A nation's currency represents much more than just money. It says something about who we are as a society and what is important to us (Pansivongsay, 2008).

Monetary systems are complex infrastructures of which the currency is often the most visible part, especially in its tangible form as coins and banknotes. That money and monetary infrastructures cannot be reduced to financial and economic discourses is well-established in the literature on the social life of money (e.g. Zelizer, 1989; Truitt, 2013). In this chapter I build on this literature and bring this into dialogue with Ara Wilson's (2016) work on ‘infrastructures of intimacy’.

Just like other infrastructures such as roads and communication networks, monetary systems are assemblages comprising physical (bankcards, buildings, cash), non-material (exchange rates, electronic banking), and immaterial elements (trust, norms) designed to operate in the background in order to ‘facilitate living and activity’ (Wilson, 2016, p. 273). A monetary system, however, is more than just a technical infrastructure; it is also deeply intimate. Bank account details are often kept private and cash is kept close to our bodies or stacked away in secret places. The intimacy of monetary systems also transpires from the role of currencies in relation to imagined communities of either a national or a regional kind. Both dynamics are illustrated by ongoing and often highly emotional debates about the Euro and former national currencies in the Eurozone.