The Struggle over the Means of Money Circulation in a Cash(less) World: Stories from Beirut

Academic scholarship is shifting towards a focus on the emergence of the cashless economy. But Lebanon in recent years has experienced an opposite phenomenon, a sudden surge in the use of cash in the aftermath of a insolvency crisis and large-scale theft of savings which has led to a deep distrust of banks. This has produced the rapid construction of a material infrastructure that enables the storage and movement of cash around the economy and country – itself always shifting in the context of rapid inflation and currency devaluation. Focusing on the city of Beirut, I use ethnographic fieldwork to ask how this infrastructure of cash is impacting different groups – from migrant workers, petty investors, small-business owners, delivery platforms, digital wallet start-ups, and money lenders and exchangers. I specifically ask how relations of power between these groups are being reconfigured through the materiality of cash. By following some of these figures on a day-to-day basis as they navigate the cash infrastructure, I reveal how Beirut’s cash economy is opening up new forms of extraction and exploitation, but also new forms of resistance and survival.