Semiotics of Digital Money

The social life of new currencies is unpredictable. Digital currencies are transnationally integrated and locally divided: accepted around the world, but not next door. The money that operates in some places as a hobby or a bribe serves in other places for wartime survival. Currency issuers, including central banks, commercial banks, tech companies, speculators, and idealists, are regulated by conflicting regimes. Some remain ungovernable, while others aim to govern. Technologies change quickly, developing signs and signals unfamiliar to the uninitiated. Though Peirce's index and Austin's performative have long been recognized as relevant to anthropological studies of money, the influence of current research in semiotics and linguistic anthropology on the anthropology of money has been relatively limited. Building on the research of students in the Semiotics of Digital Money Inquiry Seminar, this review gathers strategies of multimodal semiotic analysis for ethnographies of the monetary media shaping political economies.