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Dr. Daromir Rudnyckyj

Dr. Daromir Rudnyckj

Professor, graduate advisor

Anthropology

Accepting graduate students

Contact:
Office: COR B210 250-721-6273
Credentials:
PhD (U of California, Berkeley)
Area of expertise:
Money, capitalism, the state, ethnography. religion, finance, development, economy, globalization, social studies of finance, cryptocurrency, liberalism & neoliberalism, Southeast Asia, North America, Europe

Bio

Daromir Rudnyckyj is professor of anthropology at the University of Victoria, where he serves as director of the Counter Currency Laboratory and principal investigator for the Futures of Money project.

He is past president of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion and serves as a councillor for the American Ethnological Society. His research addresses money, religion, development, capitalism, finance, globalization and the state.

Courses

Current projects

This project, based in part at the counter currency laboratory in UVic’s Department of Anthropology examines how money is changing today.

A collaborative endeavour, with another base at Macquarie University in Australia, the project seeks to understand what the implications of these changes might be on human life, political forms, and social relationships.

New monetary forms ranging from cryptocurrencies and state-issued digital currencies to local and alternative exchange systems to mobile money and other forms of cashless payment portend significant changes to money and society.

Today money is mainly assumed to be state-issued currency, such as dollars, yen, euro, or pounds. As the dominance of state currencies appears to be waning, it is unclear how emergent forms will affect the ways in which we use money, the types of social relations they produce, and the implications for state governance.

The Future of Money Project seeks enhance understanding of money’s future forms via comparative research, developing a collaborative international network, and training of students in the social scientific study of money.

The counter currency laboratory is an interdisciplinary, collaborative research unit dedicated toward understanding the past, present, and future of money.

The lab has three main research foci: analyzing debates over money in Islamic economics and finance, examining how the production of money becomes the object of political intervention and activism, and researching alternative currency projects.

The lab is the repository for the entire archive of the Comox Valley Local Exchange Trading System (LETS), consisting of project files, founding documents, organizational documents, reporting documentation, plans, correspondence, ledgers, and other paper and digital files. 

LETS are community exchange networks that provide information on goods and services available in a community and record transactions of members exchanging those goods and services in a local currency (unit of account) separate from state-issued money. 

Founded in 1982, the Comox Valley LETS provided the first model for hundreds of LETS systems that have operated around the world. Through comparative research on alternatives to state-issued currency and bank credit, the Counter Currency Laboratory seeks to shed light on what money is and how it is changing today.

Selected publications

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