Abstract:

This talk will outline how my work on finance brought me into close contact with experts in the domain of payments - the infrastructures that facilitate value transfer, the "pipes" and "rails," in the payments industry lingo, that move money and settle transactions. Payments trouble finance's conceits of credit, speculation and derivation--along with those of the anthropology of finance. Looking at payments, one is faced square with rent. But rent itself doesn't square so easily with conventional or critical conceptions of markets. Beginning with my research in mobile payments and branching out into other areas, the talk asks with apologies to Graeber what happens when we start chronicling the last 5000 years of rent, not debt.