Money in an Actant World: Comparative Notes on Currency, Agency and Sociality

Actor-network theory is an approach notable for distributing agency over a range of human and other-than-human actors hence questioning the existence of a given “society” and instead conceiving of materially heterogeneous collectives. So far, ANT has only shown fleeting interest in the study of money. This is surprising, given the literature emphasising the powerful, agency-bearing role ascribed to money in intersubjective relations and socioeconomic arrangements. This article reviews two ethnographic case studies to examine conceptions of sociality and agency inherent in both national currencies and actor-network theory. Based on a comparative framework, which discusses different properties of money on a commercial farm in South Africa and within a progressive political struggle in Indonesia, I argue that money’s material and semiotic properties make it unfit to be subsumed into an actant scheme. Instead, I draw attention to the circulation of currency within uneven, messy, and hierarchical postcolonial political economies as foundational to money’s agency in the making of social relations.