C Vasantkumar
Biographic Data
| ID | 56410 |
|---|---|
| NAME | C Vasantkumar |
| GIVEN NAMES | C |
| FAMILY NAME | Vasantkumar |
| SIGNATURE | VASANTKUMAR C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Macquarie University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4497-3122 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 41 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 15 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
When money isn't payment and interlocutors aren't friends
Crypto, charisma, and Trump's chaos economy: AE interviews Bill Maurer and Chris Vasantkumar
Routinizing and scrutinizing: Divergent yet potentially complementary modes of valuing money's material forms
This essay contrasts and explores the complementarity between "routinizing" modes of valuation (relating money tokens to monetary value) that predominate in the contemporary global north with "scrutinizing" modes found in the past and on the periphery of more familiar forms. The former treat the relationship between pecuniary media and money value as independent from the physical condition of specific money tokens which are held to be universally…
Every dollar has its own problem: Discrepant dollars and the social topography of fungibility in multi-currency era Zimbabwe (2009-2019)
This essay analyses the emergence and importance of multiple non-fungible kinds of US Dollars in the context of Zimbabwe’s multi-currency era (2009–2019). It does so to accomplish two related tasks. First, building on Bohannan’s classic distinction between conveyances and conversions, it highlights the dissolution and reconstitution of state money in Zimbabwe between 2007 and 2019 as characteristic of a ‘reconversioning’ of economic life. By the …
Not “multiple ontologies” but ontic capaciousness: Radical alterity after the ontological turn
This essay articulates a framework for understanding radical alterity in the aftermath of the abandonment of strong claims about ontological pluralism in recent works by key figures in anthropology’s Ontological Turn. Arguing that both ontological anthropologists and their critics have overemphasized the ideational at the expense of material practice, it builds on the insights of STS-influenced work on ontology to develop a materialist case for t…
When the state tries to edit the dictionary … and fails: The return of the Zimbabwean dollar
Exploring the return of state money to Zimbabwe in June 2019 after a 10-year absence, this paper critiques the lexicographical metaphors employed by Keynes and contemporary neo-chartalists as overly prescriptivist and inadequate to understanding debates over money’s proper form as terrains of struggle over the politics of social reproduction. For, rather than seamlessly reconfiguring the nation’s monetary lexicon in its reintroduction of the Zimb…
Towards a 'contrapuntal' anthropology of the global
This essay explores the paradox of how Aihwa Ong's classic work on Chineseness managed to remain in but not of China. Identifying the central importance of Edward Said's notion of "contrapuntal analysis" to Ong's approach to both Chineseness and modernity in general, it suggests the usefulness of this method for an anthropology of the global that seeks to make sense of a world in which American paramountcy is no longer guaranteed
Towards a commodity theory of token money: On 'Gold standard thinking in a fiat currency world
Via a discussion of public debates surrounding the potential minting of a trillion dollar platinum coin in the context of the American debt ceiling crises of 2011 and 2013, this essay seeks to make sense of the popular persistence of ‘commodity’ or ‘metallist’ understandings of money's value in the face of a scholarly consensus that all currency is ‘token’ or ‘fiat’ in nature. Scholars from Knapp to Desan have elaborated token theories of commodi…
Odd Neighbours: Trans-Himalayan Tibetan Itineraries and Chinese Economic Development
From world cities to world sites: Strategic ruralism and the case for an anthropology of actually existing connectivity
As anthropological interest in trans-local connection has expanded in recent decades, anthropologists have increasingly turned to cities as paradigmatic locations of the global, the modern, and the cosmopolitan. As they have done so, an older paradigm of anthropologists doing research in villages and other out of the way places has been maligned as old fashioned or out of touch, perpetually associated with the local pole of a hackneyed local-glob…
Tibetan Diaspora, Mobility and Place: Exiles in Their Own Homeland
This article elaborates a theoretical framework for making sense of Tibetans in Tibet who live as 'exiles in their own homeland'. Placing questions of mobility at the centre of anthropological approaches to diaspora, it subjects 'the fact of movement' to critical scrutiny. In so doing it calls into question three fundamental assumptions of recent work in both 'new mobilities' and the study of diaspora more broadly: first, that people move and ter…
Unmade in China: Reassembling theEthnicon the Gansu-Tibetan Border
This essay articulates an actor-network theory (ANT) inspired approach to the analysis of emergent arrangements of human difference in contemporary northwest China. Drawing inspiration from Law's work on method and Latour's program for reassembling the social, it enacts human difference as a fluid object in which every element is potentially situationally inessential. Moving beyond the focus on 'ethnic' (minzu) categories of much recent work on m…
The Scale of Scatter: Rethinking Social Topologies via the Anthropology of 'Residual' China
After the 'Bamboo Curtain' closed China to foreign social scientists in 1949, anthropologists shifted their attention to those 'residues' of China beyond the control of the People's Republic. In the process, formerly heterodox and out-of-the-way locales such as Taiwan and the New Territories of Hong Kong were made into the exemplars par excellence of Chinese culture. In this paper I argue that the peculiar spatialities of this Cold-War-era anthro…
Tibetan Peregri-nations: Mobility, Incommensurable Nationalisms and (Un)belonging Athwart the Himalayas
Putting into context the sentiment expressed by Tibetans on both sides of the Himalayas that true Tibet is located elsewhere, this essay focuses on an under-commented-upon consequence of Tibetan trans-Himalayan mobilities since 1959: the creation of two incommensurable modes of nationalism. One of these is territorial, the other embodied in the form of the Dalai Lama himself. The result of this dual nationalism has not been mutual compatibility a…
What Is This "Chinese" in Overseas Chinese? Sojourn Work and the Place of China's Minority Nationalities in Extraterritorial Chinese-ness
This essay argues that to adequately answer the question its title poses, anthropological approaches to national and transnational China(s) must be grounded in the history of Qing imperial expansion. To this end, it compares and explores the connections between three examples of the "sojourn work" that has gone into making mobile, multiethnic populations abroad into Overseas Chinese. The first example deals with recent official attempts to projec…
The Scale of Scatter: Rethinking Social Topologies via the Anthropology of 'Residual' China
After the 'Bamboo Curtain' closed China to foreign social scientists in 1949, anthropologists shifted their attention to those 'residues' of China beyond the control of the People's Republic. In the process, formerly heterodox and out-of-the-way locales such as Taiwan and the New Territories of Hong Kong were made into the exemplars par excellence of Chinese culture. In this paper I argue that the peculiar spatialities of this Cold-War-era anthro…
Towards a commodity theory of token money: On 'Gold standard thinking in a fiat currency world
Via a discussion of public debates surrounding the potential minting of a trillion dollar platinum coin in the context of the American debt ceiling crises of 2011 and 2013, this essay seeks to make sense of the popular persistence of ‘commodity’ or ‘metallist’ understandings of money's value in the face of a scholarly consensus that all currency is ‘token’ or ‘fiat’ in nature. Scholars from Knapp to Desan have elaborated token theories of commodi…
From world cities to world sites: Strategic ruralism and the case for an anthropology of actually existing connectivity
As anthropological interest in trans-local connection has expanded in recent decades, anthropologists have increasingly turned to cities as paradigmatic locations of the global, the modern, and the cosmopolitan. As they have done so, an older paradigm of anthropologists doing research in villages and other out of the way places has been maligned as old fashioned or out of touch, perpetually associated with the local pole of a hackneyed local-glob…
What Is This "Chinese" in Overseas Chinese? Sojourn Work and the Place of China's Minority Nationalities in Extraterritorial Chinese-ness
This essay argues that to adequately answer the question its title poses, anthropological approaches to national and transnational China(s) must be grounded in the history of Qing imperial expansion. To this end, it compares and explores the connections between three examples of the "sojourn work" that has gone into making mobile, multiethnic populations abroad into Overseas Chinese. The first example deals with recent official attempts to projec…
Every dollar has its own problem: Discrepant dollars and the social topography of fungibility in multi-currency era Zimbabwe (2009-2019)
This essay analyses the emergence and importance of multiple non-fungible kinds of US Dollars in the context of Zimbabwe’s multi-currency era (2009–2019). It does so to accomplish two related tasks. First, building on Bohannan’s classic distinction between conveyances and conversions, it highlights the dissolution and reconstitution of state money in Zimbabwe between 2007 and 2019 as characteristic of a ‘reconversioning’ of economic life. By the …
Unmade in China: Reassembling theEthnicon the Gansu-Tibetan Border
This essay articulates an actor-network theory (ANT) inspired approach to the analysis of emergent arrangements of human difference in contemporary northwest China. Drawing inspiration from Law's work on method and Latour's program for reassembling the social, it enacts human difference as a fluid object in which every element is potentially situationally inessential. Moving beyond the focus on 'ethnic' (minzu) categories of much recent work on m…
Routinizing and scrutinizing: Divergent yet potentially complementary modes of valuing money's material forms
This essay contrasts and explores the complementarity between "routinizing" modes of valuation (relating money tokens to monetary value) that predominate in the contemporary global north with "scrutinizing" modes found in the past and on the periphery of more familiar forms. The former treat the relationship between pecuniary media and money value as independent from the physical condition of specific money tokens which are held to be universally…
Crypto, charisma, and Trump's chaos economy: AE interviews Bill Maurer and Chris Vasantkumar
Tibetan Peregri-nations: Mobility, Incommensurable Nationalisms and (Un)belonging Athwart the Himalayas
Putting into context the sentiment expressed by Tibetans on both sides of the Himalayas that true Tibet is located elsewhere, this essay focuses on an under-commented-upon consequence of Tibetan trans-Himalayan mobilities since 1959: the creation of two incommensurable modes of nationalism. One of these is territorial, the other embodied in the form of the Dalai Lama himself. The result of this dual nationalism has not been mutual compatibility a…
What Is This "Chinese" in Overseas Chinese? Sojourn Work and the Place of China's Minority Nationalities in Extraterritorial Chinese-ness
This essay argues that to adequately answer the question its title poses, anthropological approaches to national and transnational China(s) must be grounded in the history of Qing imperial expansion. To this end, it compares and explores the connections between three examples of the "sojourn work" that has gone into making mobile, multiethnic populations abroad into Overseas Chinese. The first example deals with recent official attempts to projec…
The Scale of Scatter: Rethinking Social Topologies via the Anthropology of 'Residual' China
After the 'Bamboo Curtain' closed China to foreign social scientists in 1949, anthropologists shifted their attention to those 'residues' of China beyond the control of the People's Republic. In the process, formerly heterodox and out-of-the-way locales such as Taiwan and the New Territories of Hong Kong were made into the exemplars par excellence of Chinese culture. In this paper I argue that the peculiar spatialities of this Cold-War-era anthro…
Tibetan Peregri-nations: Mobility, Incommensurable Nationalisms and (Un)belonging Athwart the Himalayas
Putting into context the sentiment expressed by Tibetans on both sides of the Himalayas that true Tibet is located elsewhere, this essay focuses on an under-commented-upon consequence of Tibetan trans-Himalayan mobilities since 1959: the creation of two incommensurable modes of nationalism. One of these is territorial, the other embodied in the form of the Dalai Lama himself. The result of this dual nationalism has not been mutual compatibility a…
Unmade in China: Reassembling theEthnicon the Gansu-Tibetan Border
This essay articulates an actor-network theory (ANT) inspired approach to the analysis of emergent arrangements of human difference in contemporary northwest China. Drawing inspiration from Law's work on method and Latour's program for reassembling the social, it enacts human difference as a fluid object in which every element is potentially situationally inessential. Moving beyond the focus on 'ethnic' (minzu) categories of much recent work on m…
Odd Neighbours: Trans-Himalayan Tibetan Itineraries and Chinese Economic Development
From world cities to world sites: Strategic ruralism and the case for an anthropology of actually existing connectivity
As anthropological interest in trans-local connection has expanded in recent decades, anthropologists have increasingly turned to cities as paradigmatic locations of the global, the modern, and the cosmopolitan. As they have done so, an older paradigm of anthropologists doing research in villages and other out of the way places has been maligned as old fashioned or out of touch, perpetually associated with the local pole of a hackneyed local-glob…
Tibetan Diaspora, Mobility and Place: Exiles in Their Own Homeland
This article elaborates a theoretical framework for making sense of Tibetans in Tibet who live as 'exiles in their own homeland'. Placing questions of mobility at the centre of anthropological approaches to diaspora, it subjects 'the fact of movement' to critical scrutiny. In so doing it calls into question three fundamental assumptions of recent work in both 'new mobilities' and the study of diaspora more broadly: first, that people move and ter…
Towards a commodity theory of token money: On 'Gold standard thinking in a fiat currency world
Via a discussion of public debates surrounding the potential minting of a trillion dollar platinum coin in the context of the American debt ceiling crises of 2011 and 2013, this essay seeks to make sense of the popular persistence of ‘commodity’ or ‘metallist’ understandings of money's value in the face of a scholarly consensus that all currency is ‘token’ or ‘fiat’ in nature. Scholars from Knapp to Desan have elaborated token theories of commodi…
Towards a 'contrapuntal' anthropology of the global
This essay explores the paradox of how Aihwa Ong's classic work on Chineseness managed to remain in but not of China. Identifying the central importance of Edward Said's notion of "contrapuntal analysis" to Ong's approach to both Chineseness and modernity in general, it suggests the usefulness of this method for an anthropology of the global that seeks to make sense of a world in which American paramountcy is no longer guaranteed
When the state tries to edit the dictionary … and fails: The return of the Zimbabwean dollar
Exploring the return of state money to Zimbabwe in June 2019 after a 10-year absence, this paper critiques the lexicographical metaphors employed by Keynes and contemporary neo-chartalists as overly prescriptivist and inadequate to understanding debates over money’s proper form as terrains of struggle over the politics of social reproduction. For, rather than seamlessly reconfiguring the nation’s monetary lexicon in its reintroduction of the Zimb…
Not “multiple ontologies” but ontic capaciousness: Radical alterity after the ontological turn
This essay articulates a framework for understanding radical alterity in the aftermath of the abandonment of strong claims about ontological pluralism in recent works by key figures in anthropology’s Ontological Turn. Arguing that both ontological anthropologists and their critics have overemphasized the ideational at the expense of material practice, it builds on the insights of STS-influenced work on ontology to develop a materialist case for t…
Every dollar has its own problem: Discrepant dollars and the social topography of fungibility in multi-currency era Zimbabwe (2009-2019)
This essay analyses the emergence and importance of multiple non-fungible kinds of US Dollars in the context of Zimbabwe’s multi-currency era (2009–2019). It does so to accomplish two related tasks. First, building on Bohannan’s classic distinction between conveyances and conversions, it highlights the dissolution and reconstitution of state money in Zimbabwe between 2007 and 2019 as characteristic of a ‘reconversioning’ of economic life. By the …
Routinizing and scrutinizing: Divergent yet potentially complementary modes of valuing money's material forms
This essay contrasts and explores the complementarity between "routinizing" modes of valuation (relating money tokens to monetary value) that predominate in the contemporary global north with "scrutinizing" modes found in the past and on the periphery of more familiar forms. The former treat the relationship between pecuniary media and money value as independent from the physical condition of specific money tokens which are held to be universally…
Crypto, charisma, and Trump's chaos economy: AE interviews Bill Maurer and Chris Vasantkumar
When money isn't payment and interlocutors aren't friends
Sociology (10 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Economics (6 works) · Law (6 works) · Philosophy (6 works) · Political science (6 works) · History (5 works) · Anthropology (4 works) · China (4 works) · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity (4 works)