Routinizing and scrutinizing: Divergent yet potentially complementary modes of valuing money's material forms

This essay contrasts and explores the complementarity between “routinizing” modes of valuation (relating money tokens to monetary value) that predominate in the contemporary global north with “scrutinizing” modes found in the past and on the periphery of more familiar forms. The former treat the relationship between pecuniary media and money value as independent from the physical condition of specific money tokens which are held to be universally fungible. By contrast, the latter foreground the characteristics of notes and coins as singularized objects that exist within and are potentially reconfigured semiotically by the workings of time upon their physical surfaces. Scrutinizing modes may in turn be divided between systems that seek pristine money tokens that elide their own historicity and those that treat wear and tear as indexical of previous instances of successful valuation. Ultimately the essay identifies three provisional ideal typical modes for practices of money's valuation. Two of these, the systems of routinization in the contemporary global north and of circulation-focal scrutinization, might be taken to be antithetical. By contrast, the third, the hybrid routinizing-scrutinizing model(s) we encounter on the peripheries of the contemporary state-money system or anywhere confidence about money's value starts to break down highlights the potential coexistence and complementarity of different monies within a single disjunctive system. Such complementarity often takes the form of routinized low value and scrutinized high value currencies, yet local, historically sedimented practices are foremost in the formation of such hybrid forms. Examples are drawn from nineteenth century America and China and from contemporary Southeast Asia.

"Nothing requires more care and caution than the study of bank notes" -George Payton, 1861 Introduction: Money's material forms after dematerialization How does the condition of particular notes and coins affect their value?Given the wide influence of narratives of money's progressive dematerialization (Hart, 2001; Simmel,  1978), the question itself might come as a surprise.Moreover, if one were to take conditions in the contemporary global north as representative, one might be inclined to suggest that outside of instances of severe damage, wear and tear has no effect whatsoever on the value of particular money tokens.Yet a comparative attention to practices of valuation 1 highlights a diversity of modes of reckoning with the effects of wear and tear on the ability of particular "pecuniary media" (Agha, 2017) to convincingly perform monetary value.Starting from the premise of the continued significance of money's material forms to folk understandings of the relationship between notes and coins on the one hand and monetary value on the other hand, in this essay, I provisionally contrast two different modes of valuing of money's material forms: first, the "routinizing" modes of valuation that predominate in the contemporary global north, and, second, the "scrutinizing" modes of valuation that can be identified in the context of alternative monetary ideologies 2 both in the past and on the periphery of more familiar forms.The former, routinizing, modes are predicated upon and promote the infrastructuralization and quasi-invisibilization of the work that goes into relating particular money tokens to monetary value, replacing it with a "careless faith" (Mihm, 2009:  1) in the money in our pocketbooks.Such modes function via the production of a would-be-universal fungibility between notes and coins that are replaced by central authorities before they can become too worn.As a result, the relationship between pecuniary media and money value is treated as timeless and immediate and, importantly, as independent from the physical condition of any given money object.By contrast, scrutinizing modes of valuation foreground the characteristics of particular notes and coins as objects that exist within and are potentially reconfigured, semiotically, by the workings of time upon their physical surfaces.
While in both routinizing and scrutinizing modes, the physical substance of notes and coins is subject to what Ringel (2016: 23) calls "certain…chemical and physical processes of decay and decomposition," the net result of which is a "slow and, in the long run, presumably determinate disintegration on a molecular level," only in scrutinizing modes of reckoning with money's materiality do the effects of such processes rise to the level of semiotic salience.In such schemes, in other words, wear and tear affect particular money objects' performance of monetary value in the eyes of particular communities of usage.Routinizing modes of valuation desingularize pecuniary media via an emphasis on the apparently sempiternal and self-verifying qualities of a system that renders external verification of money's value unnecessary.By contrast, scrutinizing modes foreground the specific characteristics of particular notes and coins as central to the practices of skilled inspection relied upon to alternately establish or defease their successful performance of monetary value.
In what follows I first briefly sketch out routinizing modes of engaging with money's material forms, broadly familiar to those habituated to dealing with currency in the contemporary global north, in which wear and tear and the physical condition of currency are not generally salient to negotiating its value.I then outline three contrasting examples of scrutinizing approaches to money's value in which wear and tear is semiotically salient: approaches to the handling and valuation of currency in the USA during the wildcat bank era (1836-1865), in the Jiangnan and Pearl River delta regions of nineteenth-century Qing China, and in contemporary Myanmar and Vietnam.I draw primarily on historical sources for my discussion of the first two and on both anthropological and popular accounts (drawn largely from travel blogs) for the latter. 3cross these cases we can provisionally identify a contrast between at least two kinds of scrutinizing systems.In the first, wear defeases the relationship between money object and money value (i.e., renders a note or coin alternately worthless or worth less).In the second, wear and tear establish or buttress the monetary value of particular pecuniary media by indexically signaling histories of prior successful circulation.Ultimately, I suggest that these different modes of relating money's material form to value are not opposed or mutually exclusive but may complement or coexist with each other.This complementarity in turn often incorporates various salient historically sedimented disjunctions between different elements of the local monetary ecology-whether between currencies issued by different authorities (e.g., USD and Kyat in Myanmar) or between high-value and low-value instruments of the same currency (as in contemporary Vietnam).This multifariousness of the potential complementarity between routinizing and scrutinizing in turn highlights the multiplicity of ways of reckoning money's value both historically and in the contemporary world.

"We Do Not Scrutinize the Notes Themselves"
In the introduction to his history of counterfeiting in nineteenth-century America, historian Stephen Mihm highlights the unremarkableness of money in the contemporary global north."Few of us question the slips of green paper that come and go in our wallets, purses and pockets.While we may obsess about how much money we have," he writes, "we do not scrutinize the notes themselves….Our ignorance is a testament to just how secure we feel about the nation's currency.The money is in our hands and is universally accepted at face value: that is all we need to know" (2009: 1).In the regimes of valuation that predominate in contexts associated with standard, uniform, general purpose state-issued money, the condition of particular money tokens is nearly always irrelevant to their ability to convincingly signify monetary value.Moreover, under their aegis, outside of exceptional circumstances, notes and coins are taken to be completely fungible and sempiternal.Where central banks regularly replace worn notes with new issue, any given money token is superfluous to the continued functioning of the system.Nor do notes need to be inspected for the signs of money-ness, hidden or otherwise.As long as they bear a very minimal set of visual markers and fulfill a number of related features (proper feel, appearance, sourcing, etc.), their successful performance as money is taken for granted.This is not to say that "we, moderns" never attend to the physical condition or characteristics of the money in our possession.Indeed, most of us can recall instances where a particular note or coin was subjected to extra scrutiny or even rejected as counterfeit.However, our everyday relationship to money tokens is not characterized by the chronic, quotidian processes of inspection and (re-)verification scholars such as Truitt (2013), Mihm (2009), and von Glahn (2007) describe for cases such as contemporary Vietnam or nineteenth-century China or America.Rather, in the contemporary global north, money tokens usually function as elementary particles of a kind of quasi-ontological infrastructure.
Within this infrastructure, they are, in White's (2014) words "standardized, virtually identical, interchangeable, and instantly acceptable, reliable to the point where they appear natural, so familiar that they have become a mere tool we barely notice" (389).In this vein, Poovey (2008) highlights what she terms the progressive naturalization of money, as a species of "cultural amnesia" (346) by means of which the strangeness of money and particularly of the script artifacts (Agha, 2017) present on most modern currency have slipped below the "horizon of cultural visibility" (337).Similarly, Grossman suggests we relate to modern banknotes with "a semi-conscious, eye-shallow mime of reading" (2019: 303; see also Agha, 2017: 353).
As notes and coins have been converted in popular perceptions from representations of money into money itself (Blaazer, 1999: 40), the latter has been infrastructuralized, 4 its semiotic workings hidden away."A dollar is a dollar is a dollar," (Zelizer, 2021: 1), 5 obviously worth its face value regardless of condition.This infrastructuralization of money is itself the product of the strength of the political system(s) that underpin(s) the monopolistic issue of state currency.Under such circumstances, the seamlessness of the system that "brushes over" the root plurality of state money (Blanc, 2019) takes precedence over the condition of any particular money token.Moreover, in routinizing systems, the work of recognizing genuine money tokens is usually delegated to the system itself-notes and coins received in change at shops or from ATMs are perceived by users as always already genuine except in very specific situations of heightened concern.Their validity is presumed to have been established upstream at banks or at their place of issue before they emerge "from the wall" or from the till.Their genuineness is, thus, above reproach as long as they conform with general expectations about appearance and feel.As a result, we rarely attend to the character of specific money tokens in our possession.
This latter point is true only as long as the condition of particular notes and coins falls within in the parameters set by the issuing authority.Countries in which the money supply is regularly replenished have formalized the boundary between "fit" and "unfit" money.As such, money objects that have incurred substantial damage that might render the note unrecognizable are generally removed from circulation and are subject to specific regulations concerning their exchange for undamaged notes. 6As severely damaged notes are usually quickly removed from circulation by centralized authorities and replaced with new issue, these sorts of degraded notes are rarely encountered.Moreover, as a result of the formalization of the boundary between fit and unfit money, notes with minor to moderate wear and tear that falls below the threshold for removal from circulation are not subjected to quotidian inspection.Thus, in routinizing modes of valuation, within this spectrum of minor to moderate wear, physical changes to notes and coins are completely irrelevant to establishing the value of a particular money object.By contrast, in the scrutinizing contexts described below, there is alternately no formal boundary between fit and unfit money or the currency is not regularly replenished by central authorities; degraded currency is commonly encountered.As a result, the value of particular notes and coins maybe affected by prevailing societal attitudes toward changes in their physical condition.
"Bring Bills so Crisp You Can Cut Tomatoes with Them" In Ho Chi Minh City, per Truitt (2013), and elsewhere where similar conditions obtain, "people do not routinely accept the money handed them: they rely on their own judgement regarding the credibility of particular notes.The qualities of cash-its appearance, its feel, even its denomination-shape people's confidence in its performance as money (107)." Upon receiving cash, sellers will rub the notes between their fingers, verifying the note by its feel, or hold it up to the light to see if the watermark of Hô`Chí Minh's portrait is crisp or blurred.Some vendors reject paper notes that have been taped or burned along the edges, handing them back to the buyer.When receiving change, buyers will quickly count the cash they receive, pulling out notes that appear worn or tattered for possible rejection. 7 Maurer (2016) puts it, in such contexts, "people evaluate currencies much as they do other commodities, comparing their qualities which in turn affect their circulation.It is almost as if people evaluate the money that comes through their hands as one might thump melons in the market" (310).
For many Western travelers, habituated to routinizing systems of valuation, such procedures are baffling. 8As commentator 69Bertie notes on a 2011 Tripadvisor post on "Having perfect and crisp notes/bills in Vietnam," "a note is a note and why the Vietnamese (and Asia generally) make such a song and dance over the condition of genuine notes is beyond me." 9 Truitt, too, finds these everyday inspections "puzzling.""After all," she suggests, "a ten thousand dong note that shows wear does not depreciate to eight thousand dong, just as a worn dollar bill is not devalued to eighty cents" (108).Yet many travelers' accounts from across Southeast Asia do in fact comment on the reduced value of worn notes in economic transactions-in Vietnam and, particularly, in Myanmar where one traveler described the precise scenario that Truitt dismisses as absurd: "I took my $20 bill with a tiny ink spot on it to a black-market money changer.He gave me $17.75 for it." 10Similarly, another traveler writes, "any tiny tiny discoloration or marks even on edges are usually refused or classified as seconds with lower rate of exchange." 11n Myanmar, in particular, moneychangers have long been notorious for an insistence on USD dollars in pristine condition.In locally salient interpretive frameworks, minute, nearly undetectable flaws in the physical fabric of the money token serve to render its claim to money value defeasible.Here, rather than being consigned to semiotic irrelevance, evidence of wear and tear can sunder money tokens' relation to value.Per a 2014 article in The Irrawaddy, this preference for untouched notes is long-standing."In the early 2000s, when Western economic sanctions began to bite, local banks had difficulty trading dollars outside the country.Most external trade went through Singaporean banks, which demanded crisp bills." 12Foreign tourists were banned from transacting in the local currency (kyat) between 1993 and 2013.Even after these regulations were abolished, many tourist-related businesses still required payment in dollars.Even though sanctions had been relaxed prior to the bloody coup of 2021, visitors to Myanmar were still advised to "bring bills so crisp you can cut tomatoes with them." 13 From travelers' alternately humorous and anguished accounts of apparently pristine notes being rejected or devalued on the basis of nearly imperceptible flaws, we can begin to outline the contours of the regime of valuation being used to distinguish between working and "broken notes."For example, this account from the blog "The Mad Traveller:" 14 It's true what they say about the pickiness of money changers in Myanmar.It can be so crazy as to be comical.When I went into a travel agent's office in Yangon to purchase a flight to Bagan, I paid in cash.As we were settling the bill, the manager came back over to me and said, "I am sorry, sir, but we cannot accept this." He handed back my $20 though it looked to be starched and pressed at the dry cleaner's.
"Well, why not?!" I demanded."It is torn.""What?? Where?"He patiently held it up close to my face where I could see, making my eyes go a little wonky and reminding me that perhaps reading glasses were in my near future.While I wouldn't call it a tear, exactly, there was a one millimeter exposure of fibers as if a tear were about to begin.It was the idea of a tear.A suggestion.A ground breaking ceremony.It took a second to refocus my eyes on him and I shook away the first hint of a headache."That's absurd.""I am sorry, sir, we cannot accept this.Please, sir, do you have another?"I only had one alternative $20 bill left, but I handed it to him.After careful review-I wondered why he didn't use a jeweller's loupe-this bill made the grade and he went to retrieve my change.#8232;Across these and other similar travelers' accounts, 15 we can see certain recurring themes.Where the example above suggests the usefulness of a jeweler's loupe in scrutinizing practices of valuation, a second likens a clerk's scrutiny of one hundred dollar notes to "the kind of detailed precision normally reserved for a fine art appraisal at Sotheby's." 16Where standard practice in the global north would treat any note as fungible with any other genuine note of the same type, here, by contrast, in Western travelers' metapecuniary frameworks, local moneychangers are seen to be assessing notes' values based on their own specific characteristics, as if each particular note were a gemstone or a work of fine art.Such processes of valuation are not internal to the money system but proceed from the skilled examination of singularized objects.
In an article in the International Business Times, Australian economist (and former advisor to Aung San Suu Kyi) Sean Turnell explained, "People are valuing foreign currency because they're viewing it in the same way they view gold and precious metals and precious stones….that there's some intrinsic value to it….If you're valuing something because you think it's intrinsically valuable," he continued, "rather than being a currency decided by [legal] tender and by the law, then the actual physical appearance of the note matters." 17In such instances, individual notes are not fungible.Rather they are singularized objects whose ability to perform monetary value successfully needs to be established and verified via skilled inspection.With apologies to Maurer, at least in Myanmar, this process would appear to be more akin to the grading of gemstones than to a more casual thumping of melons.
Indeed, there would appear to be important parallels between how precious stones as singularized objects are valued through skilled practice 18 and how moneychangers in Myanmar assess the condition of individual notes.As Falls (2014), notes, "two [diamonds] may look alike at a glance, but to the grader-with his or her loupe and probe and tweezers and tiny ruler and crown-angle measurer and color stones and fluorescence chart and calculator and diamond thermal tester-no two are identical" (60).The visual traces that figure prominently in the grading of diamonds are generally invisible or virtually invisible to nonexpert practitioners."The average person cannot distinguish high-versus low-grade, natural versus simulated, fine versus poor, or pricey versus inexpensive diamonds, even with close inspection" (Falls, 2014: 20).Similarly, different cuts are also invisible to nonspecialists.Per Falls, specialist diamond grading operates as a means of both "maneuver[ing] the seemingly similar into a hierarchy of value" (57) and "choreograph[ing] each gem into uniqueness" (20).The process of valuation is thus intimately linked to the singularization of each object. 19hereas in diamond grading, there is a broad spectrum of classifications into which any gem may be inserted based on its observed characteristics, in the practices of currency scrutinization described in travelers' accounts above, grading appears rather more binary.Either particular notes are in mint condition, without marks, tears, etc., and thus worthy of their full face-value or they are "broken" 20 and, depending on local proclivities, are either exchangeable at a condition-based discount or not at all.Moreover, in contrast to the physical properties of gems which are thought to be quite durable, mint condition of money tokens is easily lost.Unless you keep your notes in binders and plastic bags or pressed between the pages of a book, previously pristine notes may easily incur the minor imperfections ("the idea of a tear") that might decrease or erase a particular note's value entirely.This semiotic salience of wear and tear goes a long way toward explain why citizens in HCMC, Myanmar, and elsewhere similar conditions obtain are constantly "monitor[ing] their own money supply to ensure what they accepted would in turn be acceptable to someone else" (Truitt, 2013: 108-9).
The examples from contemporary Southeast Asia explored above have been centrally concerned with the identification of "mint condition" notes via skilled inspection.Desjardins (2006) suggests that an "an object in mint or perfect condition erases the history of the object's use and place in the past" (38).A focus on pristine condition, in other words, seeks to separate the object (or here the money token) from its particular history of circulation.Grading notes as alternately acceptable or "broken" valorizes particular tokens that elide evidence of their own historicity.Indeed, the marks of circulation in the form of visible or even almost invisible instances of wear are seen as inimical to the money token-money value relationship.Yet we should not take these examples as representative of scrutinizing practice(s) in general.Such practices vary significantly by time and place.Specifically, where the gemstone-grading-adjacent practices of scrutinization described above derive in part from being able to separate money tokens from their particular histories of circulation, in other settings, traces of this circulation are precisely the evidence sought in order to usher particular money tokens into a hierarchy of value.
"More Probably 'Good' if it was Worn and Dirty than if it was Clean" In the wildcat bank era of mid-nineteenth century America and the roughly contemporary local economic worlds of the Jiangnan and Pearl River Delta regions of late Qing China, the absence of wear and tear was suspicious; moreover, the right kinds of wear of could serve to reenforce the validity of a particular note or coin's claim to money value.In such cases, establishing or (re)constructing previous histories of circulation based on the physical traces left behind by past usage was central to processes of expert valuation.
Prior to the introduction of a uniform national currency in 1863, Americans had to navigate a dizzyingly complex tangle of literally thousands of state, local, and informal currencies (Mihm, 2009).A simple trip across state or even county lines could necessitate conversions across multiple thresholds of value (Guyer, 2004).White (2014: 389) highlights how this diversity of issue rendered money "much more culturally visible" than it is today: In antebellum America… bank notes were variegated, distinctive, even memorable, and, as numismatic historian Richard Doty concluded, "There was no single, universal value for any given note, from any given bank."Individuals could commonly detail not just how much money they had in their pocketbook, but the denominations of the notes and which banks had issued them.It was a monetary world where nothing was fixed and everything was up for negotiation.
It was in such a context that per Conway (2012), "neither colorless nor immaterial, the monies of the free-banking U.S. were routinely scoured by suspicious eyes hoping to find some physical evidence or bright sign that could better authenticate their worth" (431).The disjunctive monetary topography of this era occasioned the usage of a now largely forgotten genre of texts known as "Bank Note Reporters" (or "Counterfeit Detectors"; see Dillistin, 1949) to both stabilize the rate of conversion from one local note to another and to sort out the wheat from the chaff.A description of how such manuals were employed can be found in Peyton's (1861) treatise, How to Detect Counterfeit Banknotes.Such reporters listed "the names and rates of discount of all the banks in good standing; the names of those [banks] that are broken and worthless; the character and quality of the various frauds perpetrated in bank notes; together with a digest of general financial information" and detailed descriptions of notes both genuine and counterfeit."To give an example" of how such texts were employed, Peyton (1861: 52) begins, We have before us a ten-dollar bill, purporting to have been issued by the Broadway Bank, New York City, and we wish to ascertain if it is good.We turn to the Descriptive List and find the description of the ten-dollar notes of that Bank to be as follows : -"10 -10, female, cars, canal, ships and city."We now examine our note, and find that it corresponds in every respect with said description, and we of course pronounce it genuine.
Unfortunately for us, upon "receive[ing] it and tak[ing] it to the bank for redemption… to our surprise, we are informed that it is not good, and although it answers to the description of the genuine, it is nothing but a counterfeit facsimile of the same."For a number of reasons (lack of photographs or other visual depictions and the tendency for reporters to only report on frauds that had already occurred foremost among them), Peyton 21 suggests that banknote reporters might ultimately be of more use to the would-be counterfeiter than to the upstanding businessperson attempting to tell true issue from false.
As a result, many turned their attention to particular kinds of wear to provide evidence of a note's bona fides.Sumner highlights the key role played by wear and tear in evaluating 22 unfamiliar bank notes: The person to whom one of them was offered, if unskilled in trade and banking, had little choice but to take it.A merchant turned to his 'detector.'He scrutinized the worn and dirty scrap for two or three minutes, regarding it as more probably 'good' if it was worn and dirty than if it was clean because these features were proof a long successful circulation.He turned it up to the light and looked through it, because it was the custom of the banks to file the notes on slender pins which made holes through them.If there were many such holes the note had been often in the bank and its genuineness was ratified (quoted in Dillistin,  1949: 46).Mihm (2009: 222) suggests that in the context of such inspections, "a crisp, clean bill was suspicious: it had no history, no hint of having withstood the test of trust."Without "signs of wear 23 and tear," it bore no traces "of having passed inspection with others."In contrast to the Southeast Asian examples discussed above, here wear and dirt did not erase money's value but instead indexed its successful past usage. 24Similarly, pinholes were taken to be indices of a note's passage through a bank-that is, of successful past verification by a trusted authority.In the absence of standardized markers of trusted origin that guarantee a money token's value in the contemporary global north, here the apparent traces of use themselves vouch for the worthiness of a particular note.

"The Shroff's Magic"
Where "we" are used to the verification of money's worth being infrastructuralized and taking place upstream from particular transactions, here, per Mihm (10), "value…was not something inert, something inherent in the note itself, the way that gold in a coin was thought to have an intrinsic value.Far from it: value," he maintains, "was something that materialized and became tangible when the note was exchanged, when one person put confidence in the note of another.Only at that instant would an intrinsically worthless piece of paper come to mean something more."Verification of particular money tokens' ability to successfully perform money value via skilled practice at the moment of transaction was of central importance to such practices of valuation.Indeed, in some scrutinizing systems, skilled practitioners added their own marks to money as indices of successful instances of valuation.In turn, in yet another semiotic spin placed on wear and tear by particular communities of users, such marks became both crucial indices of a coin's validity and ammunition for skilled counterfeiters.
According to von Glahn, in nineteenth-century China, "money shops commonly marked silver coins either with ink seals or stamped trademarks (chops) in order to validate them.In the eyes of the actual users of these coins, the seal or chop of a reputable money shop vastly simplified the elaborate verification procedures detailed in" the various coin identification handbooks or "merchants' manuals," of the period that are quite reminiscent of American banknote reporters (2007: 60).A key issue in both the US and China involved how far the notes and coins in question traveled from their place of issue.The Pieces of Eight in Qing China von Glahn describes had traveled so far that the political regalia (heads) that would have indexed and potentially guaranteed value for a Mexican or Spaniard were completely opaque to Chinese users.Indeed, the latter referred to the visages of Spanish monarchs on their obverses as "ghost" or "Buddha" heads and to the Roman alphabet a as "ghost script."The absence of a socially salient interpretation of the political imagery on the coin defeased the usual power of a trusted issuer to at least provisionally guarantee the coin's value.Thus, the question of the authenticity of such coins was not generally settled as it might have been closer to "home."Instead it required constant local (re-)verification.
Into the void stepped chop-marks.Per Chalmers, even though the term and the practice are often taken to be quintessentially Chinese, in fact both derive from the Indian subcontinent and were transferred to China in the context of British colonialism.The term "chop" originates (Chalmers, 1893: 378) with "the Hindi chhap, a seal-impression, and can be traced back to European languages as far as 1537."Eventually, the term came to refer to the personal mark (stamp, sign or tool for marking silver) of particular shroffs (from the Urdu and ultimately Arabic s ̣arra ̄f), a class of functionaries who, per Deyell (2010), "set a value upon the various coins brought to [them] when any cash transaction arose between two parties" via the diligent examination of each individual coin (101, n.101).In theory, the entire purpose of coinage in contradistinction to the circulation of uncoined bullion is to yield uniform tokens with a state imprimatur that they are worth their face value.Yet, here we see local projects of valuation and verification entailing the imprinting the equivalent of a "verified by X" on a money token already in theory verified by its issuers.
Again we are firmly in the realm of the valuation of money as an expert practice.In an 1874 review by the one-time Registrar-General and Colonial Treasurer of Hong Kong, Alfred Lister, of a now apparently lost 1864 merchants' manual entitled "Shroffing Made Easy: A Simple Treatise on the Old and New Silver Coinages" by one Professor Loh-shen-teh, much as with Falls on diamond grading above, we can see the invisibility of telling details to untrained eyes.Lister notes that while the author enumerates eight different kinds of Mexican dollars, he himself is unable to observe any salient differences between these issues."After a careful examination and measurement of the pictures I cannot see any difference in them and conclude that the professor, like other Savants has let his zeal for classification run away with him" (1874: 3).Yet he suggests, such classification, so fine-grained as to be basically invisible was central to the expert scrutinizing practice of the day."These finely-divided varieties," Lister writes, "he [i.e., the author of the manual] expects his pupils to remember and distinguish if they aspire to be the shroffs of the coming generation" (3).
For, the shroff "must be an expert" in order to protect their employer from "from all spurious or light coin, forced notes, or errors of computation." 25This expertise relied on sensory cues of sight, sound and touch.As such, shroffs' scrutinizations stood in stark contrast to the practices of European visitors more habituated to routinizing modes of engaging with money's material forms.Lister describes from personal experience in Hong Kong, a process in which forgers could make "two bad dollars out of three good ones while also cutting away between two and three dollars of silver in the process"(6)."I have seen false Hongkong dollars made in this way so as to almost defy detection"; he writes, "they consisted of a mere foil of silver enclosing a mass of lead, and could be pierced by a lead awl as if they had been made of cheese."While convincing visually, the evidence of other senses could betray them: "the ring [the sound made by striking the coin against a hard surface] is fatal to them of course, but if it is considered that they present two sides and a milling of silver and real workmanship, it will be seen what a trap they are to those foreigners who cannot be cured of putting money into their pockets almost without looking at it" (6; emphasis added).In place of the infrastructuralized verification processes of contemporary routinized money systems, "decipher[ing] these monetary hieroglyphs" (Mihm, 2009: 6) required solving "a mystery, deep and rare" (Lister, 1874: 12).This could only be done via skilled practices of scrutinization.

Some Provisional Thoughts on the Complementarity of Routinization and Scrutinization
It is clear from the contrast between examples elaborated above that the relationship between wear and tear and other marks of usage on the one hand and monetary value on the other is highly variable across contexts.That said, on first blush, there would seem to be a strong contrast between two broad categories of (ideal typical) monetary systems.In the first, standardized notes and coins circulate within territorially configured currency areas in which worn money tokens are replaced regularly by strong central authorities.In such replenishing systems the boundary between good and bad money tokens is set by law and, on the good side of the ledger, differences in the condition of particular money tokens do not affect their valuation.Furthermore, processes of verification are themselves infrastructuralized and not generally a focus of day-to-day monetary life.As a result, notes and coins are fungible.A dollar is a dollar is a dollar.The monetary system as a whole is more important in processes of valuation than the particular physical characteristic of any given money token.
In the second, nonreplenishing category, notes and coins may be circulating far from "home" in the case of the US dollar in Myanmar and the Spanish Peso in Qing-era China or not as in the case of contemporary Vietnam.Alternately, they may exist within a matrix of diverse local, regional and transnational currencies that circulate alongside each other as in the nineteenth century US.But in any eventuality, they are not generally replaced as they age because the locale where they circulate lacks the authority or the ability to do so.In such instances, the boundary between good and bad money is typically ambiguous or poorly policed.As such, differences in material condition may figure unpredictably in processes of valuation that are not infrastructuralized and rendered internal to the distribution system of notes and coins but are instead dependent on locally specific sets of historically sedimented skilled practice.
In such systems, evidence of wear can alternately undo or buttress the claims of any particular money token to successfully perform monetary value.However, regardless of the semiotic salience of wear and tear, in scrutinizing systems, notes and coins are typically singularized.Correspondingly, valuation can often look more like the skilled grading of gemstones or the establishment of an heirloom's provenance than the simple, efficacious, basically automatic identification of a note or coin with its face value that we find in the contemporary global north.In such processes, the addition of personal marks such as the chops of nineteenth century China or their contemporary analogues in the ink stamps placed upon verified USD $100 bills by contemporary Cambodian banks 26 and participants in the South Asian money transfer networks called Hawalas, 27 may serve as an intentional and nonaleatory form of performative reverification of money's value.
Initially, the routinizing/scrutinizing distinction might appear to be of a piece with the binary distinctions drawn by a number of influential formulations (e.g., modern/primitive money, metallism/chartalism and hard/soft currencies).Yet if we press this analysis further, we find three systems not two.We can think of these as the default but historically recent, routinizing system generally (but not always) linked with modern state-issued money in the global north, and, alongside this, at least two kinds of scrutinizing systems.The first of these centers on the expert ushering of pristine notes into hierarchies of value while the second foregrounds an approach to wear and tear which treats the latter as indexical of the history of a particular money object's circulation.
To distinguish adequately between these three broad forms, we must attend to a number of significant factors.These can be elicited by laying out the parameters of the default routinizing system at least in ideal typical form.As we have seen, in routinizing modes of reckoning with money's value, all of money's erstwhile functions are united in a single standardized currency.This single currency is produced by an authoritative, trusted issuer (usually aligned with state power) and exists within a replenishing monetary system in which damaged currency is both defined legally and replaced on a regular basis by centralized authority within a given territory.As a result of this regular replenishment, the particular characteristics of any particular money token (i.e., changes caused wear and tear) are irrelevant to the functioning of the system as a whole and the currency as a whole appears sempiternal.In this replenishing system, verification procedures are infrastructuralized and thereby shifted from the realm of expert practice to the system itself.More generally, trust is the default position with regard to money objects' ability to successfully perform monetary value. 28n scrutinizing systems, by contrast, money's functions are not united in a single standardized currency.However, mint condition-focal and circulation-focal scrutinizing systems often diverge in terms of how functions are parceled out.In the examples discussed in this essay, we can alternately observe contemporary systems in which certain high-value forms of money are expected to be pristine in order to maintain the efficacy of their claim to value and historical orders in which all or nearly all forms of currency were habitually examined for the traces of their previous circulation.In the former case, high value, necessarily pristine money may be seen as fulfilling a store of value function whereas low value, often poor condition money more commonly fulfills the medium of exchange function. 29hereas the goal with the former is to hold onto it and the value it preserves, the aim with the latter is to move it along with as quickly as possible through channels that allow the knowledgeable operator to profit from such movements.As such this configuration strongly resembles Guyer's (2012) model of hard and soft currencies in which only the former is deemed capable of holding value and as such worthy of trust.
In such systems, the routinized currency and the scrutinized currencies exist in a disjunctive rather than a unified monetary field, often diverging in terms of issuer.On the one hand, one may observe the importance of the US dollar alongside local currencies in many locales in the global south.On the other hand, in Vietnam for example, the key axis of the scrutinizing/routinizing distinction long demarcated high value (scrutinized) from low value (routinized) increments of Vietnamese dong.Here, the absence of reliable replenishment may have been the key factor in prompting quotidian scrutinization of currency commonly used as a store of value currency.Indeed, across all scrutinizing systems, the replenishment of both scrutinized and routinized money is commonly flawed or nonexistent. 30s a result of the system's inability to replace them when necessary and in the absence of a formalized boundary between fit and unfit money, individual notes or coins are singularized and habitually scrutinized.As we have seen, verification practices are external to the system and predicated on expert knowledge.Importantly, the necessity of verification procedures may also differ significantly with regard to store of value and medium of exchange currencies.Inverting expectations from the global north, in such mixed systems, soft money does not need to be chronically verified whereas hard money does.What we see here are unexpected permutations to the valuation of "hard" money away from its original replenishing contexts and spatially distant from its trusted issuers.Outside the system that has guaranteed its value and infrastructuralized its verification, locally specific traditions of expert practice must be enlisted to usher erstwhile "hard" money (back) into value. 31irculation-focal scrutinizing systems look quite different from this model.Where mint condition-focal systems incorporate a division between store of value monies and medium of exchange monies, in circulation-focal systems, the locus of the store of value function is unpredictable.In the wildcat bank-era US, it was arguably outside the realm of money completely. 32The picture in Jiangnan China is more complex.Certainly, some kinds of broken and chopped coins were used primarily as a medium of exchange, but as silver they were always potentially subject to being melted down to access a store of value function.So perhaps the latter is best characterized as absent but latent in such situations.At any rate, the medium of exchange function was more emphasized than the store of value.
The key commonalities across these cases are that the monetary landscape was disjunctive rather than unified, trusted issuers (and or a match between issuer and area of circulation) were largely if not completely absent, replenishment was insufficient or had yet to be invented and as a result all nearly all forms of currency of more than extremely local value (e.g., American "shinplasters"-see Greenberg, 2020) were subjected to quotidian scrutinization in the context of a default suspicion of all pecuniary media.Verification procedures were matters of expert (and often paid) practice and nearly universal in their necessity.Here, we have a world entirely of soft money in Guyer's terms, in part because contemporary forms of hardness had yet to be invented.Indeed, Guyer reminds us that "[the] conditions of existence [of hard money systems] … are historically recent, particular, and rapidly changing, and therefore, they are not amenable to an assumption of normality across time and space" (2012: 2220).
Thus, we are left with a three-fold distinction where many received frameworks would give us two.On the one hand, are two pure (in the imagination, if not completely in practice) systems-of routinization in the contemporary global north and of circulation-focal scrutinization in its past.On the other hand, we have the hybrid routinizing-scrutinizing model(s) we encounter on the peripheries of the contemporary state-money system or anywhere confidence about money's value starts to break down.It is abundantly clear from an attention to the latter that scrutinizing and routinizing systems may often be complementary rather than opposed.Yet it is also clear that the conditions of such complementarity are closely linked to historically sedimented local practices.
As such, further research is needed before we can generalize effectively about the characteristics of the relationship(s) between these two divergent yet often allied modes of valuing money's material instantiations.In particular, further ethnographic research is necessary to gain access to the emic attitudes and opinions of money-changers in Myanmar, Vietnam, and other places similar conditions obtain.Until such work is completed, the categories that this essay articulates and the conclusions it draws are necessarily provisional, provocations rather than authoritative proclamations.Ultimately, this essay seeks to catalyze future research rather than to produce some sort of definitive statement on the issues it has sought to contextualize.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.essay, this highlights how both routinizing and scrutinizing modes may be used by the same community of users for different currencies.14. https://themadtraveler.com/blog/using-clean-brand-new-us-bills-in-myanmar/ 15.In addition to those linked above, see also https://www.mybanktracker.Falls (2014) and Walsh (2010) on diamonds and sapphires, respectively.19.Walsh: "As any gem trader will attest, every sapphire that comes out of the ground is unique, in which case it might make…sense to compare sapphires to works of art" (2010, 99).20.https://beingrestless.wordpress.com/2011/04/04/burma-blog-1-the-dirty-dollars/ 21.Americans of the period attempted to tame the baffling diversity of circulating paper money in two main ways.Conway distinguishes (2012, 429) between "currency describers" and "currency aesthetes."The former "argued that print technologies such as banknote reporters and counterfeit detectors could provide adequate pictorial descriptions…that might teach individuals to adjudicate good and bad money at the level of circulation."The latter, by contrast, "insisted that the only way to ensure monetary legitimacy [was] to have strict artistic criteria mediate the entire process of currency production."Where the describers relied on the apparently exhaustive detail on specific notes within the pages of their chosen publishers' periodicals, the aesthetes articulated an attention to specific visual details in general that transcended the description of any particular issue.Ironically, Peyton, from whom I draw these accounts of "describers'" practice was firmly in the "aesthete" camp.22.In practice, as one of the journal's anonymous readers suggests, there was also an intimate relationship between "the value of currencies and the valuing of persons" (see Dillistin 1949,  Mihm 2009, Cole 2009).23.Unfortunately, given its singularity as well as the aleatory circumstances of its formation, wear could be a particularly unreliable index of genuineness.Certainly, simulating certain kinds of wear became an important tool for counterfeiters of the era.Interestingly, where contemporary counterfeiters seek to fake icons (by fabricating fake notes that resemble genuine ones), here we see attempts to fake indexicals in the service of bolstering the convincingness of a dubious note's simulation of a long history of circulation and acceptance.
24. Greenberg (2020, 117) illustrates how users' writing on notes could perform a similar attesting function.25.Yet, much as with the marks of wear on banknotes in nineteenth-century America, even as chops often reassured users that particular money tokens had been used successfully in the past, they could also be counterfeited.There are suggestions that certain shroffs were not above participating in such frauds themselves.26.See for example the interesting discussion at https://www.lonelyplanet.com/thorntree/forums/asia-south-east-asia-mainland/topics/will-anyone-accept-exchange-folded-usd where posters highlight both the fact that "Cambodian banks stamp the backs of the higher value [USD] bills that come out of [ATM] machines" and that such stamps on otherwise pristine bills will render them unusable in Myanmar.27. https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/kdp7b/what_does_this_stamp_on_this_100_bill_mean_looks/ and https://forums.collectors.com/discussion/1017094/100-dollar-bill-withchopmarks-the-little-stamps-of-colored-ink-on-back-show-me-yours28.It is worth noting that even though we tend to associate routinizing systems with top-and-center practices, they are in fact historically recent and geographically contingent.The absence or rarity of scrutinizing systems in the contemporary global north is a historical rather than a cultural or civilizational fact.The nineteenth-century American examples discussed above (and one could find similar examples for Europe in that period if one were so inclined), highlight the degree to which scrutinizing systems were commonplace in "the West" during that era.29.Turnell (2021) first suggests then disclaims the notion that the relative importance of the store of value and medium of exchange to different pecuniary media accounts for the differential treatment given to each.I think his reasons for abandoning this claim (centering on the notion that "Money today is overwhelmingly not in any tangible form") are more convincing in metropolitan Western settings than they are with regard to the local practices of and cultural attitudes toward the valuation of particular money objects in Myanmar and elsewhere similar conditions obtain.Guyer (2012: 2219) argues in this vein for a continued attentiveness to the specificity of money's material forms, especially in soft money contexts.30.Truitt (2013) identifies the introduction of polymer money in 2003 as prompting potentially significant changes in this regard, given its greater durability and lesser susceptibility to counterfeiting potentially resulting in a shift from quotidian scrutinization to a more familiar routinizing mode.31.In all of this, it is often but not necessarily the case that, as one of the journal's anonymous readers suggested, acutely, that scrutinizing practices "act as a kind of DIY method of stabilizing value when other methods have broken down and money isn't quite working as it 'should'"-I'm wary of assigning routinization a normative or default character in general (as opposed to within the territorial span of the global north where it is currently hegemonic).32.In this respect, it accorded well with much older modes of imagining of money such as Artistotle's.The latter, Guyer notes, "considered the medium of exchange function to be the most important [to money], and wealth [i.e., stored valued] was appropriately held in intangibles such as honor and virtue" (2012: 2216).
Cambodia).By contrast in Zimbabwe where I have done ethnographic fieldwork on money, US dollars (especially low denomination notes) are highly valued regardless of wear and hence are often in extremely poor condition.I note that as of mid-2023 this is starting to change due to the increasing reluctance of banks to accept poor quality notes.16. https://rtwin30days.com/myanmar-yangon/ 17. https://www.ibtimes.com/myanmars-demand-pristine-dollar-notes-following-history- monetary-instability-borders-absurd-1333289.Similarly, in Indonesia, foreign "Bank Notes… are not legal tender in Indonesia but [are treated] as commodities that can be traded."As in Myanmar, notes in pristine condition are de rigeur.(http://flights.indonesiamatters.com/1899-idr-visitors-guide/) 18. See