imaginary moneys and the popular economy in haiti

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    Imaginary Moneys and the Popular Economy in Haiti

    Federico Neiburg1

    PPGAS, Museu Nacional, UFRJ

    [email protected]

    Submitted to American Ethnologist

    Abstract: This article examines a singular feature of Haitian monetary practices: thegeneralized use of a currency without material existence as an object, coin or

    banknote: the Haitian dollar. It intends to show (a) how the Haitian dollar forms partof an extremely diversified, dynamic and creative space of currencies, units ofmeasures and ordinary forms of calculation; (b) the affinities between this space of

    pluralities and creativities and the mechanisms that dynamize the popular economy,such as the sense of opportunity, the multiplication of small profits, the little deals andthe small jobs, and (c) how this universe of measurements and the relations betweenscales of measure and values has a historical dimension, which is actualized inquotidian transactions.

    This article examines a singular feature of Haitian monetary practices: the generalized

    use in setting or negotiating prices of a currency without any past or present material

    existence as an object, coin or banknote: the Haitian dollar. As I shall explain over the

    course of the text in most transactions in Haiti (price negotiations in the markets,

    working out wages and contracts such as rent, and so on) calculations are made in an

    imaginary currency, the Haitian dollar, while payments are made in other currencies,

    principally in gourdes (the national currency) but also in US dollars, Dominican

    pesos, telephone cards or even fiches, the pieces of plastic or metal that irrigate some

    commercial circuits of basic goods, such as water and coal, among the poorest people.

    1This text was conceived as a homage to Sidney Mintz and originally presented as theXVII Sidney Mintz Lecture at Johns Hopkins University on 10/11/2010. Many

    people have read and carefully commented on earlier versions of the text over the lastfew years. My thanks especially to Sidney Mintz, Jane Guyer, Bill Maurer, VivianaZelizer, Louis Herns Marcelin, Omar Ribeiro Thomaz, Benot de lEstoile, HoracioOrtiz, Afrnio Garcia Jr. Marie-France Garcia, Florence Weber, Bruno Thret andLaurence Fontaine, as well as my colleagues and students: Natacha Nicaise, FernandoRabossi, Gustavo Onto, Pedro Braum, Jean Louis Sergo, Jony Fontaine, HandersonJoseph, Flavia Dalmaso, Jos Renato Carvalho Baptista, Eugnia Motta, Herold SaintJoie and Robert Montinard.

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    Over the course of the article I intend to show (a) how the Haitian dollar forms part of

    an extremely diversified, dynamic and creative space of currencies, units of measures

    and forms of calculation; (b) the affinities between this space of pluralities and

    creativities, and the mechanisms that dynamize the popular economy, such as the

    sense of opportunity, the multiplication of small profits, the little deals and the small

    jobs, and (c) how this universe of measurements and relations between scales of

    measure and values has a historical dimension, actualized in quotidian transactions

    specifically in the daily life of people who live in the popular districts of the center of

    Port-au-Prince, in the Greater Bel Air region, where I have conducted fieldwork since

    2007. The outcome is an ethnographic critique of the mainstream narratives on

    Haitian underdevelopment and poverty, which limit themselves to depicting lacks

    of money, wages, government (see, for example, Fass 2004 and Lundahl 1992 and

    2011). By contrast, the interrogation of monetary practices and the forms of

    producing and dealing with the many different units of measure and scales affords a

    close-up observation and positive description of the dynamics of the popular economy

    rendered invisible by these normative perspectives.

    As well as the US dollar, other dollars circulate in the monetary space of the

    contemporary Caribbean, such as the Jamaican dollar, the Belize dollar or the East

    Caribbean dollar issued by the islands forming the Common Market of the eastern

    islands, like Bermuda, Dominica and Granada. From the viewpoint of standard

    monetary theories, all of these are normal currencies: they combine the four

    functions of money (serving as a unit of account, a means of payment, a means of

    exchange and a means of saving), they are identified by a symbol (USD, JMD, XCD,

    etc.) and they exist in physical form: they are minted and can be handled. The Haitian

    dollar can also be identified by a symbol (HD) but unlike the other Caribbean dollars,

    it is an imaginary money, a pure unit of account that has no material existence.

    Eighty years ago, a historian of imaginary medieval moneys suggested a link with

    real means of payment can be discovered that behind every pure unit of account

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    (Werveke 1934).2 In the case of the Haitian dollar, this link is the five-gourde note,

    convertible into one US dollar, issued during the 1919 monetary reform four years

    after US occupation of the country when a fixed parity system (or currency board)

    was introduced for making conversions between the imperial currency and the gourde

    at a rate of 1 to 5, the same ratio later used to convert between the Haitian dollar and

    gourde.3Indeed Haitians themselves often make this connection when asked about the

    origin of the Haitian dollar, recalling the red 5 gourde/1 dollar banknotes that some

    people keep as relics of a fairly recent past. However the identification of the

    connections material basis (found also in the memory of some natives) does not in

    itself explain the generalized use of particular units of account, but leaves open the

    question of how monetary preferences and cultures are formed. It is precisely these

    questions I intend to examine here.

    But rather than attributing the existence of the Haitian dollar, a singular feature of this

    small Caribbean countrys monetary culture, to the essentialist notion of

    Haitianities, my objective is to explore what the imaginary currency reveals in terms

    of the dynamics of the popular economy. Moreover, instead of attempting to explain

    why this cultural device exists, I intend to show how the universe of currencies and

    units of measure is traversed by historical vicissitudes and historical forms of

    constructing relations with the past that so richly constitute the present of everyday

    life in Haiti.4

    2 Werveke uses the expression fictional currency, while other historians speak ofghost currencies. The expression imaginary currency was first proposed by LuigiEinaudi (1936) in his exploration of how people dealt with the instability and extreme

    plurality that accompanied the unification and creation of new states in Europe priorto the creation of (national) unified systems of weights, measures and currencies.

    More recently Bompaire has shown how the notion of a unit of account or imaginarycurrency is multiform, covering a widely variable semantic field, which is onlyunified in opposition to the real money used in payment operations (Bompaire 2000).Also see Day 1998 and Lardin 2007.3 On the solution to the monetary problem in the context of the occupation andinstitution of the fixed parity system, see Chatelain (1954: 121 and ff). Also see the(unfortunately few) references to monetary management during the occupation periodin Schmidt 1995 (1971), Plummer (1988) and Castor (1987).4Before suggesting the importance of history in the Haitian present at the start of his

    book Silencing the past(1995), Michel-Rolph Trouillot described Caribbean societiesas inescapably historical, in the sense that some of their distant past is not onlyknown, but known to be different from their present, and yet relevant to both theobservers and the natives understanding of that present (Trouillot 1992:21).

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    Monetary preferences and transformations in the popular economy

    Discussing the standard views found in the economic sciences, which presume that a

    normal currency combines the four functions of money described above, historians

    and anthropologists have called attention to the productiveness of observing situations

    with an extreme monetary plurality. In these cases we find currencies that perform

    only some of these functions, yet are deeply embedded in social life, enabling and

    facilitating calculations and exchanges (with other currencies and with both physical

    and intangible objects), shaping economic spaces, establishing hierarchies of scales

    and values. Their versatility allows room for diverse practices based on exchanges

    between currencies and units of measure, dynamizing the economy in extremely poor

    localities such as the popular neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince.

    These approaches share the concern to replace deductive analyses, which set out from

    theoretical definitions of the nature of money, with inductive or empirical analyses

    that emphasize monetary practices, the social and multiple meanings of currencies

    and the historical processes leading to the creation and disappearance of some

    currencies and the persistence of others (reinforcing the difference between the so-

    called soft and hard currencies, for example).5This indeed was Marc Blochs view in

    his essay on European monetary history, where, responding to the question of why

    currencies are born, transform and vanish, he proposes replacing every a priori

    theoretical definition of currency, every intention to establish a set of functional

    criteria that would qualify (once and for all) all currencies, with a minimalist and

    pragmatic definition which recognizes that, above all else, currencies (physical and

    fictitious) are measuring instruments (Bloch 1956: 48-49).

    Over the last few years, two complementary approaches have specifically examined

    the nature and functioning of currencies that serve as pure units of account, like the

    Haitian dollar. In his comparative studies of monetary dynamics in a broad region

    spanning from China and Japan to East Africa, historian Akinobu Kuroda (2008a and

    2008b) shows how in various situations moneys classical functions can appear to

    become detached, and how units of account possess an integrating function, enabling

    5A topic with a long history, including in the monetary space of the Caribbean itself,as Mintz adeptly showed in his study of eighteenth century Jamaica (1964a).

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    conversions between units of payments and reserves of value. Similarly

    anthropologist Jane Guyer, setting out from a premise similar to Blochs i.e. to

    observe the currencies of people (Guyer 1995) provides a historical ethnography

    of monetary practices in West Africa, situating the pure units of account within what

    she calls a monetary interface. Hence for Guyer (1995, 2004 and 2011) fictional or

    imaginary currencies perform a central role in constructing boundaries and thresholds

    between scales of value, associated, as she shows, with the plurality of currencies and

    units of measure. As she points out, they also serve to mediate both the

    memorization of non-reductive transactions and their nature as conversions (Guyer

    2011: 2016).

    At the start of the 1960s, Sidney Mintz (1961) suggested how the proliferation of

    units of measure in Haiti was constitutive of the countrys popular economy and

    specifically of the dynamic of its markets. Mintz argued that the absence of unified

    standards, scales or systems of measure should not be seen as an obstacle but as a

    fundamental element in generating the small profits that allow small trade to flourish.

    We are faced, he suggested, by a universe of practices and concepts that operate

    through historical layers, the superposition of chronologies, ever present in the

    transactions, beginning with the multiple and ambiguous meanings of the terms

    forming the vocabulary of commerce and especially the vocabulary of

    measurements.6

    In his richly detailed studies of markets, measures and transactions, conducted

    between 1958 and 1961, Mintz never mentioned the existence of the Haitian dollar.7

    Michel Laguerre (1983), in research undertaken in Bel Air between 1974 and 1976,

    likewise never speaks of the currency, even when describing aspects of the popular

    economy like the credit systems and lotteries, both of which today are basically

    calculated in the Haitian dollar. A tourist guidebook published in English at the start

    of the 1970s only mentions the gourde and the national currencys parity with the US

    dollar, an omission unthinkable today when any publication intended for first-time

    6Mintz described the history of containers (bottles and tins) introduced as goodsduring the period of US occupation (1915-34) and which later acquired autonomousstatus as units of measure (1961).7In personal conversation, Sidney Mintz confirmed that he had never heard mentionof the Haitian dollar during his fieldwork in Haiti.

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    travelers to travel to the country will invariably forewarn the visitor of the complex

    monetary transactions caused by many everyday transactions being calculated in

    Haitian dollars.

    Empirically determining the precise date when a particular cultural device emerged is

    an arduous task, when not simply a banal question or a false problem. What interests

    me here, rather, is exploring a number of historical and ethnographic leads that can

    provide an insight into the historicity of monetary cultures and simultaneously into

    the dynamics of Haitis popular economy.

    If currencies possess multiple meanings (Zelizer 1998), they also possess complex

    and non-linear histories. Like all units of measure, their meanings and uses emerge

    from the intersection of various chronologies. I have already indicated one these

    histories in the case of the Haitian dollar, which begins with the institution of the

    fixed parity of 5 to 1 in 1919. In the next section I explore another longer history

    involving the use of the scale of five in the monetary universe of Haiti.

    But before turning to this history, we need to examine three elements that modulate

    the contemporary popular economy in which the Haitian dollar is measured and

    calculated. The first two elements are related to the increased mobility of people and

    money, leading to a single social space that encompasses rural, urban and overseas

    universes. The third element concerns the affinity between the dynamics of popular

    culture (the small profits and small jobs) and the dynamics of the emergency

    regimes (Fassin & Pandolfi 2010), based on the huge presence of international

    cooperation and the associations between military interventions and humanitarian aid,

    like those seen in Haiti on a virtually permanent basis over the last three decades.

    The first element refers to changes in the relations between rural and urban universes.

    As in other Caribbean nations (Portes, Itzigsohn & Dore-Cabral 1994, Manigat 1997),

    the axis of the popular economy in Haiti shifted in the second half of the 20th century

    from the fields to the city. Today the country is predominantly urban: 60% of

    inhabitants live in the cities, while in 1950 the figure was below 30%. In 1960 Port-

    au-Prince had a little over 300,000 inhabitants; today more than two million people

    live in the city. Most of the population now living in the metropolitan zone comes

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    from outside, a movement that intensified in the 1970s and that continues today,

    stimulated by the land shortages in rural areas and the crisis in the rural economy

    caused by soil erosion and competition with cheap farm imports. In the final decades

    of the twentieth century, urban sprawl grew exponentially and once middle class

    districts like Bel Air were swamped by migrants, transforming them into gueto

    stigmatized by violence, an absence of infrastructure and sanitation, and extreme

    poverty.8As Haitian extended families began to find significantly more resources in

    the city, the new urban poor developed economic habits that could be construed as

    creative reinventions of practices typical to the traditional rural economy.9I return

    to two of these later: (a) the multiplication of small profits (ti benefis) in plural and

    non-standardized universes of measures and currencies, and (b) the polyactivity that

    allows both men and women to develop an acute sense of opportunity, multiplying

    small trade (ti biznis) and little jobs (ti travay).10

    The second element is mobility. In fact as people moved in huge numbers to the

    cities, there was a parallel upsurge in people leaving Haiti a phenomenon with a

    long history but which has intensified and acquired a particular modulation over

    recent decades. Today around 10 million people live in the country, while more than 3

    million Haitians live abroad.11 According to some estimates, the money and other

    objects sent back from overseas comprise the top item in the countrys GDP.12

    8According to data collected prior to the January 2010 earthquake, slightly over100,000 people lived in the Greater Bel Air area (see Viva Rio Census 2007). Seeestimates on the informal sector in Lamautte Bisson 2002. These interconnections

    between the rural and urban worlds and between Haitis national territory and thediaspora throw into question the Barthelemys 1989 model of the meaning of the

    outside (dey) in Haitian social space.9 Both the notion of economic habits and that of creative reinvention are takenfrom Pierre Bourdieu (2000 and 1977 respectively).10 On the economic habits of rural Haiti until the mid-twentieth century, also seeMintz (especially 1961 and 1964b), Moral (1978 [1961], Herskovits (2012 [1937])and Mtraux (1951). The idea of polyactivity is central to the seminal work by Hart(1973) and Fontaines 2008 study of the dynamics of poverty in pre-industrial Europe.Comitas (1963) developed the theme of occupational multiplicity in the Caribbeanliterature.11Diverse sources (like the UNDP) agree on an emigration rate of around 8/1000;however these statistics fail to count illegal non-registered migrants, and the comingand going of Haitians from the neighboring Dominican Republic.12In 2012 remittances to Haiti represented just over 25 % of GDP (UNDP 2013).

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    The increased circulation between rural and urban areas and the intensification in

    transnational circulation has altered a crucial aspect of social life and the popular

    economy in contemporary Haiti: the mobility of people. This invests the networks of

    families, neighbors and friends with singular meanings: mothers and fathers who send

    their children to live in the city or abroad, merchants who travel between the rural

    interior, Port-au-Prince and the Haitian commercial capitals situated outside the

    countrys borders (like Miami, Panam and Santo Domingo), the universe of the

    diaspor in which forms of being and living are cultivated and where money and

    objects are obtained to be sent back to the home country as remittances. Rather than

    the notion of emigration to the city or abroad, it is the notion of mobility that allows

    us to describe the wandering that shapes Haitian lives, collapsing the local, national

    and transnational scales into a single social space through which people, currencies

    and goods circulate.13

    Along with mobility, a third element structures the dynamics of the popular economy

    in contemporary Haiti: the implantation after the end of the Duvalier dictatorship in

    1986 and especially from the mid-1990s onwards of emergency regimes backed

    by foreign military interventions (either by one country, a coalition of countries or the

    UN) and by the massive presence of International Aid Agencies (IAAs) and Non-

    Governmental Organizations (NGOs) distributing goods (water, food), services

    (medical care) and money through development projects that hire people in unstable

    short-term contracts.14

    The military actions of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti

    (MINUSTAH) began precisely in the Bel Air region in 2006. Even today the zone is

    classified by the UN as red, signifying that under no circumstances may civil staff

    13On the mobility of people in general, see Fassin 2011. On contemporary forms ofmobile money linked to the mobility of people, see Maurer 2011 and, for the Haitiancase, Taylor 2011. On mobility as a Caribbean trope, see Sheller 2011, and on themobility of Caribbean merchant women, see Ulysse 2007. In Haiti people use theterm diaspora not only as a substantive but also as an adjective: money made abroadis lajandiaspora,the acquired habits of people returning from abroad are recognizedas diaspora, etc. (see Handerson 2013). On mobility from the point of view of familylives, see Dalmaso 2013. On the transnational Haitians lives, see Glick-Shiller andFouron 2001 and Richman 2005.14On the lengthy history of what is today called international cooperation in Haiti, see

    Nicaise 2013.

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    circulate in the area, including employees of agencies like the UNDP and UNICEF.15

    This, though, has not prevented the UN itself from participating in the implantation of

    stabilization and development projects after MINUSTAHs arrival through the

    mediation of local associations and NGOs. Indeed as part of the emergency response

    to the January 2010 earthquake, the UN developed large-scale programs like Cash

    for Work in the region.16Although subject to the uneven rhythms and flows of

    money from international aid and to the constant change in the emergency agendas,

    funding from multilateral aid and cooperation bodies, and more recently from

    donations from friends countries, has in fact ranked as the second item in Haitis

    GDP, immediately after international remittances, for at least two decades.17But this

    influx and this is the point I wish to stress is accompanied by an affinity between

    the logic of the popular economy and the logics of the emergency economy.18

    According to some estimates, less than 10% of the population of Bel Air is employed

    in the formal labor market, 80% of people live on less than US$ 2.5 per day and more

    than 50% on less than one US dollar per day, i.e. technically living in extreme

    poverty.19At the same time, numerous agencies and agents are involved in the control

    (or governance) of the territory and the circulation of its people, goods and money.

    Aside from State institutions, these include bodies from the civil and military

    15The other region classified as red by the UN is the area known as Boston, in CitSoleil.16 The Cash for Work program paid individuals 30 Haitian dollars (150 gourdes, alittle less than four US dollars) per working day for periods of fifteen days. The ideawas to remove the rubble left by the earthquake and distribute money to a largenumber of people (hence the fortnightly rotation).17An account of these changes in the political economy of aid to Haiti in the 1990s

    can be found in James 2010, Marcelin 2011 and Schuller 2012.18 The idea of a patchwork of aid interventions described by Marcelin (2011: 3)

    provides an good expression of this affinity between the aid economy and the populareconomy an affinity equivalent to the connection at a political level between thedynamic of international cooperation and the pulverization of popular associations, atopic to which I return later (on this issue, also see Schuller 2007 and 2012 and James2010).19According to the WTO (cited in Portes et al. 1994) only 7.7 % of the workforce wasformally employed in 1987. The Viva Rio Census (VR 2007) found that 78% offamilies in Bel Air have a monthly per capita income below US$ 43 and 37.6% earnless than one dollar per day. This data matches the findings contained in the latestUNDP report (2013), which indicates that 75% of the countrys population surviveson less than 2.5 dollars a day.

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    branches of the United Nations, IAAs, NGOs, local associations, churches, oufs,

    armed gangs and bases.20

    It is precisely in these undisciplined regions of urban Haiti21 where the boundaries

    between housing and commerce are porous and the markets merge with residential

    spaces, inhabited by mobile people who transit continually between rural and urban

    areas and between the national territory and the diaspora, working hard to live on

    small trading and small jobs that help provide a minimum of money, food and water

    that diverse forms of calculation and units of measure flourish, the currencies multiply

    and where, to paraphrase one sociologist, the Haitian dollar is practiced.22

    The scale of five: uses and calculations

    The units of measure are cognitive and social artifacts that express relations of

    equivalence, difference, order, hierarchy and scale. These relations are also historical.

    The conversion of five gourdes to one Haitian dollar has a long history in Haitis

    monetary 'space of calculability (to quote Mitchell 2002). Indeed the history precedes

    the parity between the gourde and the US dollar instigated in 1919. This in turn takes

    us back an idea announced in the previous section in dialogue with Mintz: various

    historical layers and diverse chronologies converge in the use of a unit of measure or

    in the generalization of the calculations made in a determined currency.

    The first gourde banknotes began to circulate in 1813, nine years after the countrys

    independence in 1804. The incipient national currency became part of the extremely

    diverse monetary universe of the Caribbean, coexisting with other currencies,

    including those of the old and new empires, the coins minted on the islands or those

    produced by private companies (such as the Dutch East India Company, which issued

    its own money). In this universe of extreme monetary plurality basically governed

    by commerce and crisscrossed by trade routes the national currency acquired a

    different status from 1872 onwards when a special relationship was established with

    20I return later to this key theme of the geopolitics of contemporary urban Haiti.21Trouillot (1992: 20) uses the expression to speak of the Caribbean; here I use it todescribe those systems of measures that resist standardizations.22At the end of the article I return to Sabine Manigats proposal (2007) to promotethe practice of the gourde instead of the practice of the Haitian dollar.

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    the French franc, the currency of the former metropolis, involving the introduction of

    a fixed parity system of five gourdes to one franc.

    The United States occupied Haiti in 1915. Four years later the US administration

    implemented a process of monetary reform that replaced the franc with the dollar as

    the currency of reference, while maintaining the exchange rate of five (gourdes) to

    one (now the dollar). Fixed parity ended in 1979 during the dollar crisis and the

    ensuing economic turmoil, which had a major impact on the relations between Haiti

    and the metropolis, causing the currency to fluctuate, opening markets and

    exponentially increasing the number of Haitians migrating to the United States. All

    the indications are that the devaluation of the gourde and the end of fixed parity with

    the dollar contributed to the detachment of the unit of account from the means of

    payment. The scale of five was maintained to guide calculations: one Haitian dollar

    was (and in terms of the unit of account still is) five gourdes.

    It is curious to observe the coherence between this autonomization of the Haitian

    dollar as a unit of account and the later issue of gourde coins and notes after 1979 in a

    scale of five too: first the five gourde coin was created (replacing the banknote

    convertible to one US dollar) followed by the issue of 10, 25, 50, 100, 250 and 500

    banknotes (later the 1000 note).23The means of payment (the gourde) thereby became

    a support, in the sense proposed by Weber (2009), for this long-term cultural

    disposition to make calculations in Haitian dollars in a scale of five.

    Three examples can be cited to show how transactions occur and how calculations are

    made in everyday life. In the first example, after negotiating the price of a bag of

    mangoes in a street market, buyer and seller agree a price of three Haitian dollars; the

    buyer pays with a 50 gourde note (10 Haitian dollars = 50 5); the seller keeps three

    dollars for the price of the mangoes (3 !5 = 15 gourdes) and gives 7 Haitian dollars in

    change (7 !5 = 35 gourdes, in three notes of 10 and one coin of five).

    23 This preference for the scale of five in relation to the Haitian dollar echoes theariaryand ouguiya, the national currencies of Madagascar and Mauritania, known asthe only national currencies in circulation based on the scale of 5 rather than the scaleof 10.

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    In the second example, a receipt in a supermarket reads 234 HT (Haitian dollars). The

    buyer pays with 1500 gourdes calculated as 300 HT (1500 5), the cashier says

    heres your change: 66 dollars and gives the buyer three 100 gourde notes and three

    10 gourde notes, or in other words 330 gourdes, keeping the 234 HT for the value of

    the purchase. The calculation is made in milliseconds: (200 !5 = 1000) + (30 !5 =

    150) + (4 !5 = 20) = 1170 HTG (gourdes).

    The third example shows how the imaginary currency can also organize the system of

    money earmarking (Zelizer 2004): Madame K. sells food in a busy area of the

    Portail Saint Josef region, on the corner between a corridor linking the interior of the

    guto with the zones main routeway, J.J. Dessalines Avenue. The clients can

    purchase a fried banana (fritay) at prices varying between one gourde and one Haitian

    dollar (five gourdes). Madame K. stores the money received in three separate places.

    In the first two she places the money worth over one Haitian dollar: the first batch of

    money is used to buy the raw ingredients for the next day, the second is lajan lakay,

    house money. In the third location she keeps the money valuing less than one Haitian

    dollar, the ti kob, the small change left at the end of the working day and used to buy

    food and water the next day.24

    Although basically an oral phenomenon, the imaginary currency also appears in

    writing in some contexts, such as the example of the supermarket receipt, on some

    restaurant menus, at some gas station pumps, on some service contracts for

    international cooperation projects,25 and especially in the notebooks recording debts

    and credits for bets in general and lotteries in particular.

    Some time ago Jeane Lave (1988) showed the impossibility of establishing any

    immediate correlations between ordinary numerical habits, like those practiced in

    24The word kobhas two meanings: a specific meaning as a hundredth of a gourd (acent) and a generic meaning as a synonym for currency. In the course of this text Itreat currency and money as synonymous. It lied beyond my scope here to explore thedialogue between the creole vocabulary that distinguishes monnen, lajan, kob, and thelike, and the more analytic distinctions between, for instance, money and currency.25There are in fact numerous examples of contracts between Haitians and IAAs and

    NGOs expressed in the Haitian Dollar.

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    Haitian transactions, and school training.26Similarly, Charles Stafford (2003) has

    described the importance of the markets in the numerical socialization of children and

    their interiorization of scales and forms of calculation. Indeed in contrast to foreigners

    who need time (and very often calculators) to multiply and divide, the scale of five

    used as the basis for calculations is internalized by Haitians; as Jane Guyer would say

    (2011: 2018), it has a mnemonic function, serving as a cognitive benchmark. Indeed

    we can imagine that for those who calculate in Haitian dollars, there is an immediate

    relation between units of account and means of payment: they are indexed, in

    Charles Pierces sense, in such a way that 5 is 1, 10 is 2, 15 is 3...

    Monetary space: geographies, scales and conversions

    The residents of Bel Air, who occupy lower positions on the social scale, tend to

    calculate the money that they receive (in small trading and from small jobs) and the

    money used to pay their living expenses in Haitian dollars (food, rents, their

    childrens schooling). Wages from the local government, though usually recorded on

    the spreadsheets in gourdes, are calculated in Haitian dollars. Some time ago, for

    example, the countrys president complained on public radio about his low pay

    packet, lamenting the fact he received just 12,000 dollars a month. In this case he was

    clearly talking about Haitian dollars, equivalent to about US$ 1,500.

    The more intense the presence of foreigners in the transactions, the more the unit of

    account changes: the Haitian dollar is substituted by the US dollar and, to a lesser

    extent, other currencies such as euros or Dominican pesos. In the restaurants and

    supermarkets frequented by foreigners, for example, the prices are fixed in US

    dollars. The same occurs with rents: when contracts are negotiated with foreigners,

    the price is agreed in US dollars.

    There are also various situations in which people pay with US dollars but calculate in

    Haitian dollars. In small international trade (involving the female sellers who travel

    periodically to Miami and Panama, for example), people handle US dollars and buy in

    the foreign currency, but on their return to Port-au-Prince the relation between the

    money invested in purchasing goods and the price fixed on the market is calculated in

    26According to the 2005 UNDP report, the literacy Rate among people aged from 15to 24 is 66.2%. This figures are consistent with the Bel Air data (CVR 2007).

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    Haitian dollars. The development officers, facilitators, drivers, translators and other

    specialists linked to the NGOs and AAIs negotiate their contracts in US dollars, but

    frequently refer to them in Haitian dollars in their conversations with friends or

    relatives.

    The exchange rate between the Haitian dollar and gourde is fixed (1 to 5); the Haitian

    dollar varies in relation to the US dollar in line with the fluctuation of the gourde.

    Somewhat surprisingly given the political commotions, the constant rise in food

    prices and the turmoil caused by natural catastrophes over recent years, the gourdes

    value in relation to the US dollar has remained stable at around 40 to one. Hence one

    US dollar is worth approximately eight Haitian dollars.

    During field research I observed negotiations with money changers expressed and

    calculated in dollars (Haitian and American, aysienand vet, green). Sometimes people

    use calculators to convert and divide by eight. When negotiating with foreigners

    (blan), the money changers count in gourdes, but when the exchange is between

    Haitians, people count in Haitian dollars. In a transaction involving 50 US dollars, for

    example, a foreigner will calculate the receipt of twenty 100-gourde banknotes as

    2000 gourdes, while a Haitian will calculate the value as 400 Haitian dollars, or

    simply 400 dol. The adjective aysien, or the expression dol aysien, is only used

    when one of the people in the transaction is foreign. Among Haitians, unless the

    qualifier amerikenis used, when people say dol they mean dol aysien.

    In some contexts people differentiate between lajan blan (or lajan diaspor) and

    lajan kreyl. In fact the Haitian dollar could be said to be a creole currency,

    including in the sense of being of the country, as with so many other objects and

    habits to which Haitians attach the adjective kreyl. The unit of account is essentially

    used between Haitians, in the markets and small jobs, in the heart of the popular

    economy, where people speak in creole and calculate in dol.

    Although its use is generalized, the Haitian dollar is not used in all transactions. By

    mapping the uses of the different units of measure and means of payment, we can

    trace the geography of Haitian monetary space, composed of currencies, measuring

    instruments, spheres of exchange and scales. These all differ and, as Jane Guyer has

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    shown (2004), constitute and reveal social hierarchies and inequalities: not all

    subjects exchange and calculate with the same currencies, and not all subjects have

    the same capacities to exchange some currencies for others.

    In Port-au-Prince, as in many other locations, these hierarchies and inequalities are

    projected onto the territory: in the urban islands of foreigners scattered across some

    regions of the city, the US dollar predominates as a unit of account and a means of

    payment in some sectors, such as the housing market, some restaurants, hotels, night

    clubs and supermarkets catering for upper class Haitians and the legion of ex-pats,

    relief workers and consultants. Symptomatically the supermarkets double as currency

    exchange bureaus. As we move down the social scale, the US dollar begins to be used

    as a means of payment for transactions calculated in Haitian dollars: this is the case of

    the small jobs linked to international cooperation, for example. Lower down at a

    level undoubtedly accounting for the majority of transactions people calculate in

    Haitian dollars and pay in gourdes. And lower down still, among the thousands who

    literally have no money and perform transactions involving less than one Haitian

    dollar, people use gourdes, kobs (gourde cents), gouden (half a gourde) or penis

    (equivalent to five kobs). The latter may also be physically represented by US cents,

    which are not hard to find on the streets even though the US one cent coin is

    actually equivalent to almost 50 kobs. This shows us that the imagination of monetary

    scales is not necessarily bound to the nominal value of the money being exchanged.

    Ti benefis, ti biznis and ti travay

    After being named as the capital of the most prosperous French colony in 1770, Port-

    au-Prince became a key location in the relations between Haiti and the world system,

    two metropolises (France and the United States) and their agents in the field,

    including merchants, military personnel, missionaries and relief workers.

    Bel Air was the citys first black district according to Laguerre (1983: 167) one of

    the oldest black districts in the western hemisphere. By the second half of the

    nineteenth century it had become a mixture of slums and the homes of an incipient

    middle class of professionals, public employees and factory workers a rare

    conjunction of wage earners in a social universe with few wages. A katye popil,

    gradually turning into something like a complex of favelas, closely in tune with the

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    political and economic life of the country.27As in the citys other popular districts,

    most people survive by doing many different things, following the logic of small

    profits (ti benefis) obtained in small jobs (ti travay) and small trading (ti biznis).

    Located in the heart of the capital, next to the port and the National Palace in the

    lowest area of land close to the sea, Bel Air merges with the Croix de Bossales region,

    the core of the system of Haitian markets where the countrys main wholesale market

    is located, the central link between the rural interior, the city of Port-au-Prince and the

    international trade circuits.28

    Croix de Bossales is situated next to the port and was originally a market and

    cemetery for slaves. Today the area covers more than 350,000 square meters

    containing four public markets (with demarcated boundaries under the jurisdiction

    of an authority appointed by the city mayor) and dozens of streets that are totally or

    partially occupied by commerce, and which radiate out in capillary fashion from Bel

    Air to every corner of the city.

    The key to this capillarity is found in some of the main mechanisms of the popular

    economy: the progressive fractioning of products, the multiplication of

    intermediations, the amplified reproduction of the small gains and the interplay

    between different units of measure and scales. At one end of the network, for

    example, large sacks (gwo sak) of coal are unloaded at the Warf Jeremie port located

    between lower Bel Air and Cit Soleil; at the other end, the traders sell small tins (ti

    mamit) with some lumps of coal which are used as fuel though insufficient by

    themselves to cook lunch (in the poorest regions, coal is added to the plastic

    collected in the rubbish dumps as a source of energy for cooking). To take another

    example, at one end of the circuit the import stores sell sacks of powdered detergent

    weighing 20 pounds or more (depending on their origin, they may also be measured in

    kilos), while at the other end traders sell small bags of detergent the size of a marble.

    The same mechanism extends throughout the other commercial chains involving

    27For a recent history of Bel Air, see the novel by Danticat (2007), as well as RibeiroThomaz & Nascimento 2006, Neiburg, Nicaise & Braum 2013 and Braum 2013.28On the Haitian market system, see Mintz (1959 and 1960); on the street markets inthe countrys capital, see Bazabas (1997); and for an ethnography of the markets inthe Greater Bel Air area, including Croix de Bossales, see Neiburg 2012a.

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    popularly consumed items, where products measured in one kind of unit are converted

    into others, multiplying the transactions, distributing small profits and undoubtedly

    increasing the final price of the product consumed by the poorest (who typically only

    have enough money to buy one kob of detergent).29

    In Bel Air, as in the other popular districts of Haiti, the observation made by Laurence

    Fontaine (2008) in her study of the dynamics of poverty in Europe during the ancien

    rgime is equally applicable: in one form or another, all people are linked to the

    markets. As well as being the main source for obtaining products and services, they

    are key locations for the production and distribution of money (a) in the actual

    transactions of buying and selling (which primarily involve female merchants30), and

    (b) in the infinite number of tasks flourishing in what could be called the

    infrastructure (preponderantly male) of the markets activities that enable the

    transactions themselves to take place: 31 lending money, transporting goods,

    controlling the access to the sales and storage spaces, guarding (and/or threatening),

    coordinating development projects, charging duties, engaging in politics and making

    war.32

    In this universe of small jobs, small trading and small profits which oscillates to the

    rhythm of the money supply (coming from the big merchants, the government and

    international cooperation) and to the rhythm of the opening and closure of one or

    other channel of intermediation (Mosse 2006) people cultivate an acute sense of

    29 Mintz (1964b) showed how profits are made in the relations between scale andunits of measurement. Describing similar mechanisms in West Africa, Guyer (2004and 2011) developed the idea of marginal gains and the distinction betweenprofit and

    gain.30 Mintz (1964a) writes that 66% of women were linked to commerce. In the VRcensus in Bel Air, this figure was 70%.31Curiously the distinction between transactional work and infrastructural work

    proposed in studies of financial markets (see for instance Pardo-Guerraforthcoming),and inspired by social studies of science and technology, is extremely useful in termsof comprehending the dynamics and range of popular markets.32Comprehending the dynamics of the popular markets depends to a large extent onunderstanding their political centrality: the conflicts in the markets (over the controlof the government, rates and flows) are interconnected with political conflicts: as a

    popular saying in Haiti goes: closing the markets overthrows the government. Ihave examined the relations between the dynamics of the popular economy and thegovernement of markets recently elsewhere (Neiburg 2012a and 2012b).

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    opportunity, while doing or trying to do various things simultaneously. As observed

    earlier (recalling Comitas 1963, Hart 1973 and Fontaine 2008), in the popular

    economy people must remain polyactive.

    Two expressions reveal the meanings held by polyactivity for the people living in

    popular districts of Haiti: mwen gen plizy chapand mwen gen plizy badj. Someone

    with many hats may dedicate him or herself to various activities simultaneously, or

    may receive payment from more than one source to perform the same activity. As one

    of the privileged few, someone may simultaneously participate in a development

    project financed by an NGO, work as a warehouse guard, participate in small-scale

    street trading, nurture closer contacts with a local government entity, and so on.

    The second expression, I have many badges, sheds light on the multifaceted

    effective and affective relations between polyactivity and the development universe.

    The badges, which function like ID cards, become part of the social games involved

    in creating the sense of opportunities and small jobs. When worn on a persons chest,

    they have various potential meanings: they may assert hierarchy as a boss or a notable

    person with many resources (social capital and money), just as they may also display

    the frustration of someone who was once waged, employed, a contender, or

    someone who began or even completed training but is now unemployed.

    The three main sources of badges are (a) a technical or language training course (the

    equivalent of a diploma or certificate of initiated training), (b) a current job or proof

    of previous employment (for government bodies like the local council and, above all,

    for NGO and AAI projects), and (c) belonging to one or more of the local associations

    found in Haitis popular districts, many of which are officially recognized by the

    government, permitting them to receive funds or take part in development projects.

    Managing a tap distributing water to the public (the so-called kys dlo), a popular

    pharmacy or cyber caf, or refurbishing a space to run arts courses, workshops or

    language courses, or somewhere to be used for band rehearsals or promoting

    neighborhood festivals, are just some of the activities that generate an infinite number

    of ti travay and ti biznis in the universe formed by a diverse set of associations at

    street, sector and district level, as well as youth and womens associations,

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    associations of musicians and artists, and even associations of associations. Their

    names and acronyms (like the Rue Saint Martin Civic Service Committee, CSCSM, to

    pick one of many) can be seen on badges, in the minutes of association meetings, on

    posters in head offices, or sometimes in graffiti on the walls of the area covered by

    their activities. We can also observe the projection of this affinity between the logics

    of the popular economy, local associations and international cooperation in the

    organization of local space.33

    The associations linked to development, which receive official recognition from the

    government and cooperation agencies and distribute badges, also form part of a much

    wider universe of groupings that help shape the social organization of the popular

    districts of Haiti. As my colleagues and I have shown elsewhere (Neiburg, Nicaise &

    Braum 2013, and Braum 2013) the most general term for designating all these

    groupings is baz, or base a key social form connecting the dynamics of the popular

    economy with local forms of government.

    The base is a location and an area of action, a crowd that protects, ensures somewhere

    to sleep, a plate of food, helps in cases of need, and provides the chance for a small

    job.34 The bases bring together people, equalizing and hierarchizing them, creating

    group belongings and leaders (chef, boss, notab, gran ng, ougn, past, kmandan

    are just some of the terms from the rich vocabulary of authority used in Haitis

    popular districts). These are segmentary formations that exist in different contexts and

    at different scales, allowing multiple and contextual belongings closely in tune with

    the dynamic of the ti travay and the ti biznis, which in turn produce and reproduce the

    bases, serving as channels for the circulation of money: in development work

    (associations recognized by the government and cooperation agencies may also be

    33The life of the associations varies according to numerous factors. Over the courseof my fieldwork in Bel Air, I heard people talk about associations that no longer exist,I observed many active associations and I came across many others that were in alethargic state, ready to be activated if there was a chance of a project anexpectation set off principally at the start of my ethnography by my own presence,when people thought that I, as a blan, was in Bel Air to look for partners for a project,like a missionary or a member of an NGO or AAI.34 On the long history of Haitian associations and bosses or chiefs, from kombit tochef de section see Herskovits 2012 (1937), Metraux 1951 and Comhaire 1955. Onthe construction of bosses in relation to the morality of respect and reputation in theCaribbean, see Wilson 1969.

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    called bases), the promotion of cultural events (especially musical events, such as

    performances by rarabands and band a pye), illegal trading, armed actions linked to

    politics (as in the case of the resistance of Bel Airs bases to the overthrow of

    President Jean Bertrand Aristide in 2004), small or large crimes (ranging from thefts

    to kidnappings), and the control especially in the proximities of the markets (in the

    Forturon and La Salines bases, for example) of the rates and flows of money and

    goods.

    Trade and small jobs, for their part, are inserted in flows of money sustained by

    credit. Among the skills needed by base leaders is the capacity to give and lend

    money. The projects developed by local associations very often receive funding,

    mostly from NGOs linked to microcredit rather than banks. Without credit it is

    impossible to generate the capital needed for small commerce to exist.35Sources of

    credit include the loans and payment deferrals given to larger traders (ranging from

    the big wholesalers to the small retailers), the credit associations that abound in

    Haitis popular districts and especially the markets, like solor sabotay, or the larger

    loans and interest rates, like eskontor ponya an endless number of formats, in fact,

    in which the number of people involved, the timescale, the amount lent and the

    interest rates charged all vary, and which tend to converge on the figure of a manager

    or boss,who may be male or female (papaor manman).

    These financial microcircuits also include the pawn shops (which frequently assist

    people by temporally exchanging goods for money) and bets in the lottery (blt),

    which in many senses also functions as a mechanism for savings and capitalization.36

    This is the case, for example, of a neighbor from Bel Air who spends between 6 and 8

    Haitian dollars (30 and 40 gourdes) every day in the blt, approximately 30% of the

    profit she makes from selling juice in the street (around 30 Haitian dollars or 150

    gourdes). In the mornings she, her two daughters and a woman friend who lives with

    them often discuss the numbers to choose for the days bets; at night the women

    35Sidney Mintz (1964b), emphasizing the importance of capitalization in Haitis ruralmarkets, explored the native notion of capital, manman lajan, mother money. Onforms of capitalization in small-scale popular urban trade in contemporary Haiti, seeSergo 2010.36On this point also see Laguerre 1983, and Baptiset, Heather & Taylor 2010.

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    discuss the reasons for the failures to win anything or, less frequently, what they will

    spend their prize winnings on.

    Many of these conversations on numbers, money and business involve questions

    relating to politics and magic. At this level the very images printed on the banknotes

    become relevant. For example, I heard people in Bel Air explain the preference for

    the Haitian dollar to the disdain for the gourde, whose notes for decades only bore

    images of the Duvaliers a disdain involving a mixture of militancy and fear

    motivated by the still powerful figures of Papa Doc and Baby Doc.

    Although I cannot explore the relation between magic, money and measuring, and

    chance and trading in the remainder of this article, I wish to emphasize how in this

    universe of popular loans and savings, involving the physical handling of some

    currencies and the imagining of others, subjects are created who are enthusiastic

    experts in numbers, specialists in units of measure and, we could say, in games of

    scales.

    Conclusion

    In 2007, shortly after beginning my fieldwork in Port-au-Prince, the government

    issued a ban on the use of the Haitian dollar and made it compulsory to set prices in

    gourdes. Intellectuals supported the measure, condemning the imaginary currency,

    described as just another sign of the barbarity or backwardness characterizing the

    country, just another display of the weakness of the State, unable to maintain a true

    currency. In a newspaper article, one intellectual argued that the governments

    measure had the merit of being an invitation to less schizophrenia in the calculations

    in which our compatriots are engaged every day [...] forever attached to their

    arithmetical gymnastics. Displaying the condescension typical to the social elites

    who claim to comprehend and at the same time disparage the pathetic practices of

    the population, the author condemned this dexterity of our vendors, workers and

    other scarcely literate economic agents [...] who reproduce the automatism of the

    older generation. She ends by encouraging young people to practice the gourde

    (Manigat 2007).

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    Even though these attempts to modernize the countrys monetary culture failed to

    have the desired effect since people continue to calculate in Haitian dollars while

    they exchange other currencies there are signs of other preferences emerging: some

    young people, for example, use the Haitian dollar but condemn the imaginary

    currency as a practice pertaining to old people. Indeed teleologies have no place in

    monetary histories or in the formation of practices involving calculation and

    conversion.37

    Over the last few years I have studied two cases whose contrasting experiences

    provide a surprising insight into the world of Haitis imaginary currencies (Neiburg

    2006, 2007, 2010 and 2011). In Argentina, after the end of the currency board system

    (known as convertibility, 1991-2001), nothing similar to a pure unit of account

    emerged, something akin to an Argentinean dollar.38In Brazil, by contrast, the

    current national currency was created in 1994 on the basis of a pure unit of account,

    an index, an imaginary currency called the Unidade Real de Valor (URV, real unity of

    value), which gave way to the real, baptized with this name, among other reasons,

    precisely to contrast it with the indexes governing the monetary correction system

    that had fed inflation for decades.

    In fact once the normative premises concerning the normality or sickness of

    currencies are stripped away, we can observe what was previously invisible to the

    analyses of the Haitian economy and markets: the social productivity of imaginary

    currencies. At the same time, we can observe that the relations between the different

    functions of money are embedded in social interactions and their history. Indeed

    monetary stabilization or unification policies dialogue with the monetary cultures

    created over the generations and with the concrete conditions of economic practices

    37In contrast to the classic demonstration by Kula (1986), the sociocultural history ofmeasures is not always a history of unifications in statized systems. Here we have acontrary example of proliferations, in line with the logic suggested by Trouillot(1990) in which Haitian society instead of becoming statized, confronts the State. Inturn, this makes it necessary to observe the complexities of the relations between theimaginary currencies and the question of sovereignty (see, for instance, Thret 2009),an attribute of minted currencies, not, precisely, of the imaginary ones.38On monetary practices and conflicts between the peso and US dollar after the endof Argentinean convertibility, see Luzzi (2012).

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    that, in cases like Haiti, are intrinsically linked to the persistence of plural, non-

    unified systems of measures and currencies.

    From the viewpoint of the theories that sustain monetary policies, the existence of a

    pure unit of account is no more than a curiosity or another symptom of the weakness

    of a weak State, unable to govern its systems of measure. In this article, by contrast, I

    have tried to show how non-unification is a condition of possibility for people to be

    able to survive in an environment of extreme money scarcity. We have also seen

    how the Haitian dollar, a central element in the forms of calculation making up the

    contemporary monetary culture, offers an ideal gateway to understanding the

    historical dynamics of Haitis popular economy.

    So far all attempts to extinguish the Haitian dollar have failed, just like the projects to

    contain street trading and the initiatives to formalize the economy. The streets

    continue to fill with an endless multitude of people who sell, buy and consume, even

    late into the night and without electricity, relying on candles and kerosene lamps for

    lighting. In the middle of these swarming crowds, which appear chaotic to the

    untrained eye, thefts and violent occurrences are as rare as the police and military

    personnel. Instead there is a constant legion of well-known local leaders and

    associations, connecting sellers, commercial networks and territorial spaces. For local

    people the markets are ordered places where, as well as enjoying the art of trading,

    conversing, and sometimes singing and dancing, they live with their families, make

    friends and lovers, find food and water, elaborate individual and collective futures, at

    the same time as they cultivate numeric habits and exchange currencies, even

    imaginary ones.

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