Chris Vasantkumar

CHRIS VASANTKUMAR, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, was approved in October 2021 to aid research on “Money and the Future in Zimbabwe’s Crisis Economy.” This project used ethnographic methods to explore middle-class Zimbabweans’ changing attitudes towards the diverse forms of money that have proliferated since the collapse of state currency during the hyperinflation of 2008-9. It found that the controversial introduction and ambivalent reception of a new putatively national currency, the Zimbabwe Gold, or ZiG, has both been shaped by and shown a potential to reconfigure Zimbabweans’ assumptions about the failures of national currency. Where previous fiat currencies were seen as having been printed into oblivion by a profligate state, the ZiG is positioned as a “structured currency” whose value was linked to the nation’s gold reserves as a hedge against popular concern about state predation of private wealth. Taking place against a background of affective and mimetic formalization across multiple levels of economic life, its introduction and stubborn failure to collapse has disrupted Zimbabweans’ assumption that state money will always fail. As such it prompts a reassessment both of existing scholarship on money in Zimbabwe and of received understandings of the relationship between money and trust more generally.