Le Trueque argentin au prisme de la dette : une socioéconomie des pratiques monétaires et financières

This work questions the nature of money through the analysis of a complex set of local monetary systems located in Argentina (trueque). It is based on both the reconstitution of the history of the main national trueque networks (meso-level) and the observation of the monetary and financial practices of their participants, carried out through an ethnographic fieldwork (micro-level). These data suggest that money must be understood as a system of evaluation and settlement of debts. Such approach allows first to distinguish financial from monetary practices and to clarify their interdependences. Second, it puts the emphasis on the wide diversity of monetary practices (i.e. the material media of the means of settlement and evaluation of debts) and modalities of issuing the means of settlement. Therefore, money can participate to the reproduction of special organizations more or less centralized and to widely contrasted social relations (either violent or emancipating). Finally, to conceive money from debt begs the question of the access to the means of settlement of those who have been excluded from the fordist wage-labor nexus through the expansion of the so-called “informal economy.