Haunting JAM-DEX
Three cultural lenses for the study of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs)
Dados Bibliográficos
| ID | 17820071 |
|---|---|
| Autores | Camilla Carabini (0000-0002-9051-6830, University of Milano-Bicocca, autor correspondente) |
| Ano | 2026 |
| Páginas | 1-18 |
| Data de publicação | 2026-04-30 |
| Peer Reviewed | Sim |
| Open Access | Sim |
| Tipo | ARTICLE |
| Periódico | Finance and Society (JOURNAL) |
| Identificadores do periódico | ISSN: 2059-5999 • E-ISSN: 2059-5999 |
| Editora | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/fas.2026.10042 |
| OpenAlex | W7159789521 |
| Idioma | EN |
| Referências citadas | 49 |
This article examines the introduction of Jamaica’s central bank digital currency (CBDC), Jamaica Digital Exchange (JAM-DEX), to show how monetary innovation is embedded in questions of sovereignty, class, race, and religion. Drawing on 23 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Kingston (2022–2024), it adopts a pragmatist anthropology of money and mobilizes three cultural lenses – institutional, infrastructural, and affective – to analyze how CBDCs are lived, interpreted, and contested in everyday life. The institutional lens reveals a struggle over monetary sovereignty that is continually undermined by the CBDC’s dependence on private, largely foreign-owned financial intermediaries for its circulation. The infrastructural lens shows how financial innovation can reproduce the racialized and classed hierarchies rooted in Jamaica’s colonial banking history. The affective lens shows how moral imaginaries, ranging from eschatological fears of the ‘Mark of the Beast’ to crypto-libertarian critiques of surveillance, shape public engagement with the CBDC. The article employs the metaphor of haunting to show how unresolved histories of racial capitalism re-emerge through JAM-DEX, producing a disjointed temporality in which digital futures arrive prematurely. The persistence of these financial ghosts reinforces the claim that CBDCs should be studied within their social, historical, and affective contexts
Capitalism · Colonialism · Currency · Digital currency · Ethnography · Futures contract · Metaphor · Temporality · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Cuban History and Society · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism
Money at the Margins
The Promise of Infrastructure
Decolonizing the Colonial City
Bankers and Empire
Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage
Deporting Black Britons
Living in the end of days
Imagining Infrastructure in Urban Jamaica
What is ‘affective infrastructure’
Religion and rights
The digital euro
Finance/security infrastructures
Big Man” politics in the social economy
Those that do not smile will kill me
The geoeconomics of Central Banks Digital Currencies (CBDCs)
Mobile Money
Trust as affective infrastructure
Platform economies
Capture land as abolition geography
Small money, large profits
Racial capitalism, coloniality and the financialization of Caribbean remittances
Payment
Prophecy and the near future
Banking on Digital Money
The Anthropology of Money and Finance
The dollarization of Vietnamese ghost money
The hybrid state
Payments as performances
The money tree
Financial capital and ghosts of empire
Storying Indigenous cryptocurrency
Skin color and socioeconomic inequality
Examining Race in Jamaica
| Velocidade de citação | historical |
|---|---|
| Altamente citado | Não |