Abstract
This article explores the sociality of digitised money transactions in the use of credit and debit cards in New Delhi. The article draws from insights in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and uses ethnographic practices to capture the complexity of digital money usage. The findings suggest that digital money and its required technological infrastructure do not operate as neutral interventions. Rather, credit cards and consumer behaviour are generated by and implicated in a range of cultural codes and practices, such as contexts for debt vulnerability and fraud. Courts, banks and the government currently appear to be behind the regulatory curve for managing these transactions which clearly seem to outpace the existing legal capacities in India. Significantly, it also emerges that credit card usage, consumer debt and digital frauds need to be grasped as linked phenomena. Money and technology, hence, I argue, operate in sociologically and politically charged contexts.
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