Institute for Money, Technology & Financial Inclusion

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.