ABSTRACT
This chapter offers an ethnography of mobile money professionals, industry, and philanthropic actors seeking to bring mobile phone–enabled financial products to poor people in the ‘developing world’. We focus on how they imagine ‘mobile money agents’, those who serve as ‘human ATMs’ or ‘bridges to cash’ in permitting others to put cash into an electronic money transfer system and pull cash out of it. We seek to understand how their ‘agency’ inflects debates over money, its meaning, and its pragmatics; its transformation in new communicative infrastructures; and how it might inform anthropology and political struggles over money and payment.
