Associate Professor of Anthropology
Department of Anthropology
wmmaurer@uci.edu

Bill Maurer is a cultural anthropologist who conducts research on law, property, money and finance, particularly new and experimental financial and currency forms and their legal implications.

He has written widely on the anthropology of money, finance and property for journals such as Cultural Anthropology, American Ethnologist, American Anthropologist, Annual Reviews in Anthropology, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Comparative Studies in Society and History, and other venues. His research has been supported by several grants from the National Science Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, and other sources.

He is the editor of several collections, as well as the author of Recharting the Caribbean: Land, Law and Citizenship in the British Virgin Islands (1997), Pious Property: Islamic Mortgages in the United States (2006), and Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason (2005). The latter received the Victor Turner Prize in 2005.

He is currently conducting research on the shifting regulatory landscape in the offshore Caribbean; innovations in Native American banking (with Justin B. Richland, UC Irvine); and the cultural and legal implications of new forms of electronic money and payment systems (with Scott Mainwaring, Intel Research).

He has worked as a consultant in industry and the non-profit and philanthropic sector, and has also provided expert testimony on his areas of expertise.

Selected Publications

Books
Pious Property: Islamic Mortgages in the United States. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006.
Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason. Princeton: Princeton U P., 2005.
Recharting the Caribbean: Land, Law and Citizenship in the British Virgin Islands Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1997.

Edited Volumes
Accelerating Possession: Global Futures of Property and Personhood. Bill Maurer and Gabriele Schwab, eds. New York: Columbia U. P., in press.
Globalization Under Construction: Governmentality, Law and Identity. Eds. Richard W. Perry and Bill Maurer. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P., 2003.
Gender Matters: Re-Reading Michelle Z. Rosaldo. Eds. Alejandro Lugo and Bill Maurer. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2000.
Common Land in the Caribbean and Mesoamerica. Special issue of Plantation Society in the Americas 4.2-3 (1997).
Citizenship and Difference. Special issue of PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 19.1 (1996).
Sanctioned Identities. Eds. Jane Collier and Bill Maurer. Spec. issue of Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 2.1-2 (1995).

Recent Journal Articles, Commentaries and Reviews
"Work in progress: Electronic payments systems" 2008.
From meiwaku to tokushita!: lessons for digital money design from Japan. Scott Mainwaring, Wendy March and Bill Maurer. Proceeding of the twenty-sixth annual SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems, pp.21-24. [Winner, Best Research Note Award, SIGCHI Conference] [also here]
Re-socialising Finance? Or Dressing it in Mufti? Calculating Alternatives for Cultural Economies. Journal of Cultural Economy 1(1):65-78, 2008.
Re-regulating offshore finance? Geography Compass 2(1):155-175, 2008.
Incalculable payments: money, scale and the South African offshore Grey Money Amnesty. African Studies Review 50(2):125-138, 2007.
"The Anthropology of Money." Annual Review of Anthropology, 2006, 35:15-36.
"Due Diligence and 'Reasonable Man,' Offshore." Cultural Anthropology, 2005, 20(4):474-505.
"Introduction: Ethnographic Emergences." American Anthropologist, 2005, 107(2):1-4. [available through AnthroSource, www.aaanet.org]
"The Cultural Power of Law? Conjunctive Readings." Law and Society Review, 2004, 38(4):843-850.*
"Ungrounding knowledges offshore: Caribbean studies, disciplinarity and critique." Comparative American Studies, 2004, 2(3):324-341.
"Got Language? Law, Property, and the Anthropological Imagination." American Anthropologist, 2003, 105(4):775-781.
"Please Destabilize Ethnography Now: Against Anthropological Showbiz-as-Usual." Reviews in Anthropology, 2003, 32(2):159-169.
"Uncanny Exchanges: The Possibilities and Failures of Making Change with Alternative Monetary Forms." Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2003, 21(3):317-340.
"Modern Reflex." American Anthropologist 104(1): 324-326, 2002.
"In the Mirror: The Legitimation Work of Globalization." Susan Coutin, Bill Maurer and Barbara Yngvesson. Law and Social Inquiry. 27(4): 801-843, 2002.
"Anthropological and Accounting Knowledge in Islamic Banking and Finance: Rethinking Critical Accounts." Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, new series, 8(4): 645-667, 2002.
"Fact and Fetish in Creolization Studies: Herskovits and the Problem of Induction, or, Guinea Coast, 1593." New West Indian Guide/Nieuwe West-Indisches Gids 76 (1/2): 5-22, 2002.
"Chrysography: Substance and Effect." The Asia-Pacific Journal of Anthropology (formerly Canberra Anthropology) 3(1): 49-74, 2002.
"Repressed Futures: Financial Derivatives Theological Unconscious." Economy and Society 31(1):15-36, 2002.
"Visions of Fact, Languages of Evidence: History, Memory and the Trauma of Legal Research." Law and Social Inquiry 26(4):893-909, 2001.
"Islands in the Net: Re-wiring Technological and Financial Circuits in the Offshore Caribbean." Comparative Studies in Society and History. Summer 2001.
"Engineering an Islamic Future: Speculations on Islamic Financial Alternatives." Anthropology Today. 17.1 (2001): 8-11.
"A Fish Story: Rethinking Globalization on Virgin Gorda." American Ethnologist 27.3 (2000): 670-701. [available through AnthroSource, www.aaanet.org]
"Forget Locke? From Proprietor to Risk-Bearer in New Logics of Finance." Public Culture 11.2 (1999): 365-385.
"Cyberspatial Sovereignties: Offshore Finance, Digital Cash, and the Limits of Liberalism." Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 5.2 (1998): 493-519.
"Out of Balance? Konesans and First World Knowledges in Caribbean Women's Studies." New West Indian Guide 72.3-4 (1998): 297-304.
"Complex Subjects: Offshore Finance, Complexity Theory, and the Dispersion of the Modern." Socialist Review. 25 (3&4): 114-145.

Recent Book Chapters
"In the Matter of Marxism," in Chris Tilley et al., eds., Handbook of Material Culture. Oxford: Sage, 2006, 13-28.
"Does Money Matter? Abstraction and Substitution in Alternative Financial Forms." In Daniel Miller, ed. Materiality. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005, pp.140-164.
"Re-Formatting the Economy: Islamic Banking and Finance in World Politics. In Nelly Lahoud, A.H. Johns and Allan Patience, eds. Islam in World Politics. RoutledgeCurzon, 2005, pp.54-66.
"Cyberspatial Properties: Taxing Questions about Proprietary Regimes." In C. Humphrey and K. Verdery, eds. Property in Question: Value Transformation in the Global Economy. Oxford: Berg, 2004, pp. 297-318.
"Implementing Empirical Knowledge in Anthropology and Islamic Accountancy." Eds. Aihwa Ong and Stephen Collier. Global Anthropology: Technology, Governmentality, Ethics. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004, pp.214-232. [expanded version of "Anthropological and Accounting Knowledge" article, below]
"On Divine Markets and the Problem of Justice: Empire as Theodicy." In Paul Passavant and Jodi Dean, eds. Empires New Clothes. New York: Routledge, 2004, 57-72.
"Redecorating the International Economy: Keynes, Grant, and the Queering of Bretton Woods." In Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism, A. Cruz-Malave and M. Manalansan, eds. New York: New York University Press, 2002, pp. 100-133.