‘Travels and Travails of the Monetary Hoard’

The Global Studies Seminar welcomes Charles Dolph, graduate student in anthropology from the Graduate Center of City University New York, presenting “Travels and Travails of the Monetary Hoard: Kirchnerism and Passive Revolution in Argentina.”

In this presentation, Dolph examines how the dynamics of monetary hoarding shape processes of state formation in contemporary Argentina. Much scholarship characterizes the South American “pink tide” of progressive governments in terms of Gramsci’s concept of “passive revolution”–processes led from above that paradoxically accede to some popular demands while restoring capitalist order. Meanwhile, scholars in economic anthropology have recently analyzed the importance of monetary hoarding to the historical formation of modern European nation-states, and the contemporary cultures of monetarism.

Dolph will bring these lines of investigation together to explore two connected aspects of state formation during Kirchnerism: (1) the Kirchnerist state’s attempt to recompose a nationalized monetary hoard–its foreign exchange reserves–after these were denationalized as debt obligations during the previous quarter century of monetarist orthodoxy, and (2) how the state’s dependence on agricultural commodity exports for its foreign exchange inflows created a series of conflicts with landholding interests that it cast, in Gramscian terms, as “cultural battle.”