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Abstract
Across the world, national currencies—public goods that emerged out of a previous era of currency proliferation—are now competing with private alternatives. As paper and coins fall into disuse, the seigniorage that helps to fund the circulation and regulation of currency diminishes, while their capacity to bind together states and citizens decreases in equal measure. The Swedish central bank's response to these threats, which includes issuing the world's first national digital currency, charts a course that all central banks must consider in the near future.

AbstractThis article seeks to come to terms with the extraordinarily swift demise of the debtors' prison in multiple countries during the nineteenth century. While focusing primarily on the reform debate in England, I argue that the debtors' prison quickly came to be seen as a barbaric aberration within the expanding commercial life of the nineteenth century. By turning to a copious pamphletic literature from the era of its demise, I show how pamphleteers and eye-witnesses described the debtors' prison in the idiom of ritual; it was seen as a dangerous sanctuary that radically inverted all capitalistic economic practices and moral values of the world outside its walls. Reformers claimed that, inside these shrines of debt, citizens were ritually guided and transformed from active members of society into "knaves" or "idlers," or both. As such, the debtors' prison needed to be eradicated. To do so, reformers mobilized at least three critical discourses, all of which sought to mark the debtors' prison as a zone of barbarism that threatened the civility of the state and its citizenry. By focusing on the debtors' prison as a powerful and transformative ritual zone, the article provides a counterintuitive history of this institution that was so crucial to the regulation of credit and debt relations for centuries. In so doing, the article contributes to a broader literature on the spatiality of debt.

This review essay takes a synoptic view of the ethnographic record concerning the long-standing and cross-cultural associations between money and dirt. In questioning why this association crops up as often as it does, I turn to the anthropological literature on the study of metaphor and metonym. By doing so, I offer a reinterpretation of the money form, pointing out that dirt—as a transgressive mediator between discrete realms—is itself a cross-cultural trope that is often intimately tied to ideas and rituals of social reproduction and fertility. I suggest that the widespread denigration of money as dirty may serve as a sort of economic regulatory mechanism, which aims to reinvigorate money's potential fertility when this latter has become sterile due to alleged acts of anti-social exchange or non-exchange.

Whether concerned with kinship or with kula, anthropology's interest in credit and debt goes back to the very beginnings of the discipline. Nevertheless, this review dedicates itself primarily to more recent research trends into credit and debt's powerful nature and effects. Following Mauss, credit and debt are treated as an indissoluble dyad that contributes to diverse regulatory mechanisms of sociality, time, space, and the body. Anthropology's overarching contribution to this field of inquiry rotates around its refusal to segregate the moral from the material, seeing the ubiquitous moral debates surrounding credit and debt in various ethnographic settings as coconstitutive of their material effects.

From twilight in the Himalayas to dream worlds in the Serbian state, this book provides a unique collection of anthropological and cross-cultural inquiry into the power of rhetorical tropes and their relevance to the formation and analysis of social thought and action through a series of ethnographic essays offering in-depth studies of the human imagination at work and play around the world