Viviana A. Zelizer (1997), Bruce Carruthers (2010), Peter North (2007) and other sociologists and anthropologists of money have, over the past 30 years, sought to show that currencies are not simply unmediated expressions of the broader economic totality they represent and facilitate. Rather, a careful examination of money’s uses and meanings in the field of daily life reveals that they become carriers, transmitters and palimpsestual zones of mediation for multiple frames of value. Money is not only the disciplinary force of capital, materialized (though this it certainly is – see Caffentzis 2013; Cleaver 2000; Lapavitsas 1999); it can also function as a gift, as a means to negotiate social worth and as a medium of social intercourse.

Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, loc. 386