The Politics of Cash Circulation and Epistemic Tangles of Work in Beirut

In this paper I trace the emergence of a new infrastructure of money circulation in Beirut, Lebanon in the aftermath of a financial crisis. This includes a new set of practices, actors, and systems for handling and storing cash in a context where banks have become largely unusable. I examine the struggle over the means of this money circulation as it moves between different actors in the realms of labour and debt. In particular, I describe the intimate struggles of undocumented Syrian delivery drivers and Filipino and Cameroonian domestic workers to secure enough cash to survive in the context of multiple overlapping dispossessions. I adopt a methodology of following the cash, going with these men and women as they interact with friends, colleagues, customers, employers, money lenders and transfer services, state officials, landlords, and shopkeepers. In doing this, I argue that following the cash can help reveal the operational relations of power that govern the ability of certain actors to extract value from these marginalized inhabitants, as well as the ability of these inhabitants to cope with and combat this through networks of fractured solidarity and resistance. I also want to use this methodology of tracing forms of extraction and survival as cash circulates to break down boundaries between work and social reproduction.