How mobile is money in societies that, until recently, were largely cashless? Are big, unwieldy cash denominations—such as Peru’s 100-sol bill—uniquely mobile, or uniquely stationary in such places? Might new influxes of cash have special impacts on poverty, economic life, and even the ways people self-identify? Large cash units have recently begun to circulate through the rural communities of Andean Peru’s Colca Valley due to two factors: (1) the recent emergence of a developmental paradigm emphasizing microfinance investments in enterprises that promote indigenous culture as a market good, and (2) the rise in cash-cropping as a means of livelihood. In its capacity to structure savings, transactions, and value distribution, large cash denominations provide a unique and rarely explored avenue for understanding the everyday impacts of development intervention. This project draws on anthropological theories of money, economic development, and indigenous identity to argue that new forms of usage, transfer, and mobility of specifically large bills are reconfiguring the ways Colcans relate to one another and conceptualize themselves.

Based on what I have found, I argue that in Colca big bills often cannot be spent without the mediation of certain social relations. In other words, a bill’s denomination, or the unit of value it designates (for example, 10 soles, 20 soles, or 50 soles), is sometimes a structural obstacle to cash fungibility: a 50-sol bill can’t always be used to buy a 3-sol bag of tomatoes, and even if it can, the exchange can’t happen immediately if the vendor does not have the right amount of change to return to the buyer. And as a structural obstacle, denomination actually ends up coloring market exchanges, making them more human, more intimate, and even more political than standard social scientific approaches to exchange would have us imagine. 

Thinking about the rich social dimensions of ordinary, everyday cash use at the micro level suggests that fungibility is not an automatic function of money, but money’s goal. Fungibility is something that must be achieved. Cash denominations can perhaps be imagined as falling on a fungibility spectrum, ranging from “immediately fungible” on one end, to “fungible through extensive intersubjective mediation” on the other. The many intermediate steps one often needs to take to achieve money’s fungibility in Colca are socially significant, culturally generative, and ethnographically revealing.