The Gift of Money: Dematerialization,

Demonetization, and Money’s Pedigree

Bill Maurer

“Humanity has long been feeling its way.”

Marcel Mauss [1925: 92]

The first motivation of this essay is the demonetization of 500

and 1000 rupees notes in India, declared on November 8, 2016,
which accounted for 86 % of the value of rupees in circulation and
led to long lines at banks and automatic teller machines (ATMs) and
at least 100 documented deaths. Although the notes were replaced
with new 500 and 2000 notes, the demonetization of the old notes,
their discontinuation as legal tender, represented a fundamental
break in what John Maynard Keynes called the “continuity of… the
pedigree” of money [Keynes 1930: 5]. How can an anthropologist
resist a kinship metaphor?
The second motivation of this essay is the rapid pace with which
states, private actors and advocacy organizations are insisting on
the dematerialization and digitization of all monetary transactions.
So called “cashlessness” is on the rise as a development paradigm,
a political move, a security stance, and a means of interdicting
counterfeiting, criminal activity and tax evasion. It is also
advocated by those seeking a monetary system outside the state
altogether —a paradox for chartalist theories of money, of course,
which insist on the state’s role in setting the standard and the unit
of account. At the same time, cashlessness, because it is framed
162 Anthropologie(s) du don

in terms of digitization, means also the necessity of deploying

new electronic payment infrastructures. In India, demonetization
took place even before ATMs had been equipped to handle the
new banknotes.
Cashlessness necessarily entails digital payment, and digital
payment involves another kind of continuity of money, not its
pedigree or its origins, but rather its transit, its movement across
time and space. This stages an important distinction between the
state control over money, its unique offspring, so to speak, and the
possibilities of its ramifying and wild networks, the other relations it
establishes and the multiple routes it can take to make new relations.
These new routes pose risks —and I shall consider some of those
risks— but also point toward the possibilities of what Keith Hart
[2000] has called a human economy for money. If, for Keynes,
money had a pedigree, then what of these new, ramifying relations
not part of the state’s family tree of money? At what point do they
pull the state’s money away from its line of descent as it follows
new lines, new routes, over new rails?
Demonetization reminds us that money is the state’s gift. In
anthropology, however, we rarely talk about money as the state’s
gift, or of the state being in the position to make a gift. Instead
we tend to contrast the gift and the commodity, or, more recently,
decry the state’s enforcement of monetary debts that curtain human
relations through money’s violent abstraction [Graeber, 2011].
And we rarely inquire into instances where the gift is revoked.
Not when it is returned —for this is the normal thing, we are led
to believe since Mauss [1925]— but when the return is demanded
as a revocation, a cancellation of the gift. In the case of money,
the revocation of the gift by the state underscores that we still live
in a chartalist world, a world of the state’s sovereign exception.
This essay is an attempt to consider the state’s gift of money
with reference to some work on the difference between sharing,
borrowing and stealing by Marilyn Strathern [2011], as well as
money’s ancient history, in order to revisit Mauss’ account of money
as arising from exchange of prestige goods. Mauss’ famous footnote
“of principle on the use of the notion of money” (chapter II, n.29
in the Guyer edition) from The Gift helps pose the question, what
happens when the giver of money compels its return? Or when
money as unit of account remains, while its specific manifestation
 The Gift of Money: Dematerialization, Demonetization… 163

as tokens of the general type, specific material tokens to be used

in exchange, are rendered valueless, and have the metaphorical
rug of the relation between the state, people and value ripped out
from underneath them? What happens when these material tokens
no longer index the unit of account after having been given, with
certain understandings, certain guarantees, of that continued relation
to the unit of account?

Dematerialization

There is nothing specifically weird about dematerialized money.

Mesopotamian accounting demonstrates that you don’t need a
circulating token to represent value in exchange if you have a means
of recording transactions and denominating them according to a
standard. Van de Mieroop cites Janssen [1975] to the effect that
money emerges in “statements that something was in the possession
of someone else” [Van de Mieroop, 2014: 20] and that silver, copper
or bronze could be used as measures “without having to be present”
[ibid.]. Records of price lists and loans existed even if most precious
metal was immobilized in temples and palaces.
In the contemporary moment, however, dematerialization
refers to the digitization of money —the move away from
physical tokens, cash and coin, to digital accounts much like
ancient papyrus records or cuneiform tablets. Dematerialization
also entails new infrastructures, just as the Sumerians depended
on the infrastructure of clay tablets, scribes and temples. Banks
throughout the 20th century developed different dematerialized
systems for recording transactions. Elsewhere I have considered
the phenomenon of mobile money, when non‐bank entities like
telecommunications companies started getting into the business
of recording transactions of value [Maurer, 2012]. Early mobile
phones, circa 1995, operated on a pre-paid system: users would
purchase physical coupons bearing code numbers which could be
entered on the mobile phone to credit the digital account attached
to the device with units of airtime. Airtime “top-up” suppliers,
separate from mobile network operators or device manufacturers,
realized within ten years or so that they were not merely providing
access to additional minutes of speaking time or bits of data in the
164 Anthropologie(s) du don

form of text messages. Instead, they were serving as an accounting

and crediting backbone to mobile phone services more broadly. As
one of my informants related to me, “money magically appeared”
when he and his colleagues realized that they were not just a third-
party platform for mobile network operators to supply airtime to
their customers, but were becoming a payment system or “payment
rail,” in the industry’s lingo. That is, rather than providing airtime,
they were in the business of the transfer of electronic value. Their
discovery was akin to that of Visa network founder Dee Hock: “It
was a revelation then. We were not in the credit card business,”
Hock recalled, “We were really in the business of the exchange
of monetary value” [quoted in Stearns, 2011: 45].
Mobile phone-based money transfer services like Safaricom’s
M-Pesa in Kenya and numerous copycats ensued from this
discovery, and mobile network operators fundamentally shifted
the payments industry from its heretofore exclusive focus on a few,
established “rails” —like the Visa and MasterCard networks— to
a profusion of new network infrastructures, devices, and platforms
for value transfer [Future of Money Research Collaborative,
2017]. Along the way, industry actors started to wonder whether
they needed to be exclusively in the business of transiting the
state’s money, or whether their databases for recording credits
and debits might alternatively begin to serve as a ledger for their
own. Loyalty and reward points, airline miles, and other similar
system might shade into general purpose money, they thought.
And critiques of the state’s money itself—crystallized in the
cryptocurrency phenomenon of Bitcoin, which popularized the
term “fiat” to refer to the state’s money— became more and more
mainstream.
Such experimentation with money and its means of transit is
ongoing, M-Pesa and the iPhone inspiring other mobile and digital
payment experiments, using multiple channels of the mobile device
and other devices, multiple forms and systems.
Co-occurring with what my colleagues and I have called this
Cambrian explosion in payments [Future of Money Research
Collaborative, 2017] has been the emergence of advocacy
organizations like the Better Than Cash Alliance, a consortium
of government, nonprofit and industry actors, which sees in digital
payment, dematerialized money, the possibility for economic
 The Gift of Money: Dematerialization, Demonetization… 165

development. Physical cash’s anonymity, they argue, makes

it vulnerable to criminal activity, tax evasion and the like; its
vulnerability to theft, the cost of its transport, the difficulty of
obtaining it all contribute, the argument goes, to costs for the poor
that hinder economic well being. The ubiquity of mobile can put
a means of money transfer, and access to digital accounts, into
everyone’s hand. As a result there is also now a pro‐cash lobby,
made up of privacy advocates, civil libertarians, people involved
in the production and movement of cash, the banknote companies,
security and anti‐counterfeiting companies, armored car companies
and ATM producers [see Dalinghaus, 2017]. In the context of the
drive toward cashlessness, the infrastructures of cash itself are
being made more readily visible, and the people who create and
maintain those infrastructures are constituting themselves as a
counterweight to cashlessness. We have in effect a battle taking
place between the creators of new digital infrastructures and the
infrastructures of cash.

Demonetization

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s initial stated reasons for

demonetization in India were very much in line with the rhetoric
of the cashlessness lobby —that cash is linked to crime and tax
evasion, and that putting digital tools for money in everyone’s
hands would be liberating and democratizing [see Dharia and Trisal,
2017]. And even though the old banknotes were replaceable by new
ones, popular discourse that the state had rendered these banknotes
worthless led to parody, despair and violence.
Arguments for demonetization are not just taking place in India.
The European Union has ceased production of, but not demonetized,
the 500 euros note. Some in the anti-money laundering community
and elsewhere have referred to the 500 euros as the “bin Laden
note” or as “bin Ladens” because of their supposed use in terrorist
financing. As others have demonstrated, however [see Dalinghaus,
2017], it takes a very expansive definition of what counts as
supporting terrorism to make the case, one would do well to
remember that transnational criminal and terrorist networks use
of the conventional banking system and bank secrecy protections.
166 Anthropologie(s) du don

Critics see the drive toward cashlessness as a sort of government

and private sector plot to make money off people’s use of money.
One of my informants called cash transactions at the point of sale
“the last commons.” It is a commons because no one technically
“owns” it, or, more specifically, no one captures and then owns
the data that could be garnered from physical world transactions
at the point of sale were they to be digitized. Industry players very
much want to enclose that commons, either to enhance fee‐derived
income from transactions or to collect valuable data on consumers
spending, preferences, movements and identities. Brett Scott writes,
“‘Cashless society’ is a euphemism for the “ask‐your‐banks‐for‐
permission‐to‐pay society. Rather than an exchange occurring
directly between the hotel and me [for example], it takes the form of
a ‘have your people talk to my people’ affair” [Scott, 2016, np]. The
risks of these new systems include breaches of data privacy as well
as fees on transactions previously “free.” And data gathering at the
physical world point of sale begs the question of who controls that
data, who shares with whom, and what new modes of surveillance
—government or corporate— become possible in a world of digital-
only commerce.

Anthropological Concerns

Let me return to Keynes’ treatise on money via what may be a

surprising source, Claude Meillassoux’s [1975] Femmes, Greniers
et Capitaux.
Meillassoux argued that when land became an instrument
of production rather than an all‐giving subject, in, for example,
contexts of quasi‐settled horticulture instead of migratory hunting
and gathering, people needed ways of accounting between
the full season and the fallow. They have a need to carry over
surpluses and take stock of who has lent what to whom (which
was precisely the problem for those Mesopotamians with their clay
tablets, incidentally). For Meillassoux, elders are in the position to
undertake such reckoning. Already, then, we have kinship in the
making of money.
 The Gift of Money: Dematerialization, Demonetization… 167

The opening pages of Keynes’ Treatise on Money ring with

diagrams like this one.

How very much like this one, from Evans‐Pritchard’s The Nuer:

And indeed, Keynes speaks of money in terms of lineage. For

Keynes, money emerges when the state establishes a unit of account
in terms of which debts are denominated and enforceable:
“The Age of Chartalist or State Money was reached when the State
claimed the right to declare what thing should answer as money to
the current money-of-account – when it claimed the right not only to
enforce the dictionary but to write the dictionary” [Keynes 1930: 5].
168 Anthropologie(s) du don

Elsewhere he opens up the definition of the state to include

what he calls The Community. In doing so, he departs from a fully
chartalist position and is perhaps more in line with contemporary
theorist Christine Desan [2014] or, indeed, Meillassoux.
But he goes on, in a manner that should interest the anthropologist:
Money of account must be continuous, he writes. Even if new units
are introduced, there must be what Taylor Nelms [2015] calls a
hinge or nodal point linking them to the original units.
And there can be no breach of continuity, Keynes says, no
break in the line of descent, for otherwise the state’s guarantee
of the repayment of debts in terms of its standard is thrown into
question. Only a “catastrophe,” he writes —or one might say from
a different perspective a jubilee or great debt cancellation— would
permit such a break in the line of descent:
“money-of-account must be continuous. When the name is changed
… the new unit must bear a definite relation to the old.
There can be no real breach in the continuity of descent in the pedigree
of the money-of-account, except by a catastrophe by which all existing
contracts are simultaneously wiped out” [Keynes, 1930:5].

Keynes makes an almost Saussurean analogy here: if there

is a new token, it must be denominated in terms of the unit of
account named by the state. Or as we might say from kinship theory,
he makes a distinction between the kinship status and the person
occupying it. “Money of account is the description or title and the
money is the thing which answers to the description,” he writes.
The thing can change but the description has to remain the same,
else there would be a break in that line of descent, that continuity.
The difference, he writes:
is like that between the King of England (whoever he may be)
and King George. A contract to pay ten years hence a weight of
gold equal to the weight of the King of England is not the same
thing as a contract to pay a weight of gold equal to the weight of the
individual who is now King George. It is for the State to declare,
when the time comes, who the King of England is [1930:4].
If there is a new type, if a new standard is introduced, then the
market or the state will force a parity between the two. This forcing
of parity is an act of state (or communal?) creativity, an expression
 The Gift of Money: Dematerialization, Demonetization… 169

of sovereignty to engineer that hinge between systems of accounting

so that a reckoning can occur.
Keynes thus helps us think about demonetization like what has
taken place in India in relation to denomination, the naming of the
unit of account by the state, that writing of the dictionary. Now, what
happened in India, seen one way, was simply a re-denomination:
one pair of material tokens, the 500 and 1000 rupees notes, were
rendered invalid, but new tokens on parity with the old, denominated
in the same unit of account, were issued to replace them, a new 500
and a new 2000 rupees note. But at the same time, the promise of
the state to take as legal tender the material instantiation of the
initial 500 and 1000 notes was interrupted. What was a 500 note
on November 5 was suddenly worthless paper on November 6
unless you took action to replace it with the new. The continuity
of descent was cut, maybe even more so for the 1000 note because
there was no replacement for it in its specificity. That particular
“King George” became “Just George” with no direct replacement:

Redenomination and Demonetization Contrasted

Redenomination —new token on parity with old type

Demonetization —parity with the old is interrupted, refused, rendered
invalid; the continuity of descent in the pedigree is cut

You may think I am quibbling. In fact, the old notes were

replaced with new ones whose value could be redeemed at par
with whatever notes people went to the bank to replace them
with. In the case of the 1000 rupees note, they could be redeemed
for a value-equivalent quantity of the new 500s or 2000s. The
unit of account, the rupee, remained the same. Really this
demonetization was a simple redenomination. But let me ask a
little more specifically what took place in this action of the Indian
state. Marilyn Strathern’s [2011] delightful essay on sharing,
borrowing and stealing in two boarding schools, one in Micronesia
and one in England, offers some tools. Her insight comes from
the fact that there is in English a set of concepts that refer to
actions which look more or less the same, from the point of view
170 Anthropologie(s) du don

of an outside observer. Whether I take something in an act of

sharing, or I borrow something, or I steal something, all looks
schematically at least the same: something from you has gone to
me. Your property has been left behind [Strathern, 2011: 3] and
is now in my possession. But what is the nature of this position?
It depends on a constellation of concepts.
The Jesuit fathers at Xavier Boarding School on Chuuk in
Micronesia couldn’t get their heads around what they called “Xavier
borrowing:” students taking items from one another and from the
fathers called the practice “borrowing,” but there was no expectation
of the items’ ever being returned. Euroamerican notions of property
presume borrowing as a kind of time-share [p. 6], she writes, with
a return built in. At Xavier, there was borrowing with no intention
to return and often without asking (which for most of us, in our
everyday worlds, would be stealing).
One way to think about this from a Melanesian point of view,
Strathern says, is that the students at the Chuuk boarding school
were using material things to enlarge or “enhance their spheres of
influence… in effect enlarging or extending their potential agency”
[p. 8]. For the teachers, however, the idea of “culture” came to the
rescue, and they were able to explain away the practice of Xavier
borrowing as a manifestation of “Micronesian culture” of sharing
[p. 7].

Feeling A Way

What on earth has this to do with money and demonetization?

Let’s take each of the concepts around property introduced by
Strathern in turn and think about it in relation to money. We
have already seen money as a gift, in several senses, shared by
its standard-setting and issuing authority. Money is first of all
derived from the gift. Mauss and many others trace its origins to
the circulation of prestige items which even if still attached to their
first owners nevertheless are liberated, Mauss writes, because they
are extensible to other owners who give the thing their names.
They are not alienable but nevertheless they help extend relations
of naming, of credit, into the future. This is in his long footnote:
 The Gift of Money: Dematerialization, Demonetization… 171

It is true that precious things differ from what we are used to conceiving
of as instruments of liberation. … [I]n addition to their economic
nature, and of their value, they also have a magical nature, and are
talismans in particular. … [T]hey are still attached to persons or clans
…, to the individuality of their previous owners. … But on the other
hand, … these precious things have the same functions as the money
in our own societies and therefore deserve to be classified in at least
the same genre. They have a power of purchase and this power is
enumerated. … What is more, this purchasing power is truly liberating
[Mauss, 1925: 92].

Second, following Keith Hart [2000] money is a gift of each to

all —the visibilization and extension of collective credits. Think
of David Graeber here [2011], too— if we can do it for ourselves,
without the state, we will have succeeded in liberating money
from the state’s sovereign violence. Third, with Keynes, money is
a gift of the state: the state writes that dictionary and sets forth the
pedigree. The state lets us do these same things with its money,
to extend our collective credits, while also guaranteeing them by
force of law. And, of course, demanding taxes, as an expression of
sovereignty, in its money.
Speaking of that sovereign violence, consider, next, money as
stealing. Seen this way, the state’s writing of the dictionary robs
us of our own words; it forecloses our relationships; it recognizes
only one standard and takes from us the “do-it-ourselves” quality
of debt recognition and redemption that Graeber or Hart promote.
And then, money is also a borrowing —think Derrida’s [1992]
“given time:” it is valuable only insofar as it can be redeemed
later, settle payment at a point in future time. It is always on credit,
whether that faith be in other people or in the permanence and
durability of the state and its unit of account.
I am suggesting, then, that we see the demonetization of
certain physical banknotes as the state taking back the gift of
money —the state exerting a kind of Xavier borrowing for which
there is no return. Killing the old notes kills the vitality with which
they were invested by the state in the first place. They can only
be redeemed. They cannot stay in your mattress or in a gulak,
a south Asian baked clay moneybox (Fig. 3, next page). And to
redeem, you would need to rip open the mattress or break the
gulak, thereby destroying both.
172 Anthropologie(s) du don

Gulak (photo © The Trustees of the British Museum).

In the India case, demonetization was explicitly linked to

digitization and a move toward digital denomination of currency.
Really, then, demonetization is only meaningful in terms of
material cash and the interruption of cash’s pedigree as a long
term store of value. With digital money, demonetization is not
possible except for Keynes’ “catastrophe,” or the shift to an entirely
different standard. For digital, denomination in turn is just a matter
of payment formatting. In other words, material demonetization
interrupts the promise of cash as a long-term store of value. Digital
demonetization would entail a switch to an entirely different system,
or transferring over into a new pedigree—to the US dollar, for
example [Nelms, 2015]. Digital denomination, in turn, has no
meaning except in terms of, say, how many decimal places are
permitted in digital ledgerbooks.

This suggests three final points

The first is that the state’s taking back of the gift of material
money is a manifestation of its control over the unit of account, pure
 The Gift of Money: Dematerialization, Demonetization… 173

and simple. It is a tearing up of the material dictionary in order to

replace it with something else: another material dictionary, on the
way toward the fantasy at least of its digital-only denomination.
The second point is that giving, borrowing and stealing each
have their infrastructures. Demonetization is an attempt at control:
control the infrastructures in order to channel the value transfer
and relations among people. Demonetization reminds people that
a, or perhaps the, primary relation they should have where money
is concerned is to the state, as its sovereign gift. But at the same
time, demonetization is a broken promise, the revocation of the
gift‐‐‐and in its revocation, the gift of money slides into stealing and
borrowing, and thereby reveals its own ambiguity (a point Taylor
Nelms [2015] makes in his work on dollarization in Ecuador).
The third point is that new relations are indeed possible. That
these infrastructures have lobbies—the Better Than Cash Alliance,
on the one side, the International Currency Association, on the
other—means that new relationships of alliance and descent are
now within the realm of possibility.
The introduction of new payment rails, their interoperability and
their noninteroperability, allows people to feel a way to get value
where they want it to go regardless of infrastructural or even state
constraint, the possibility of paratactical relationality in infinite
extensibility. With Mauss, I thus want to reconsider money as a
means of purchase, or payment —itself a different modality of
control from the state’s. Money as payment ramifies in networks
to provide new pathways to other worlds and revivified relations.
Demonetization may cut the ties, but people always feel out a way
to remake them.

Acknowledgments

This paper was first presented at the Université Catholique de

Louvain’s Chaire Singleton 2017, “Le lien social au regard de la
circulation des biens, des personnes et des capitaux,” 3-7 May, 2017.
I would like to thank Olivier Servais for the invitation to speak as
well as for his colleagueship, and Mike Singleton and Pierre-Joseph
Laurent for providing inspiration. I am grateful for the opportunity
to publish it here and I thank the editors for their forbearance. I
174 Anthropologie(s) du don

owe a great debt to Taylor Nelms, for helping surface the argument
both for the original presentation and this essay. Research on the
payments industry has been supported by the US National Science
Foundation under grants SES 0960423 and SES 1455859. Any
opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed
in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily
reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

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