Ivan V. Small's book Currencies of Imagination is a remarkably tight ethnographic account of how affectively complex money becomes when it flows between borders, boundaries, and kin. Sited as a transnational study of remittances, Currencies of Imagination shows the categorical transformations that befall remittances from migrant communities in the United States to their homeland communities as they gather and challenge cultural, social, legal, and financial meanings. A central part of Small's argument is that remittances are not “mere money” but concentrate the dynamics of gift-debt and historical motion in neat analytical ways. The transnational study of how money seems to flow freely between countries shows a third space in the making, a productive zone that becomes economically significant for developing national economies such as Vietnam, and a potential site of regulation and limit for sending countries such as the United States that seek to assert state power over gray markets...
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