From shackles to links in the chain: theorising adolescent boys’ relocation in Burkina Faso

This paper focuses on adolescent boys’ independent migration to Ouagadougou and Abidjan and aims to unpack decision-making and strategies in child relocation. Through participant observation and interviews with around 120 young male migrants from the Bisa region in south-eastern Burkina Faso, the paper explores how their capacity to tap into networks of kin and peers shapes their migration and work trajectories. The paper argues that adolescents’ performance as social actors is central to their migration, in as much as they choose between travelling with age-mates or with senior kin, which in turn shapes the destination and the type of work that they will take up as early-career migrants. The adolescents also make choices regarding employers and where to live at the destination by tapping into particular types of social network

Materiality, symbol, and complexity in the anthropology of money

The invitation to review anthropological studies of money offers an opportunity not only to revisit the history of anthropologists' investigations into money's objects, meanings, and uses but also to reflect on the intersections of such work with recent psychological research. In this review essay, we survey the primary findings of the anthropology of money and the central challenges anthropological work has posed to assumptions about money's power to abstract, commensurate, dissolve social ties, and erase difference. We summarize anthropologists' historical concern with cultural difference and recent work on money's materialities, meanings, and complex uses. We emphasize the pragmatics of money-from earmarking practices and the use of multiple moneys to the politics of liquidity and fungibility. In the final section of the paper, we find inspiration in recent psychological studies of money to indicate new trajectories for inquiry. Specifically, we point to three potentially fruitful areas for research: money use as a tool and infrastructure; the politics of revealing and concealing money; and money's origins and futures as a memory device. We end with a brief reflection on ongoing monetary experiments and innovations