and historically constituted notions of “the normal life”, and a “life worth living” will always contribute to shaping the experience of rising prices. For many, inflation is a crisis, a rupture from ordinary life. Yet contrary to the assumption that inflation is always an inherently negative phenomenon, Daromir Rudnyckyj’s provocative blog piece suggests that it is not universally perceived as a “problem.”

A third area of interest suggested by the case studies in this collection centers on how people navigate monetary instability and plurality. As Harry Pettit points out in his case study from Beirut, monetary instability will often set off a messy battle for the control over the circulation of cash as well as the digital infrastructures that facilitate economic transactions. In a related vein, Van Roekel draws on field research in Venezuela to ask how Venezuelans navigate and assess their de facto multi-currency economy of foreign bank notes, crypto currencies, and gold after a decade of hyperinflation. In several cases, people find, or even invent, new sources of value, or turn to new techniques of storing and circulating value, when the national currency start to lose worth. A final, fascinating example comes from Cuba, a country that only in recent years has experienced the effects of inflation, as described in two separate blog entries by Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier and Mélissa Gauthier, and Steffen Köhn. Here, the ongoing economic crisis and triple-digit inflation rates have inspired Cubans to turn to “play-to-earn” crypto games online, to access digital currencies. Runaway inflation and economic crises are breeding grounds for new digital experimentation with money and exchange creating niches for makeshift economic survival, speculation and quick profit, while reproducing historical conditions of vulnerability, inequality and “crypto-colonialism” (Rosales et al. 2024).

Combined, the ethnographic studies in this blog series on the social life of inflation reveal the potential of an anthropology of inflation to inquire economies from below. This effort has only just begun.

This text is part of the feature The Social Life of Inflation edited by Sian Lazar, Evan van Roeckel, and Ståle Wig.

Ståle Wig is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oslo, and author of the forthcoming book, The struggle for the market. Life and hustle in Cuba’s new economy (Pennsylvania University Press).

Sian Lazar is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Her latest book is How we Struggle: A Political Anthropology of Labour (Pluto Press)

Eva van Roekel is assistant professor in cultural anthropology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She is author of the monograph Phenomenal Justice. Violence and Morality in Argentina (Rutgers University Press).

References

Amri, M. (2023). “Inflation as Talk, Economy as Feel: Notes Towards an Anthropology of Inflation”. Anthropology of the Middle East, 18(2), 27-45.

E.P. Thompson (1971). “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century.” Past & Present 50 (1): 76–136.

Neiburg, F. (2023). “Inflation: Pragmatics of money and inflationary sensoria. economic sociology. perspectives and conversations”, 24(3), 9-17.

Rosales, A., van Roekel, E., Howson, P., & Kanters, C. (2024). “Poor miners and empty e-wallets: Latin American experiences with cryptocurrencies in crisis”. Human Geography, 17(1), 43-54. https://doi.org/10.1177/19427786231193985

Cite as: Ståle Wig, Sian Lazar and Eva van Roekel: The social life of inflation: introduction” Focaalblog 10 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/12/10/stale-wig-sian-lazar-and-eva-van-roekel-the-social-life-of-inflation-introduction/

Blog, Features, Taxonomies of Difference in Global Humanitarianism

Adia Benton: Humanitarian vernaculars (and the racial vernaculars of humanitarianism)

Image 1: Untitled (Ánima, Silueta de Cohetes) 1976, by Ana Medieta

While explaining the origins of Gramsci’s definition of hegemony to an interviewer, the labour historian Michael Denning (2023) suggested taking a Jeopardy! approach to social theory, which is to say: “rather than try to define a term, give a term, and the question to which that term is the answer.” For the purposes of this short essay, I’ll begin with the term “humanitarianism.” If humanitarianism is the answer, the question is: why do you help someone who is not like you, who is also far away from you; what are the logics or the rationale underlying the imperative to organize help for distant others, for attempting to alleviate their suffering? As Malay Firoz and Pedro Silva Rocha Lima note in the introduction to this collection, when the question is posed this way, “the human” that forms the basis for much theorizing about humanitarianism is not a universal category, but a differentiated (and aspirational) one; in this formulation, “empathy for ‘distant others’ is not simply a moral calling but a politically filtered and calibrated gesture.”

What comes into view when we acknowledge that humanitarianism is premised on the idea of treating members of a suffering collective as if human? This is where the critical study of humanitarianism and its taxonomies of difference intervenes. To argue for a critical study of humanitarianism and its taxonomies of difference is not to normalize or ascribe normative status to humanitarianism as an Euro-American or Eurocentric mode of governance, profession, ethos, laws, or industry, but to denaturalize it as the primary category through which we understand the moral and political imperatives to help others along lines of or transversal to allegiance, affinity, solidarity, or difference. It is also to highlight the forms of difference upon which the field rests and operates, through which it is mobilized and that it produces.

Fechter and May, working at the Myanmar-Thailand border, observe local, grassroots efforts to assist internally displaced persons and refugees fleeing protracted conflict. They call for de-centring taxonomies of difference in “classical” humanitarianism—what Dorothea Hilhorst (2018) has defined as the “highly institutionalized form, often led by organizations from the Global North”—and to instead examine the taxonomies of humanitarianisms and the various affinities and inclusions associated with them. I understand them to also be asking: Can examining the lateral, vernacular or everyday forms of assistance during crisis help to (re)construct different genealogies, and therefore, a different critique, of the imperative to help, its social and political organization, its emergent and undergirding sodalities?

Based upon the insights provided in the other posts, I’d like to propose that reframing these locally organized acts of mutual aid and solidarity as ‘vernacular humanitarianism’ simply provincializes these acts as an (humanitarian) object of study. Using a sleight of hand deployed by Fechter and May, I wonder if it is perhaps more politically necessary to excavate and decipher not only vernacular humanitarianisms—if we must call them that – but also the humanitarian vernacular, revealed through our analyses of so-called classical humanitarian ideologies, organizations, practices, and discourses (cf. Pierre 2020, and her discussion of the racial vernacular of development). Doing so helps us to understand how humanitarianism organizes, institutionalizes, and builds upon existing ideas about ethics, labour, race, culture, religion, gender, family, and nation—and vice versa.

In her contribution on Turkish humanitarians working among Muslims in Africa south of the Sahara (a space racially coded as ‘Black Africa’), Güner provides a clear illustration of what attention to taxonomies of difference can offer. She details the discursive construction of Muslim whiteness in humanitarians’ accounts of their encounters with Black Muslims in Africa, highlighting the circulating narratives about their interpellation as ‘White Muslims’ by their African interlocutors (Güner 2023). Her contribution here not only reveals how “the racial logics of humanitarianism operate…in transnational contexts outside of the West,” but also how national racial projects and formations are constituted through humanitarian governmentality.

Within the humanitarian vernacular, taxonomies of difference (and affinity) are laid bare as operational categories within nongovernmental and state organizations, which are reproduced and experienced via everyday encounters with these entities. Ward, drawing on her research in Jordan and sociological theories of on-the-ground race-making, reveals how racialized constructions of the formal and informal classifications of aid workers as ‘international’, ‘expat’, ‘national’ and ‘local’,” organize everyday work of Jordanian freelance consultants. These expert consultants are ‘fast-fixers’ who, working on short timelines, are hired to edit and improve international consultants’ reports to donors. Fast-fixers are often former employees of humanitarian NGOs who have ‘maxed out of the local’ and into freelance work; for a range of reasons, including the limited mobility afforded by their passports, they do not move on/up and work abroad. These ‘local’ consultants insist that they are ‘true humanitarians’ because they have remained in place to help others, rather than hopping from place-to-place—a notable feature of humanitarian labour regimes (Redfield 2012; cf. Benton 2016). Ward ultimately outlines the humanitarian industry’s racial vernacular and how it is “deployed in ways that sustain racial thought, that index particular racial meanings, and that prescribe certain social and political practices” (Pierre 2020: 87).

In the work of Tsoi and Stuewe, respectively, Canada and Germany define their border and migration projects in terms of humanitarianism and human rights. Stuewe argues that Germany’s humanitarian approach to managing Yezidi refugees from Iraq prioritizes assimilation via conventional educative programming like language instruction, but also what historical anthropologist Ann Stoler referred to as the ‘education of desire,’ the curriculum highlighting German norms and values around family, kinship, and romantic love (“free partner choice”). The programming is experienced by Yezidi refugees as a violent erasure of their kin practices and, thus, an existential threat. Tsoi focuses on Canada’s relaxed immigration policy, in which a “democratic logic intersects with a capitalistic logic to control border mobility.” Specifically, the regime of mobility governing this policy is also a racial regime, in which democracy and capitalism are intertwined: Hong Kong diasporans in Canada are racialized as uniquely economically productive citizens. Incoming Hong Kong migrants are, thus, prospectively placed in the category of ‘productive labourers’, while the conferral of Canadian citizenship is the democratic intervention. Together, Tsoi and Steuwe show how border regimes, particularly when they are characterized as humanitarian, or as performing a humanitarian function, interpolate humanitarian assistance into exploitative and often violent, differentiating function of borders.

Each of these contributions helps us to understand the humanitarian vernacular and its ‘grammar’—how humanitarianism organizes, institutionalizes, produces and builds upon local, everyday notions of ethics, labour, race, culture, religion, gender, family, and nation. They also show us specific ways humanitarianism becomes vernacularized, organizing the scale and scope of helping economies; sustaining racial regimes that subtend international humanitarian organizational forms and local labour conditions; prescribing certain kinship practices and enabling border migration regimes that consolidate ideas about membership, belonging and humanity.

Adia Benton is an associate professor of Anthropology and African Studies at Northwestern University, where she is affiliated with the Science in Human Culture Program. She is the author of the award-winning book, HIV Exceptionalism: Development through Disease in Sierra Leone, and is currently writing a book about the 2014 West African Ebola outbreak.

References

Benton, Adia. “African expatriates and race in the anthropology of humanitarianism.” Critical African Studies 2, no. 3 (2016): 266–277. https://doi.org/10.1080/21681392.2016.1244956.

Denning, Michael. Interview by Daniel Denvir. Transcript, January 23, 2023. https://jacobin.com/2023/01/michael-denning-antonio-gramsci-prison-notebooks-theory-hegemony-class-organizing

Güner, Ezgi. “Rejoicing of the Hearts: Turkish Constructions of Muslim Whiteness in Africa South of the Sahara.” Africa 93, no. 2 (2023): 236–55.

Hilhorst, Dorothea. “Classical Humanitarianism and Resilience Humanitarianism: Making Sense of Two Brands of Humanitarian Action.” Journal of International Humanitarian Action 3, no. 1 (September 10, 2018): 15. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41018-018-0043-6.

Pierre, Jemima. “The Racial Vernaculars of Development: A View from West Africa.” American Anthropologist 122, no. 1 (March 2020): 86–98. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13352.

Redfield, Peter. “The Unbearable Lightness of Ex-pats: Double Binds of Humanitarian Mobility.” Cultural Anthropology 27, no. 2 (2012): 358–382. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2012.01147.x.

Cite as: Benton, Adia 2024. “Humanitarian vernaculars (and the racial vernaculars of humanitarianism)” Focaalblog 20 November. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/11/20/adia-benton-humanitarian-vernaculars-and-the-racial-vernaculars-of-humanitarianism/