Bill Maurer

William M. Maurer (born March 31, 1968) is an American academic scholar of legal and economic anthropology.

He currently serves as the dean of the School of Social Sciences at the University of California, Irvine.

He has conducted research on money, finance, economy, and law, including the off-shore financial services industry in the Caribbean, alternative currencies, Islamic finance, mobile money, and traditional and emerging payment technologies, as well as cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and related blockchain technologies.

He has been called the “doyen” of the subfield of the anthropology of finance.

Maurer is also the founding director of the Institute for Money Technology and Financial Inclusion, a research institute at UC Irvine funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and a fellow of the Filene Research Institute.

He was previously the founding co-director of the Intel Science and Technology Center in Social Computing, also at UCI.

Maurer received his BA from Vassar College and, in 1994, his PhD in anthropology from Stanford University.

He joined the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine in 1996.

He was chair of the Department of Anthropology at UC Irvine from 2005 to 2011 and was associate dean for research and graduate studies in the social sciences from 2011-13.

His book Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason received the Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing in 2005.

He is the Editor of the forthcoming 6-volume series from Bloomsbury Press on A Cultural History of Money.

From 2007-09, Maurer was President of the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology.

Maurer is currently associate editor of the Journal of Cultural Economy and serves as a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Islamic Accounting and Business Research, Cultural Anthropology, Cultural Critique, and PoLAR: The Political and Legal Anthropology Review.

In 2012, Maurer consulted on the renovation of the Citi Money Gallery at the British Museum.

He was appointed Dean of the School of Social Sciences in July 2013.

In 2015, he was appointed to the Board on Behavioral, Cognitive and Sensory Sciences of the National Academy of Sciences.

He is the recipient of four major National Science Foundation research grants on topics ranging from the cultures of international finance to mobile money and private digital currencies.

In 2015, he was invited to provide input with 14 other academics to the United States Department of the Treasury on the redesign of the US$10 bill.

In 2016, Maurer was named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for noteworthy advances in the fields of law and economic anthropology, specifically in banking and the meaning of money in different cultures.

Maurer’s research encompasses ethnographic and historical work on the Caribbean offshore tax haven economy, specifically in the British Virgin Islands, Islamic banking and alternative currencies, and the material technologies and cultural practices money, finance, and law.

Maurer’s first book Recharting the Caribbean: Land, Law and Citizenship in the British Virgin Islands shows how the offshore tax haven economy was not a foreign imposition, but rather grew out of local practices of kinship and land ownership and was shaped by local conflicts around class and race.

This work highlights the role of colonial legal regimes and national sovereignty claims in the uneven geography of global finance.

Maurer’s second book Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason compares global Islamic banking and finance with the local and alternative currency movement.

Maurer’s work on money, especially his widely cited survey of the anthropology of money, challenges assumptions about money’s effects on social life and calls for a shift in focus away from money’s abstract meanings as a tool for producing equivalence and towards its diverse uses and practices, especially in settings that are not strictly market-based.

More recently, Maurer has studied the cultural and political implications of mobile and digital technologies, especially cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies.

Maurer is the author of four books, the editor or co-editor of seven collections, and the author of numerous journal articles, book chapters, reviews, working papers, and other publications.