Smoki Musaraj, Ph.D.

Musaraj takes an anthropological approach to the study of economic transitions, informal economy, and corruption. She earned her PhD in Cultural Anthropology from The New School for Social Research in 2012, and was Postdoctoral Scholar at the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion at the University of California, Irvine from 2012-2014.

Musaraj specializes in economic and legal anthropology. One area of focus of her research is the anthropology of money and finance at the margins of global capitalism. She has studied financial practices that do not fit the textbook definitions of finance but that, nonetheless, proliferate within neoliberal economic regimes. Her book entitled, Tales from Albarado: Ponzi Logics of Accumulation in Postsocialist Albania, (Cornell 2020) explores the widespread participation in the the ponzi schemes of 1990s Albania. She has also co-edited the book Money at the Margins: Global Perspectives on Technology, Inclusion and Design (with Bill Maurer and Ivan Small) (Berghahn 2018), which explores emerging forms of monetary technologies–-from digital cash grants to mobile money–-in the global South. She has also co-edited the book Remitting, Restoring and Building Contemporary Albania (Palgrave Macmillan 2021), which brings together contributions from Albanian studies scholars, including many in the diaspora, reflecting on cultural transformations in Albanian society since the end of the Cold War.

Another area of focus of her research is the anthropology of corruption. She has researched the discourses, measurements, and judicial reforms that target corruption in postcommunist contexts. Musaraj has published in a number of journals, including Current Anthropology, Cultural Anthropology, Ethnos, and Ethnologie Française.

Musaraj is Book Review Editor for PoLAR: Journal of Political and Legal Anthropology.