This book is about how men and women, particularly the poor and the unbanked in the global South, use money in ways that empower them and their families. Money as a medium of relationships across cultures is at the center of this inclusive story of globalization. It includes interconnected markets and half the world that is unbanked, particularly women.
Globalization and Money covers new and old currencies and ways of banking and payments. Men and women’s banking patterns connect with the way they display their management of money in the joint family or nuclear household. Migrants send money home to show they care for their families and communities left behind. Yet these remittances are worth more than three times official development assistance. The mobile phone transforms communication, as well as ensuring people in the Global South can send money instantaneously to their family in the village.
The author emphasizes these personal dimensions of money and globalization. She draws on her research on money, banking and the use of information and communication technologies in Australia, India, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea and Kenya, as well as her global family networks as a migrant.
This book will be of interest to students and scholars alike who engage with the sociology of money and banking, and policy makers interested in migration and remittances. It will also appeal to everybody interested in globalization and the personal and market aspects of money in the global South.
Supriya Singh is professor of the sociology of communications at RMIT University, Australia
Preface
Acknowledgments
References
Index
‘Globalization and new technologies are transforming the world of money. In this pioneering study, Supriya Singh offers a sweeping and compelling account of those changes. A book that will inspire researchers, inform policy makers, and fascinate students and general readers.’
VIVIANAA. ZELIZER, Department of Sociology, Princeton University
‘Money is changing—in its flows, its figurings, its very form. Supriya Singh’s marvelous book demonstrates how much of this change today is coming from the global South. From remittance flows that challenge easy understandings of GDP, gender, and family to the global spread of mobile computing—backed by powerful corporate, philanthropic, and government interests but just as much by everyday people’s own wishes, desires, and dramas—this book charts a course for a new global sociology of money for the twenty-first century.
BILL MAURER, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Irvine.