The Semiotics of Banknotes and Coins : Reading Contemporary Currency Design

This book studies currency from a semiotic perspective, with a focus on how it reproduces and produces social meanings in the public sphere of the countries, and political organizations in the case of the EU, where it is used.

It analyses currencies from ten countries as text, in a broad sense, as defined by semiotics, with the purpose of rendering visible how they function as the material support for the construction of an idea of the nation in banal terms. The currencies studied are the Argentinean Peso, the Brazilian Real, the British Pound Sterling, the Canadian Dollar, and the Croatian Kuna, the Euro, the Mexican Peso, the Swiss Franc, the Uruguayan Peso and the U.S. Dollar.

Particular attention is paid to what were chosen for the design of the banknotes and coins of a number of countries including the local encyclopaedia, historical figures, national heroes, autochthonous animals, typical landscapes, and historical moments and episodes. Moreover, the book focuses on showcasing the type of cultural memory that the iconography selected by each country to design their banknotes and coins transmits, as well as the idea of national identity it constructs. The author studies the various possible semiotic strategies underlying the design of banknotes and coins from our present time through a semiotic study of their iconography. He argues that the iconography selected by the nation-state to design currency is not innocent or random, but rather meaning- and value-loaded.

The semiotic examination of the currencies of multiple countries allows us to extract some general conclusions regarding how money and currency can be the object of specific semiotic strategies revolving around the collective identity of a nation and the aspects of its cultural memory the State wants to bring to the fore as distinctive traits of that collective identity.