Imaginary Moneys and the Popular Economy in Haiti

Federico Neiburg1
PPGAS, Museu Nacional, UFRJ
federico.neiburg@gmail.com
Submitted to American Ethnologist
Abstract: This article examines a singular feature of Haitian monetary practices: the
generalized use of a currency without material existence as an object, coin or
banknote: the Haitian dollar. It intends to show (a) how the Haitian dollar forms part
of an extremely diversified, dynamic and creative space of currencies, units of
measures and ordinary forms of calculation; (b) the affinities between this space of
pluralities and creativities and the mechanisms that dynamize the popular economy,
such as the sense of opportunity, the multiplication of small profits, the little deals and
the small jobs, and (c) how this universe of measurements and the relations between
scales of measure and values has a historical dimension, which is actualized in
quotidian transactions.

This article examines a singular feature of Haitian monetary practices: the generalized
use in setting or negotiating prices of a currency without any past or present material
existence as an object, coin or banknote: the Haitian dollar. As I shall explain over the
course of the text in most transactions in Haiti (price negotiations in the markets,
working out wages and contracts such as rent, and so on) calculations are made in an
imaginary currency, the Haitian dollar, while payments are made in other currencies,
principally in gourdes (the national currency) but also in US dollars, Dominican
pesos, telephone cards or even fiches, the pieces of plastic or metal that irrigate some
commercial circuits of basic goods, such as water and coal, among the poorest people.

1
This text was conceived as a homage to Sidney Mintz and originally presented as the
XVII Sidney Mintz Lecture at Johns Hopkins University on 10/11/2010. Many
people have read and carefully commented on earlier versions of the text over the last
few years. My thanks especially to Sidney Mintz, Jane Guyer, Bill Maurer, Viviana
Zelizer, Louis Herns Marcelin, Omar Ribeiro Thomaz, Benot de lEstoile, Horacio
Ortiz, Afrnio Garcia Jr. Marie-France Garcia, Florence Weber, Bruno Thret and
Laurence Fontaine, as well as my colleagues and students: Natacha Nicaise, Fernando
Rabossi, Gustavo Onto, Pedro Braum, Jean Louis Sergo, Jony Fontaine, Handerson
Joseph, Flavia Dalmaso, Jos Renato Carvalho Baptista, Eugnia Motta, Herold Saint
Joie and Robert Montinard.

Over the course of the article I intend to show (a) how the Haitian dollar forms part of
an extremely diversified, dynamic and creative space of currencies, units of measures
and forms of calculation; (b) the affinities between this space of pluralities and
creativities, and the mechanisms that dynamize the popular economy, such as the
sense of opportunity, the multiplication of small profits, the little deals and the small
jobs, and (c) how this universe of measurements and relations between scales of
measure and values has a historical dimension, actualized in quotidian transactions
specifically in the daily life of people who live in the popular districts of the center of
Port-au-Prince, in the Greater Bel Air region, where I have conducted fieldwork since
2007. The outcome is an ethnographic critique of the mainstream narratives on
Haitian underdevelopment and poverty, which limit themselves to depicting lacks
of money, wages, government (see, for example, Fass 2004 and Lundahl 1992 and
2011). By contrast, the interrogation of monetary practices and the forms of
producing and dealing with the many different units of measure and scales affords a
close-up observation and positive description of the dynamics of the popular economy
rendered invisible by these normative perspectives.
As well as the US dollar, other dollars circulate in the monetary space of the
contemporary Caribbean, such as the Jamaican dollar, the Belize dollar or the East
Caribbean dollar issued by the islands forming the Common Market of the eastern
islands, like Bermuda, Dominica and Granada. From the viewpoint of standard
monetary theories, all of these are normal currencies: they combine the four
functions of money (serving as a unit of account, a means of payment, a means of
exchange and a means of saving), they are identified by a symbol (USD, JMD, XCD,
etc.) and they exist in physical form: they are minted and can be handled. The Haitian
dollar can also be identified by a symbol (HD) but unlike the other Caribbean dollars,
it is an imaginary money, a pure unit of account that has no material existence.
Eighty years ago, a historian of imaginary medieval moneys suggested a link with
real means of payment can be discovered that behind every pure unit of account

(Werveke 1934).2 In the case of the Haitian dollar, this link is the five-gourde note,
convertible into one US dollar, issued during the 1919 monetary reform four years
after US occupation of the country when a fixed parity system (or currency board)
was introduced for making conversions between the imperial currency and the gourde
at a rate of 1 to 5, the same ratio later used to convert between the Haitian dollar and
gourde.3 Indeed Haitians themselves often make this connection when asked about the
origin of the Haitian dollar, recalling the red 5 gourde/1 dollar banknotes that some
people keep as relics of a fairly recent past. However the identification of the
connections material basis (found also in the memory of some natives) does not in
itself explain the generalized use of particular units of account, but leaves open the
question of how monetary preferences and cultures are formed. It is precisely these
questions I intend to examine here.
But rather than attributing the existence of the Haitian dollar, a singular feature of this
small Caribbean countrys monetary culture, to the essentialist notion of
Haitianities, my objective is to explore what the imaginary currency reveals in terms
of the dynamics of the popular economy. Moreover, instead of attempting to explain
why this cultural device exists, I intend to show how the universe of currencies and
units of measure is traversed by historical vicissitudes and historical forms of
constructing relations with the past that so richly constitute the present of everyday
life in Haiti.4

2
Werveke uses the expression fictional currency, while other historians speak of
ghost currencies. The expression imaginary currency was first proposed by Luigi
Einaudi (1936) in his exploration of how people dealt with the instability and extreme
plurality that accompanied the unification and creation of new states in Europe prior
to the creation of (national) unified systems of weights, measures and currencies.
More recently Bompaire has shown how the notion of a unit of account or imaginary
currency is multiform, covering a widely variable semantic field, which is only
unified in opposition to the real money used in payment operations (Bompaire 2000).
Also see Day 1998 and Lardin 2007.
3
On the solution to the monetary problem in the context of the occupation and
institution of the fixed parity system, see Chatelain (1954: 121 and ff). Also see the
(unfortunately few) references to monetary management during the occupation period
in Schmidt 1995 (1971), Plummer (1988) and Castor (1987).
4
Before suggesting the importance of history in the Haitian present at the start of his
book Silencing the past (1995), Michel-Rolph Trouillot described Caribbean societies
as inescapably historical, in the sense that some of their distant past is not only
known, but known to be different from their present, and yet relevant to both the
observers and the natives understanding of that present (Trouillot 1992:21).

Monetary preferences and transformations in the popular economy

Discussing the standard views found in the economic sciences, which presume that a
normal currency combines the four functions of money described above, historians
and anthropologists have called attention to the productiveness of observing situations
with an extreme monetary plurality. In these cases we find currencies that perform
only some of these functions, yet are deeply embedded in social life, enabling and
facilitating calculations and exchanges (with other currencies and with both physical
and intangible objects), shaping economic spaces, establishing hierarchies of scales
and values. Their versatility allows room for diverse practices based on exchanges
between currencies and units of measure, dynamizing the economy in extremely poor
localities such as the popular neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince.
These approaches share the concern to replace deductive analyses, which set out from
theoretical definitions of the nature of money, with inductive or empirical analyses
that emphasize monetary practices, the social and multiple meanings of currencies
and the historical processes leading to the creation and disappearance of some
currencies and the persistence of others (reinforcing the difference between the socalled soft and hard currencies, for example).5 This indeed was Marc Blochs view in
his essay on European monetary history, where, responding to the question of why
currencies are born, transform and vanish, he proposes replacing every a priori
theoretical definition of currency, every intention to establish a set of functional
criteria that would qualify (once and for all) all currencies, with a minimalist and
pragmatic definition which recognizes that, above all else, currencies (physical and
fictitious) are measuring instruments (Bloch 1956: 48-49).
Over the last few years, two complementary approaches have specifically examined
the nature and functioning of currencies that serve as pure units of account, like the
Haitian dollar. In his comparative studies of monetary dynamics in a broad region
spanning from China and Japan to East Africa, historian Akinobu Kuroda (2008a and
2008b) shows how in various situations moneys classical functions can appear to
become detached, and how units of account possess an integrating function, enabling

5
A topic with a long history, including in the monetary space of the Caribbean itself,
as Mintz adeptly showed in his study of eighteenth century Jamaica (1964a).

conversions between units of payments and reserves of value. Similarly

anthropologist Jane Guyer, setting out from a premise similar to Blochs i.e. to
observe the currencies of people (Guyer 1995) provides a historical ethnography
of monetary practices in West Africa, situating the pure units of account within what
she calls a monetary interface. Hence for Guyer (1995, 2004 and 2011) fictional or
imaginary currencies perform a central role in constructing boundaries and thresholds
between scales of value, associated, as she shows, with the plurality of currencies and
units of measure. As she points out, they also serve to mediate both the
memorization of non-reductive transactions and their nature as conversions (Guyer
2011: 2016).
At the start of the 1960s, Sidney Mintz (1961) suggested how the proliferation of
units of measure in Haiti was constitutive of the countrys popular economy and
specifically of the dynamic of its markets. Mintz argued that the absence of unified
standards, scales or systems of measure should not be seen as an obstacle but as a
fundamental element in generating the small profits that allow small trade to flourish.
We are faced, he suggested, by a universe of practices and concepts that operate
through historical layers, the superposition of chronologies, ever present in the
transactions, beginning with the multiple and ambiguous meanings of the terms
forming the vocabulary of commerce and especially the vocabulary of
measurements.6
In his richly detailed studies of markets, measures and transactions, conducted
between 1958 and 1961, Mintz never mentioned the existence of the Haitian dollar.7
Michel Laguerre (1983), in research undertaken in Bel Air between 1974 and 1976,
likewise never speaks of the currency, even when describing aspects of the popular
economy like the credit systems and lotteries, both of which today are basically
calculated in the Haitian dollar. A tourist guidebook published in English at the start
of the 1970s only mentions the gourde and the national currencys parity with the US
dollar, an omission unthinkable today when any publication intended for first-time

6
Mintz described the history of containers (bottles and tins) introduced as goods
during the period of US occupation (1915-34) and which later acquired autonomous
status as units of measure (1961).
7
In personal conversation, Sidney Mintz confirmed that he had never heard mention
of the Haitian dollar during his fieldwork in Haiti.

travelers to travel to the country will invariably forewarn the visitor of the complex
monetary transactions caused by many everyday transactions being calculated in
Haitian dollars.
Empirically determining the precise date when a particular cultural device emerged is
an arduous task, when not simply a banal question or a false problem. What interests
me here, rather, is exploring a number of historical and ethnographic leads that can
provide an insight into the historicity of monetary cultures and simultaneously into
the dynamics of Haitis popular economy.
If currencies possess multiple meanings (Zelizer 1998), they also possess complex
and non-linear histories. Like all units of measure, their meanings and uses emerge
from the intersection of various chronologies. I have already indicated one these
histories in the case of the Haitian dollar, which begins with the institution of the
fixed parity of 5 to 1 in 1919. In the next section I explore another longer history
involving the use of the scale of five in the monetary universe of Haiti.
But before turning to this history, we need to examine three elements that modulate
the contemporary popular economy in which the Haitian dollar is measured and
calculated. The first two elements are related to the increased mobility of people and
money, leading to a single social space that encompasses rural, urban and overseas
universes. The third element concerns the affinity between the dynamics of popular
culture (the small profits and small jobs) and the dynamics of the emergency
regimes (Fassin & Pandolfi 2010), based on the huge presence of international
cooperation and the associations between military interventions and humanitarian aid,
like those seen in Haiti on a virtually permanent basis over the last three decades.
The first element refers to changes in the relations between rural and urban universes.
As in other Caribbean nations (Portes, Itzigsohn & Dore-Cabral 1994, Manigat 1997),
the axis of the popular economy in Haiti shifted in the second half of the 20th century
from the fields to the city. Today the country is predominantly urban: 60% of
inhabitants live in the cities, while in 1950 the figure was below 30%. In 1960 Portau-Prince had a little over 300,000 inhabitants; today more than two million people
live in the city. Most of the population now living in the metropolitan zone comes

from outside, a movement that intensified in the 1970s and that continues today,
stimulated by the land shortages in rural areas and the crisis in the rural economy
caused by soil erosion and competition with cheap farm imports. In the final decades
of the twentieth century, urban sprawl grew exponentially and once middle class
districts like Bel Air were swamped by migrants, transforming them into gueto
stigmatized by violence, an absence of infrastructure and sanitation, and extreme
poverty.8 As Haitian extended families began to find significantly more resources in
the city, the new urban poor developed economic habits that could be construed as
creative reinventions of practices typical to the traditional rural economy.9 I return
to two of these later: (a) the multiplication of small profits (ti benefis) in plural and
non-standardized universes of measures and currencies, and (b) the polyactivity that
allows both men and women to develop an acute sense of opportunity, multiplying
small trade (ti biznis) and little jobs (ti travay).10
The second element is mobility. In fact as people moved in huge numbers to the
cities, there was a parallel upsurge in people leaving Haiti a phenomenon with a
long history but which has intensified and acquired a particular modulation over
recent decades. Today around 10 million people live in the country, while more than 3
million Haitians live abroad.11 According to some estimates, the money and other
objects sent back from overseas comprise the top item in the countrys GDP.12

8
According to data collected prior to the January 2010 earthquake, slightly over
100,000 people lived in the Greater Bel Air area (see Viva Rio Census 2007). See
estimates on the informal sector in Lamautte Bisson 2002. These interconnections
between the rural and urban worlds and between Haitis national territory and the
diaspora throw into question the Barthelemys 1989 model of the meaning of the
outside (dey) in Haitian social space.
9
Both the notion of economic habits and that of creative reinvention are taken
from Pierre Bourdieu (2000 and 1977 respectively).
10
On the economic habits of rural Haiti until the mid-twentieth century, also see
Mintz (especially 1961 and 1964b), Moral (1978 [1961], Herskovits (2012 [1937])
and Mtraux (1951). The idea of polyactivity is central to the seminal work by Hart
(1973) and Fontaines 2008 study of the dynamics of poverty in pre-industrial Europe.
Comitas (1963) developed the theme of occupational multiplicity in the Caribbean
literature.
11
Diverse sources (like the UNDP) agree on an emigration rate of around 8/1000;
however these statistics fail to count illegal non-registered migrants, and the coming
and going of Haitians from the neighboring Dominican Republic.
12
In 2012 remittances to Haiti represented just over 25 % of GDP (UNDP 2013).

The increased circulation between rural and urban areas and the intensification in
transnational circulation has altered a crucial aspect of social life and the popular
economy in contemporary Haiti: the mobility of people. This invests the networks of
families, neighbors and friends with singular meanings: mothers and fathers who send
their children to live in the city or abroad, merchants who travel between the rural
interior, Port-au-Prince and the Haitian commercial capitals situated outside the
countrys borders (like Miami, Panam and Santo Domingo), the universe of the
diaspor in which forms of being and living are cultivated and where money and
objects are obtained to be sent back to the home country as remittances. Rather than
the notion of emigration to the city or abroad, it is the notion of mobility that allows
us to describe the wandering that shapes Haitian lives, collapsing the local, national
and transnational scales into a single social space through which people, currencies
and goods circulate.13
Along with mobility, a third element structures the dynamics of the popular economy
in contemporary Haiti: the implantation after the end of the Duvalier dictatorship in
1986 and especially from the mid-1990s onwards of emergency regimes backed
by foreign military interventions (either by one country, a coalition of countries or the
UN) and by the massive presence of International Aid Agencies (IAAs) and NonGovernmental Organizations (NGOs) distributing goods (water, food), services
(medical care) and money through development projects that hire people in unstable
short-term contracts.14
The military actions of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti
(MINUSTAH) began precisely in the Bel Air region in 2006. Even today the zone is
classified by the UN as red, signifying that under no circumstances may civil staff

13
On the mobility of people in general, see Fassin 2011. On contemporary forms of
mobile money linked to the mobility of people, see Maurer 2011 and, for the Haitian
case, Taylor 2011. On mobility as a Caribbean trope, see Sheller 2011, and on the
mobility of Caribbean merchant women, see Ulysse 2007. In Haiti people use the
term diaspora not only as a substantive but also as an adjective: money made abroad
is lajan diaspora, the acquired habits of people returning from abroad are recognized
as diaspora, etc. (see Handerson 2013). On mobility from the point of view of family
lives, see Dalmaso 2013. On the transnational Haitians lives, see Glick-Shiller and
Fouron 2001 and Richman 2005.
14
On the lengthy history of what is today called international cooperation in Haiti, see
Nicaise 2013.

circulate in the area, including employees of agencies like the UNDP and UNICEF.15
This, though, has not prevented the UN itself from participating in the implantation of
stabilization and development projects after MINUSTAHs arrival through the
mediation of local associations and NGOs. Indeed as part of the emergency response
to the January 2010 earthquake, the UN developed large-scale programs like Cash
for Work in the region.16 Although subject to the uneven rhythms and flows of
money from international aid and to the constant change in the emergency agendas,
funding from multilateral aid and cooperation bodies, and more recently from
donations from friends countries, has in fact ranked as the second item in Haitis
GDP, immediately after international remittances, for at least two decades.17 But this
influx and this is the point I wish to stress is accompanied by an affinity between
the logic of the popular economy and the logics of the emergency economy.18
According to some estimates, less than 10% of the population of Bel Air is employed
in the formal labor market, 80% of people live on less than US$ 2.5 per day and more
than 50% on less than one US dollar per day, i.e. technically living in extreme
poverty.19 At the same time, numerous agencies and agents are involved in the control
(or governance) of the territory and the circulation of its people, goods and money.
Aside from State institutions, these include bodies from the civil and military

15
The other region classified as red by the UN is the area known as Boston, in Cit
Soleil.
16
The Cash for Work program paid individuals 30 Haitian dollars (150 gourdes, a
little less than four US dollars) per working day for periods of fifteen days. The idea
was to remove the rubble left by the earthquake and distribute money to a large
number of people (hence the fortnightly rotation).
17
An account of these changes in the political economy of aid to Haiti in the 1990s
can be found in James 2010, Marcelin 2011 and Schuller 2012.
18
The idea of a patchwork of aid interventions described by Marcelin (2011: 3)
provides an good expression of this affinity between the aid economy and the popular
economy an affinity equivalent to the connection at a political level between the
dynamic of international cooperation and the pulverization of popular associations, a
topic to which I return later (on this issue, also see Schuller 2007 and 2012 and James
2010).
19
According to the WTO (cited in Portes et al. 1994) only 7.7 % of the workforce was
formally employed in 1987. The Viva Rio Census (VR 2007) found that 78% of
families in Bel Air have a monthly per capita income below US$ 43 and 37.6% earn
less than one dollar per day. This data matches the findings contained in the latest
UNDP report (2013), which indicates that 75% of the countrys population survives
on less than 2.5 dollars a day.

branches of the United Nations, IAAs, NGOs, local associations, churches, oufs,
armed gangs and bases.20
It is precisely in these undisciplined regions of urban Haiti21 where the boundaries
between housing and commerce are porous and the markets merge with residential
spaces, inhabited by mobile people who transit continually between rural and urban
areas and between the national territory and the diaspora, working hard to live on
small trading and small jobs that help provide a minimum of money, food and water
that diverse forms of calculation and units of measure flourish, the currencies multiply
and where, to paraphrase one sociologist, the Haitian dollar is practiced.22
The scale of five: uses and calculations
The units of measure are cognitive and social artifacts that express relations of
equivalence, difference, order, hierarchy and scale. These relations are also historical.
The conversion of five gourdes to one Haitian dollar has a long history in Haitis
monetary 'space of calculability (to quote Mitchell 2002). Indeed the history precedes
the parity between the gourde and the US dollar instigated in 1919. This in turn takes
us back an idea announced in the previous section in dialogue with Mintz: various
historical layers and diverse chronologies converge in the use of a unit of measure or
in the generalization of the calculations made in a determined currency.
The first gourde banknotes began to circulate in 1813, nine years after the countrys
independence in 1804. The incipient national currency became part of the extremely
diverse monetary universe of the Caribbean, coexisting with other currencies,
including those of the old and new empires, the coins minted on the islands or those
produced by private companies (such as the Dutch East India Company, which issued
its own money). In this universe of extreme monetary plurality basically governed
by commerce and crisscrossed by trade routes the national currency acquired a
different status from 1872 onwards when a special relationship was established with

20
I return later to this key theme of the geopolitics of contemporary urban Haiti.
21
Trouillot (1992: 20) uses the expression to speak of the Caribbean; here I use it to
describe those systems of measures that resist standardizations.
22
At the end of the article I return to Sabine Manigats proposal (2007) to promote
the practice of the gourde instead of the practice of the Haitian dollar.

10

the French franc, the currency of the former metropolis, involving the introduction of
a fixed parity system of five gourdes to one franc.
The United States occupied Haiti in 1915. Four years later the US administration
implemented a process of monetary reform that replaced the franc with the dollar as
the currency of reference, while maintaining the exchange rate of five (gourdes) to
one (now the dollar). Fixed parity ended in 1979 during the dollar crisis and the
ensuing economic turmoil, which had a major impact on the relations between Haiti
and the metropolis, causing the currency to fluctuate, opening markets and
exponentially increasing the number of Haitians migrating to the United States. All
the indications are that the devaluation of the gourde and the end of fixed parity with
the dollar contributed to the detachment of the unit of account from the means of
payment. The scale of five was maintained to guide calculations: one Haitian dollar
was (and in terms of the unit of account still is) five gourdes.
It is curious to observe the coherence between this autonomization of the Haitian
dollar as a unit of account and the later issue of gourde coins and notes after 1979 in a
scale of five too: first the five gourde coin was created (replacing the banknote
convertible to one US dollar) followed by the issue of 10, 25, 50, 100, 250 and 500
banknotes (later the 1000 note).23 The means of payment (the gourde) thereby became
a support, in the sense proposed by Weber (2009), for this long-term cultural
disposition to make calculations in Haitian dollars in a scale of five.
Three examples can be cited to show how transactions occur and how calculations are
made in everyday life. In the first example, after negotiating the price of a bag of
mangoes in a street market, buyer and seller agree a price of three Haitian dollars; the
buyer pays with a 50 gourde note (10 Haitian dollars = 50 5); the seller keeps three
dollars for the price of the mangoes (3 5 = 15 gourdes) and gives 7 Haitian dollars in
change (7 5 = 35 gourdes, in three notes of 10 and one coin of five).

23
This preference for the scale of five in relation to the Haitian dollar echoes the
ariary and ouguiya, the national currencies of Madagascar and Mauritania, known as
the only national currencies in circulation based on the scale of 5 rather than the scale
of 10.

11

In the second example, a receipt in a supermarket reads 234 HT (Haitian dollars). The
buyer pays with 1500 gourdes calculated as 300 HT (1500 5), the cashier says
heres your change: 66 dollars and gives the buyer three 100 gourde notes and three
10 gourde notes, or in other words 330 gourdes, keeping the 234 HT for the value of
the purchase. The calculation is made in milliseconds: (200 5 = 1000) + (30 5 =
150) + (4 5 = 20) = 1170 HTG (gourdes).
The third example shows how the imaginary currency can also organize the system of
money earmarking (Zelizer 2004): Madame K. sells food in a busy area of the
Portail Saint Josef region, on the corner between a corridor linking the interior of the
guto with the zones main routeway, J.J. Dessalines Avenue. The clients can
purchase a fried banana (fritay) at prices varying between one gourde and one Haitian
dollar (five gourdes). Madame K. stores the money received in three separate places.
In the first two she places the money worth over one Haitian dollar: the first batch of
money is used to buy the raw ingredients for the next day, the second is lajan lakay,
house money. In the third location she keeps the money valuing less than one Haitian
dollar, the ti kob, the small change left at the end of the working day and used to buy
food and water the next day.24
Although basically an oral phenomenon, the imaginary currency also appears in
writing in some contexts, such as the example of the supermarket receipt, on some
restaurant menus, at some gas station pumps, on some service contracts for
international cooperation projects,25 and especially in the notebooks recording debts
and credits for bets in general and lotteries in particular.
Some time ago Jeane Lave (1988) showed the impossibility of establishing any
immediate correlations between ordinary numerical habits, like those practiced in

24
The word kob has two meanings: a specific meaning as a hundredth of a gourd (a
cent) and a generic meaning as a synonym for currency. In the course of this text I
treat currency and money as synonymous. It lied beyond my scope here to explore the
dialogue between the creole vocabulary that distinguishes monnen, lajan, kob, and the
like, and the more analytic distinctions between, for instance, money and currency.
25
There are in fact numerous examples of contracts between Haitians and IAAs and
NGOs expressed in the Haitian Dollar.

12

Haitian transactions, and school training.26 Similarly, Charles Stafford (2003) has
described the importance of the markets in the numerical socialization of children and
their interiorization of scales and forms of calculation. Indeed in contrast to foreigners
who need time (and very often calculators) to multiply and divide, the scale of five
used as the basis for calculations is internalized by Haitians; as Jane Guyer would say
(2011: 2018), it has a mnemonic function, serving as a cognitive benchmark. Indeed
we can imagine that for those who calculate in Haitian dollars, there is an immediate
relation between units of account and means of payment: they are indexed, in
Charles Pierces sense, in such a way that 5 is 1, 10 is 2, 15 is 3...
Monetary space: geographies, scales and conversions
The residents of Bel Air, who occupy lower positions on the social scale, tend to
calculate the money that they receive (in small trading and from small jobs) and the
money used to pay their living expenses in Haitian dollars (food, rents, their
childrens schooling). Wages from the local government, though usually recorded on
the spreadsheets in gourdes, are calculated in Haitian dollars. Some time ago, for
example, the countrys president complained on public radio about his low pay
packet, lamenting the fact he received just 12,000 dollars a month. In this case he was
clearly talking about Haitian dollars, equivalent to about US$ 1,500.
The more intense the presence of foreigners in the transactions, the more the unit of
account changes: the Haitian dollar is substituted by the US dollar and, to a lesser
extent, other currencies such as euros or Dominican pesos. In the restaurants and
supermarkets frequented by foreigners, for example, the prices are fixed in US
dollars. The same occurs with rents: when contracts are negotiated with foreigners,
the price is agreed in US dollars.
There are also various situations in which people pay with US dollars but calculate in
Haitian dollars. In small international trade (involving the female sellers who travel
periodically to Miami and Panama, for example), people handle US dollars and buy in
the foreign currency, but on their return to Port-au-Prince the relation between the
money invested in purchasing goods and the price fixed on the market is calculated in

26
According to the 2005 UNDP report, the literacy Rate among people aged from 15
to 24 is 66.2%. This figures are consistent with the Bel Air data (CVR 2007).

13

Haitian dollars. The development officers, facilitators, drivers, translators and other
specialists linked to the NGOs and AAIs negotiate their contracts in US dollars, but
frequently refer to them in Haitian dollars in their conversations with friends or
relatives.
The exchange rate between the Haitian dollar and gourde is fixed (1 to 5); the Haitian
dollar varies in relation to the US dollar in line with the fluctuation of the gourde.
Somewhat surprisingly given the political commotions, the constant rise in food
prices and the turmoil caused by natural catastrophes over recent years, the gourdes
value in relation to the US dollar has remained stable at around 40 to one. Hence one
US dollar is worth approximately eight Haitian dollars.
During field research I observed negotiations with money changers expressed and
calculated in dollars (Haitian and American, aysien and vet, green). Sometimes people
use calculators to convert and divide by eight. When negotiating with foreigners
(blan), the money changers count in gourdes, but when the exchange is between
Haitians, people count in Haitian dollars. In a transaction involving 50 US dollars, for
example, a foreigner will calculate the receipt of twenty 100-gourde banknotes as
2000 gourdes, while a Haitian will calculate the value as 400 Haitian dollars, or
simply 400 dol. The adjective aysien, or the expression dol aysien, is only used
when one of the people in the transaction is foreign. Among Haitians, unless the
qualifier ameriken is used, when people say dol they mean dol aysien.
In some contexts people differentiate between lajan blan (or lajan diaspor) and
lajan kreyl. In fact the Haitian dollar could be said to be a creole currency,
including in the sense of being of the country, as with so many other objects and
habits to which Haitians attach the adjective kreyl. The unit of account is essentially
used between Haitians, in the markets and small jobs, in the heart of the popular
economy, where people speak in creole and calculate in dol.
Although its use is generalized, the Haitian dollar is not used in all transactions. By
mapping the uses of the different units of measure and means of payment, we can
trace the geography of Haitian monetary space, composed of currencies, measuring
instruments, spheres of exchange and scales. These all differ and, as Jane Guyer has

14

shown (2004), constitute and reveal social hierarchies and inequalities: not all
subjects exchange and calculate with the same currencies, and not all subjects have
the same capacities to exchange some currencies for others.
In Port-au-Prince, as in many other locations, these hierarchies and inequalities are
projected onto the territory: in the urban islands of foreigners scattered across some
regions of the city, the US dollar predominates as a unit of account and a means of
payment in some sectors, such as the housing market, some restaurants, hotels, night
clubs and supermarkets catering for upper class Haitians and the legion of ex-pats,
relief workers and consultants. Symptomatically the supermarkets double as currency
exchange bureaus. As we move down the social scale, the US dollar begins to be used
as a means of payment for transactions calculated in Haitian dollars: this is the case of
the small jobs linked to international cooperation, for example. Lower down at a
level undoubtedly accounting for the majority of transactions people calculate in
Haitian dollars and pay in gourdes. And lower down still, among the thousands who
literally have no money and perform transactions involving less than one Haitian
dollar, people use gourdes, kobs (gourde cents), gouden (half a gourde) or penis
(equivalent to five kobs). The latter may also be physically represented by US cents,
which are not hard to find on the streets even though the US one cent coin is
actually equivalent to almost 50 kobs. This shows us that the imagination of monetary
scales is not necessarily bound to the nominal value of the money being exchanged.
Ti benefis, ti biznis and ti travay
After being named as the capital of the most prosperous French colony in 1770, Portau-Prince became a key location in the relations between Haiti and the world system,
two metropolises (France and the United States) and their agents in the field,
including merchants, military personnel, missionaries and relief workers.
Bel Air was the citys first black district according to Laguerre (1983: 167) one of
the oldest black districts in the western hemisphere. By the second half of the
nineteenth century it had become a mixture of slums and the homes of an incipient
middle class of professionals, public employees and factory workers a rare
conjunction of wage earners in a social universe with few wages. A katye popil,
gradually turning into something like a complex of favelas, closely in tune with the

15

political and economic life of the country.27 As in the citys other popular districts,
most people survive by doing many different things, following the logic of small
profits (ti benefis) obtained in small jobs (ti travay) and small trading (ti biznis).
Located in the heart of the capital, next to the port and the National Palace in the
lowest area of land close to the sea, Bel Air merges with the Croix de Bossales region,
the core of the system of Haitian markets where the countrys main wholesale market
is located, the central link between the rural interior, the city of Port-au-Prince and the
international trade circuits.28
Croix de Bossales is situated next to the port and was originally a market and
cemetery for slaves. Today the area covers more than 350,000 square meters
containing four public markets (with demarcated boundaries under the jurisdiction
of an authority appointed by the city mayor) and dozens of streets that are totally or
partially occupied by commerce, and which radiate out in capillary fashion from Bel
Air to every corner of the city.
The key to this capillarity is found in some of the main mechanisms of the popular
economy:

the

progressive

fractioning

of

products,

the

multiplication

of

intermediations, the amplified reproduction of the small gains and the interplay
between different units of measure and scales. At one end of the network, for
example, large sacks (gwo sak) of coal are unloaded at the Warf Jeremie port located
between lower Bel Air and Cit Soleil; at the other end, the traders sell small tins (ti
mamit) with some lumps of coal which are used as fuel though insufficient by
themselves to cook lunch (in the poorest regions, coal is added to the plastic
collected in the rubbish dumps as a source of energy for cooking). To take another
example, at one end of the circuit the import stores sell sacks of powdered detergent
weighing 20 pounds or more (depending on their origin, they may also be measured in
kilos), while at the other end traders sell small bags of detergent the size of a marble.
The same mechanism extends throughout the other commercial chains involving

27
For a recent history of Bel Air, see the novel by Danticat (2007), as well as Ribeiro
Thomaz & Nascimento 2006, Neiburg, Nicaise & Braum 2013 and Braum 2013.
28
On the Haitian market system, see Mintz (1959 and 1960); on the street markets in
the countrys capital, see Bazabas (1997); and for an ethnography of the markets in
the Greater Bel Air area, including Croix de Bossales, see Neiburg 2012a.

16

popularly consumed items, where products measured in one kind of unit are converted
into others, multiplying the transactions, distributing small profits and undoubtedly
increasing the final price of the product consumed by the poorest (who typically only
have enough money to buy one kob of detergent).29
In Bel Air, as in the other popular districts of Haiti, the observation made by Laurence
Fontaine (2008) in her study of the dynamics of poverty in Europe during the ancien
rgime is equally applicable: in one form or another, all people are linked to the
markets. As well as being the main source for obtaining products and services, they
are key locations for the production and distribution of money (a) in the actual
transactions of buying and selling (which primarily involve female merchants30), and
(b) in the infinite number of tasks flourishing in what could be called the
infrastructure (preponderantly male) of the markets activities that enable the
transactions themselves to take place:

31

lending money, transporting goods,

controlling the access to the sales and storage spaces, guarding (and/or threatening),
coordinating development projects, charging duties, engaging in politics and making
war.32
In this universe of small jobs, small trading and small profits which oscillates to the
rhythm of the money supply (coming from the big merchants, the government and
international cooperation) and to the rhythm of the opening and closure of one or
other channel of intermediation (Mosse 2006) people cultivate an acute sense of

29
Mintz (1964b) showed how profits are made in the relations between scale and
units of measurement. Describing similar mechanisms in West Africa, Guyer (2004
and 2011) developed the idea of marginal gains and the distinction between profit and
gain.
30
Mintz (1964a) writes that 66% of women were linked to commerce. In the VR
census in Bel Air, this figure was 70%.
31
Curiously the distinction between transactional work and infrastructural work
proposed in studies of financial markets (see for instance Pardo-Guerra forthcoming),
and inspired by social studies of science and technology, is extremely useful in terms
of comprehending the dynamics and range of popular markets.
32
Comprehending the dynamics of the popular markets depends to a large extent on
understanding their political centrality: the conflicts in the markets (over the control
of the government, rates and flows) are interconnected with political conflicts: as a
popular saying in Haiti goes: closing the markets overthrows the government. I
have examined the relations between the dynamics of the popular economy and the
governement of markets recently elsewhere (Neiburg 2012a and 2012b).

17

opportunity, while doing or trying to do various things simultaneously. As observed

earlier (recalling Comitas 1963, Hart 1973 and Fontaine 2008), in the popular
economy people must remain polyactive.
Two expressions reveal the meanings held by polyactivity for the people living in
popular districts of Haiti: mwen gen plizy chap and mwen gen plizy badj. Someone
with many hats may dedicate him or herself to various activities simultaneously, or
may receive payment from more than one source to perform the same activity. As one
of the privileged few, someone may simultaneously participate in a development
project financed by an NGO, work as a warehouse guard, participate in small-scale
street trading, nurture closer contacts with a local government entity, and so on.
The second expression, I have many badges, sheds light on the multifaceted
effective and affective relations between polyactivity and the development universe.
The badges, which function like ID cards, become part of the social games involved
in creating the sense of opportunities and small jobs. When worn on a persons chest,
they have various potential meanings: they may assert hierarchy as a boss or a notable
person with many resources (social capital and money), just as they may also display
the frustration of someone who was once waged, employed, a contender, or
someone who began or even completed training but is now unemployed.
The three main sources of badges are (a) a technical or language training course (the
equivalent of a diploma or certificate of initiated training), (b) a current job or proof
of previous employment (for government bodies like the local council and, above all,
for NGO and AAI projects), and (c) belonging to one or more of the local associations
found in Haitis popular districts, many of which are officially recognized by the
government, permitting them to receive funds or take part in development projects.
Managing a tap distributing water to the public (the so-called kys dlo), a popular
pharmacy or cyber caf, or refurbishing a space to run arts courses, workshops or
language courses, or somewhere to be used for band rehearsals or promoting
neighborhood festivals, are just some of the activities that generate an infinite number
of ti travay and ti biznis in the universe formed by a diverse set of associations at
street, sector and district level, as well as youth and womens associations,

18

associations of musicians and artists, and even associations of associations. Their

names and acronyms (like the Rue Saint Martin Civic Service Committee, CSCSM, to
pick one of many) can be seen on badges, in the minutes of association meetings, on
posters in head offices, or sometimes in graffiti on the walls of the area covered by
their activities. We can also observe the projection of this affinity between the logics
of the popular economy, local associations and international cooperation in the
organization of local space.33
The associations linked to development, which receive official recognition from the
government and cooperation agencies and distribute badges, also form part of a much
wider universe of groupings that help shape the social organization of the popular
districts of Haiti. As my colleagues and I have shown elsewhere (Neiburg, Nicaise &
Braum 2013, and Braum 2013) the most general term for designating all these
groupings is baz, or base a key social form connecting the dynamics of the popular
economy with local forms of government.
The base is a location and an area of action, a crowd that protects, ensures somewhere
to sleep, a plate of food, helps in cases of need, and provides the chance for a small
job.34 The bases bring together people, equalizing and hierarchizing them, creating
group belongings and leaders (chef, boss, notab, gran ng, ougn, past, kmandan
are just some of the terms from the rich vocabulary of authority used in Haitis
popular districts). These are segmentary formations that exist in different contexts and
at different scales, allowing multiple and contextual belongings closely in tune with
the dynamic of the ti travay and the ti biznis, which in turn produce and reproduce the
bases, serving as channels for the circulation of money: in development work
(associations recognized by the government and cooperation agencies may also be

33
The life of the associations varies according to numerous factors. Over the course
of my fieldwork in Bel Air, I heard people talk about associations that no longer exist,
I observed many active associations and I came across many others that were in a
lethargic state, ready to be activated if there was a chance of a project an
expectation set off principally at the start of my ethnography by my own presence,
when people thought that I, as a blan, was in Bel Air to look for partners for a project,
like a missionary or a member of an NGO or AAI.
34
On the long history of Haitian associations and bosses or chiefs, from kombit to
chef de section see Herskovits 2012 (1937), Metraux 1951 and Comhaire 1955. On
the construction of bosses in relation to the morality of respect and reputation in the
Caribbean, see Wilson 1969.

19

called bases), the promotion of cultural events (especially musical events, such as
performances by rara bands and band a pye), illegal trading, armed actions linked to
politics (as in the case of the resistance of Bel Airs bases to the overthrow of
President Jean Bertrand Aristide in 2004), small or large crimes (ranging from thefts
to kidnappings), and the control especially in the proximities of the markets (in the
Forturon and La Salines bases, for example) of the rates and flows of money and
goods.
Trade and small jobs, for their part, are inserted in flows of money sustained by
credit. Among the skills needed by base leaders is the capacity to give and lend
money. The projects developed by local associations very often receive funding,
mostly from NGOs linked to microcredit rather than banks. Without credit it is
impossible to generate the capital needed for small commerce to exist.35 Sources of
credit include the loans and payment deferrals given to larger traders (ranging from
the big wholesalers to the small retailers), the credit associations that abound in
Haitis popular districts and especially the markets, like sol or sabotay, or the larger
loans and interest rates, like eskont or ponya an endless number of formats, in fact,
in which the number of people involved, the timescale, the amount lent and the
interest rates charged all vary, and which tend to converge on the figure of a manager
or boss, who may be male or female (papa or manman).
These financial microcircuits also include the pawn shops (which frequently assist
people by temporally exchanging goods for money) and bets in the lottery (blt),
which in many senses also functions as a mechanism for savings and capitalization.36
This is the case, for example, of a neighbor from Bel Air who spends between 6 and 8
Haitian dollars (30 and 40 gourdes) every day in the blt, approximately 30% of the
profit she makes from selling juice in the street (around 30 Haitian dollars or 150
gourdes). In the mornings she, her two daughters and a woman friend who lives with
them often discuss the numbers to choose for the days bets; at night the women

35
Sidney Mintz (1964b), emphasizing the importance of capitalization in Haitis rural
markets, explored the native notion of capital, manman lajan, mother money. On
forms of capitalization in small-scale popular urban trade in contemporary Haiti, see
Sergo 2010.
36
On this point also see Laguerre 1983, and Baptiset, Heather & Taylor 2010.

20

discuss the reasons for the failures to win anything or, less frequently, what they will
spend their prize winnings on.
Many of these conversations on numbers, money and business involve questions
relating to politics and magic. At this level the very images printed on the banknotes
become relevant. For example, I heard people in Bel Air explain the preference for
the Haitian dollar to the disdain for the gourde, whose notes for decades only bore
images of the Duvaliers a disdain involving a mixture of militancy and fear
motivated by the still powerful figures of Papa Doc and Baby Doc.
Although I cannot explore the relation between magic, money and measuring, and
chance and trading in the remainder of this article, I wish to emphasize how in this
universe of popular loans and savings, involving the physical handling of some
currencies and the imagining of others, subjects are created who are enthusiastic
experts in numbers, specialists in units of measure and, we could say, in games of
scales.
Conclusion
In 2007, shortly after beginning my fieldwork in Port-au-Prince, the government
issued a ban on the use of the Haitian dollar and made it compulsory to set prices in
gourdes. Intellectuals supported the measure, condemning the imaginary currency,
described as just another sign of the barbarity or backwardness characterizing the
country, just another display of the weakness of the State, unable to maintain a true
currency. In a newspaper article, one intellectual argued that the governments
measure had the merit of being an invitation to less schizophrenia in the calculations
in which our compatriots are engaged every day [...] forever attached to their
arithmetical gymnastics. Displaying the condescension typical to the social elites
who claim to comprehend and at the same time disparage the pathetic practices of
the population, the author condemned this dexterity of our vendors, workers and
other scarcely literate economic agents [...] who reproduce the automatism of the
older generation. She ends by encouraging young people to practice the gourde
(Manigat 2007).

21

Even though these attempts to modernize the countrys monetary culture failed to
have the desired effect since people continue to calculate in Haitian dollars while
they exchange other currencies there are signs of other preferences emerging: some
young people, for example, use the Haitian dollar but condemn the imaginary
currency as a practice pertaining to old people. Indeed teleologies have no place in
monetary histories or in the formation of practices involving calculation and
conversion.37
Over the last few years I have studied two cases whose contrasting experiences
provide a surprising insight into the world of Haitis imaginary currencies (Neiburg
2006, 2007, 2010 and 2011). In Argentina, after the end of the currency board system
(known as convertibility, 1991-2001), nothing similar to a pure unit of account
emerged, something akin to an Argentinean dollar.38 In Brazil, by contrast, the
current national currency was created in 1994 on the basis of a pure unit of account,
an index, an imaginary currency called the Unidade Real de Valor (URV, real unity of
value), which gave way to the real, baptized with this name, among other reasons,
precisely to contrast it with the indexes governing the monetary correction system
that had fed inflation for decades.
In fact once the normative premises concerning the normality or sickness of
currencies are stripped away, we can observe what was previously invisible to the
analyses of the Haitian economy and markets: the social productivity of imaginary
currencies. At the same time, we can observe that the relations between the different
functions of money are embedded in social interactions and their history. Indeed
monetary stabilization or unification policies dialogue with the monetary cultures
created over the generations and with the concrete conditions of economic practices

37
In contrast to the classic demonstration by Kula (1986), the sociocultural history of
measures is not always a history of unifications in statized systems. Here we have a
contrary example of proliferations, in line with the logic suggested by Trouillot
(1990) in which Haitian society instead of becoming statized, confronts the State. In
turn, this makes it necessary to observe the complexities of the relations between the
imaginary currencies and the question of sovereignty (see, for instance, Thret 2009),
an attribute of minted currencies, not, precisely, of the imaginary ones.
38
On monetary practices and conflicts between the peso and US dollar after the end
of Argentinean convertibility, see Luzzi (2012).

22

that, in cases like Haiti, are intrinsically linked to the persistence of plural, nonunified systems of measures and currencies.
From the viewpoint of the theories that sustain monetary policies, the existence of a
pure unit of account is no more than a curiosity or another symptom of the weakness
of a weak State, unable to govern its systems of measure. In this article, by contrast, I
have tried to show how non-unification is a condition of possibility for people to be
able to survive in an environment of extreme money scarcity. We have also seen
how the Haitian dollar, a central element in the forms of calculation making up the
contemporary monetary culture, offers an ideal gateway to understanding the
historical dynamics of Haitis popular economy.
So far all attempts to extinguish the Haitian dollar have failed, just like the projects to
contain street trading and the initiatives to formalize the economy. The streets
continue to fill with an endless multitude of people who sell, buy and consume, even
late into the night and without electricity, relying on candles and kerosene lamps for
lighting. In the middle of these swarming crowds, which appear chaotic to the
untrained eye, thefts and violent occurrences are as rare as the police and military
personnel. Instead there is a constant legion of well-known local leaders and
associations, connecting sellers, commercial networks and territorial spaces. For local
people the markets are ordered places where, as well as enjoying the art of trading,
conversing, and sometimes singing and dancing, they live with their families, make
friends and lovers, find food and water, elaborate individual and collective futures, at
the same time as they cultivate numeric habits and exchange currencies, even
imaginary ones.

23

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