The Semiotics of Banknotes and Coins: Reading Contemporary Currency Design

This book uses semiotics to study the design of a selection of banknotes and coins currentlycirculating in the American and European continents.
Its purpose is to argue how the iconography used to decorate them draws on pre-existing social discourses and meaning.

Moreover, it aims to show how currency design is an enunciative praxis and hence, an activity shaped by cultural conventions that can be approached as a specific discursive genre.

In a nutshell, the book demonstrates how, beyond their economic function, banknotes and coins serve as the material support for a visual type of cultural semiosis linked to the nation and the state. The units of any currency system can be approached as visual texts expressing contents linked with specific social discourses and ideas. Since these texts are created and regulated by the state, they convey meanings that relate to discourses about statehood and, with it, the nation.

Informed by analyses of the United States dollar, the Canadian dollar, the British pound sterling, the Swiss franc, the Brazilian real, the Uruguayan peso, the Argentinean peso and the euro, the book highlights the relevance of studying currency design in the scholarly efforts to understand the discursive construction of states and nations.

Sebastián Moreno Barreneche is Associate Lecturer, Faculty of Management and Social Sciences, Universidad ORT, Uruguay and a member of Uruguay’s National Research System.