Money and Moralities in Contemporary Asia

Money and Moralities in Contemporary Asia provides original, nuanced insights into social meanings of money and wealth in moral economies of Asia. Through case studies from South and Southeast Asia, the collection sheds important light on how the new mobilities and wealth created by neoliberal globalization transform people’s ways of life, notions of personhood, and their meaning making of the world. It highlights the moral dilemmas and anxieties emerging from the profound socio-economic transformations that are taking place across the region and deepens our understanding of local cultures as well as the inner contradictions of global capital in Asian contexts. With rich ethnographic insights and a diverse range of empirical contexts, chapters in this volume reveal multifaceted complexities and contradictions in the relationship between money and moralities. Money, they affirm, is not an impersonal, objective economic instrument with homogenizing powers but a culturally constructed and socially mediated currency in which meanings are constantly contested and re-negotiated across time and space.

Lan Anh Hoang is Senior Lecturer in Development Studies in the School of Social and Political Sciences, the University of Melbourne, Australia. She is a co-editor of the Palgrave Macmillan book series ’Anthropology, Change, and Development’. Her research interests are migration and transnationalism, sexualities and gender, social networks and social capital, and identity and belonging. Cheryll Alipio is Assistant Research Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her work examines how care within the family is shaped by transnational migration and other forms of labour. She contributes to the fields of migration and development studies, economic and medical anthropology, the anthropology of children and youth, and Southeast Asian studies.