5. Alternative currency designers

This entry posits that the analysis of making and managing money is a promising new direction in economic anthropology. To understand how economies function, it is worthwhile to study the agents who manufacture currencies. I provide an ethnographic window into the world of alternative currency designers. Anthropological scholarship on money has focused by and large on how people continuously reshape, recreate, and re-evaluate money through everyday practices. These initial studies of money emphasize systems of exchange and the way money becomes imbued with value and intention through its use and via relationships. This rich body of work sets the stage for future horizons of economic anthropology: the exploration of intentionality in manufacturing money.