Haunting JAM-DEX: Three cultural lenses for the study of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs)

Abstract This article examines the introduction of Jamaica’s central bank digital currency (CBDC), Jamaica Digital Exchange (JAM-DEX), to show how monetary innovation is embedded in questions of sovereignty, class, race, and religion. Drawing on 23 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Kingston (2022–2024), it adopts a pragmatist anthropology of money and mobilizes three cultural lenses – institutional, infrastructural, and affective – to analyze how CBDCs are lived, interpreted, and contested in everyday life. The institutional lens reveals a struggle over monetary sovereignty that is continually undermined by the CBDC’s dependence on private, largely foreign-owned financial intermediaries for its circulation. The infrastructural lens shows how financial innovation can reproduce the racialized and classed hierarchies rooted in Jamaica’s colonial banking history. The affective lens shows how moral imaginaries, ranging from eschatological fears of the ‘Mark of the Beast’ to crypto-libertarian critiques of surveillance, shape public engagement with the CBDC. The article employs the metaphor of haunting to show how unresolved histories of racial capitalism re-emerge through JAM-DEX, producing a disjointed temporality in which digital futures arrive prematurely. The persistence of these financial ghosts reinforces the claim that CBDCs should be studied within their social, historical, and affective contexts.