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date: 26 February 2021

Abstract and Keywords

This article considers several sets of financial practices commonly defined as alternative either by commentators or practitioners themselves. In each case, it also explores the real or potential harnessing of these alternatives into dominant financial arrangements, demonstrating the cycling in as well as the cycling out of these practices into harmonization with the dominant. That harmonization raises questions about the distinction between the alternative and the dominant, revealing both to be simultaneously socially embedded and disembedded, and raising questions about the implications of the continual ‘discovery’ of and hope for a more ‘social’ finance.

Keywords: financial practices, financial arrangements, cycling, harmonization, social finance

Bill Maurer

Bill Maurer is Professor of Anthropology and Law at the University of California, Irvine. His work on the anthropology of money and finance has considered the offshore financial services sector in the Caribbean islamic banking, and, most recently, mobile phone-enabled money transfer and savings services. He is the author of Recharting the Caribbean: Land, Law and Citizenship in the British Virgin Islands (1997); Pious Property: Islamic Mortgages in the United States (2006); and Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason (2005). The latter was awarded the Victor Turner Prize.

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