Webs of Fiesta-related Trade. Chinese Imports, Investment and Reciprocity in La Paz, Bolivia (original) (raw)
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Ethnos, Special Issue on Anthropology and Festival, Nicola Frost and Mark Graham (eds), 2015
In the Argentinean Andes, fairs constitute the main setting where lowland and highland Kolla peasants barter their agricultural production. In order to preserve these encounters – seen as traditional – in a context of peasants’ growing participation in capitalist economy, public organizations invest money for boosting old fairs and instituting new ones. The author proposes to qualify these fairs as ‘institutional’, compared with the ‘spontaneous’ ones that come along with religious celebrations. Alluding to Bourdieu’s concept of institutional rituals, this expression enlightens how such meetings assert social categories, whose boundaries are otherwise blurred. Drawing on an analysis of institutional fairs’ social and symbolic performativity, the paper argues that rather than ‘safeguarding ancestral customs’, as claimed by the organizers, these specific festivals publically state the conditions for the ethnic group at play to be integrated within the nation state.
Popular Economy and Commerce: (In)Formality Materiality and Gender in Latin American Cities
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The Popular Economy in Urban Latin America: Informality, Materiality, and Gender in Commerce advances comparative knowledge and theoretical reflections on urban popular economies in Latin America by going beyond the lenses of so-called informal and street economies. Contributors address case studies in Brazil, Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, Mexico, and Peru to provide new insights in key concepts such as informality, materiality, and gender. These case studies work to understand which actors, and with what agencies, are forming and transforming street markets and other place-based economies, and to what effects. Remaining sensitive to history, power, and urban politics, this book offers an ethnographically informed cultural and socio-material perspective on how popular economies and commerce thrive, transform, and persist in Latin American cities today. Scholars of anthropology, economics, Latin American studies, urban studies and sociology will find this book particularly useful.
To Be Well Seen: The Cultural Economy of the Urban Poor in Bolivia
Iberoamericana – Nordic Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies
I. INTRODUCTION Following the UN Millennium Development Goals, poverty reduction is the overall goal of development cooperation. 1 Yet very little is known about poor people's own strategies to mobilize economically, politically, and socially to overcome their own predicament. If we were to follow Amartya Sen's assertion that development is to "expand freedoms" and to give people the capacity to live the life they value, and have a reason to value (1999:18), then we need to explore what life poor people in different places value and what strategies they adopt in order to reach their life expectations (see McNeish, 2005:231). This article looks at the moral and social dimensions of poverty among urban dwellers in La Paz, and how they manage or resist poverty by both exploiting and contributing to social networks of friends, kin, and ritual kin and/or through development projects aimed at people with scarce resources. In a focus on fiesta participation in Bolivia, I want to try out the thesis of Stephen Gudeman (2001) that economy is something more than market exchanges alone. It is rather about maintaining community, but not with the alleged effect of undermining the conditions for sound markets. Instead, prosperous economic activities are always generated through community. Gudeman's thoughts contrast with the individualist perspective of dominant neoclassical economics and the idea that the market is the prime regulator of the economy. Instead, economies revolve around both market and community. "Community," in Gudeman's terms, refers to "onthe-ground-associations and to imagined solidarities that people experience" (ibid.:1), whereas "market" refers to "anonymous short-term exchanges" (ibid.:1). The market and the community exist in a dialectical long-term relationship since market systems need the support of community, i.e., the shared languages, mutual understandings, and the culturally sanctioned ways of doing things (ibid.:11). I will argue that in the
Trueque. An ethnographic account of barter, trade and money in Andean Ecuador
This article presents the ethnography of trueque, an exchange that takes place between villagers and itinerant peddlers in North Ecuador. The distinguishing feature of trueque is that it involves simultaneously money, animals and goods, thus stimulating a rethinking of anthropological debates of exchange and money. It also encompasses relationships, ideas, values and perceptions of the "transacting other" and of oneself which are located within socio-economic historical relationships between individual trading partners and social groups. Finally, it makes a case for the relevance of Andean data to anthropological debates on exchange, which have relied mainly on Melanesia and Africa.
Fiestas Beyond Folklore — Harvard Review of Latin America, Ed. June Erlick
At the Oruro Carnival, a few hours from La Paz, the heavy-set blue-skirted women swirl past me in a dizzying burst of color and enviable grace. The trumpeters, some with exotically dyed hair, blare not too far behind. I remember that as a young man President Evo Morales had been a trumpeter in this very carnival.
2013
The paper aims at showing culture as a feature capable of shaping urban environments, both promoting specific phenomena and making a stand to transformation attempts. Tianguis, the informal Mexican markets, appear as a demonstration of this shaping ability, being relevant not only for informal economy, but also for urban settings and social networks created by their presence. On the other hand, the phenomenon of Walmart spreading – now diffused in many growing countries (e.g. Brazil, China, India) – is opposing a totally different model of commerce and even lifestyle that tries to tame traditional forms of trade replacing them in their usual settings. Such a relevance is also proved by the attitude of institutions, which are unable to face the problems set in the political agenda but also passive when receiving proposals from external actors.