ABSTRACT
Since the early 2000s, mobile phone carriers, device manufacturers, and the mobile industry’s trade associations have promoted the use of the mobile network as a digital payment network. In doing so, they are attempting to use the networks they have built to carry financial data, muscling into banks’ territory, posing challenges to how states regulate money flows, and potentially “disrupting” the payments industry itself. Such disruption invites opportunities for ethnographic study of the rapidly changing landscape of digital and mobile payment. Much traditional ethnographic fieldwork took place in areas that are now, in the early twenty-first century, at the forefront of new mobile payment technologies. Alternately, ethnographers may find opportunities for working laterally with payments industry professionals, many of whom have enlisted ethnographers in their work and experience, once they get into the business of payment, the denaturalization of money familiar to anthropologists (Maurer 2016).1
