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- Convenors:
-
Timothy Sharp
(The Australian National University)
Mark Busse (University of Auckland)
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- Discussant:
-
Chris Gregory
(Australian National University)
- Stream:
- Dwelling
- Location:
- Babel G03 (Lower Theatre)
- Start time:
- 2 December, 2015 at
Time zone: Australia/Melbourne
- Session slots:
- 3
Short Abstract:
Marketplaces are central in the lives and livelihoods of urban and rural people in the Pacific and Asia. This session will explore these spaces of contestation, belonging and exclusion, and the moral considerations market actors negotiate in their daily interactions with known and unknown others.
Long Abstract:
Open-air marketplaces are central institutions in the lives and livelihoods of urban and rural people throughout the Pacific and Asia. From large, permanent urban fixtures to small clusters of sellers periodically occupying a roadside corner or village clearing, these public spaces are important sites of trade but also of social exchange. In marketplaces people interact with both known and unknown others, notably in relationships around money. In doing so they grapple with moral considerations about how they ought to act with one another. Marketplaces are frequently sites of contestation, amongst marketplace actors (vendors, customers, and onlookers) themselves, and with the state. They are also characterised by power asymmetries, making them spaces of belonging and comfort for some, and fear and insecurity for others. Marketplaces have also been subject to particular moralistic visions by governments and development agencies about what these spaces should look like and how they should function. These spaces are also frequently enlisted in other projects - criminality, gambling, HIV/AIDS awareness, evangelising - that raise questions of morality. In this session we seek papers that explore different dimensions of morality in the marketplace including, but not limited to, who belongs, how people should interact and transact, the modes of regulation that shape these spaces, how different practices within the marketplace are perceived, and which activities are considered legitimate (and in who's eyes). We seek papers that are empirically grounded and theoretically engaged which examine issues of morality and marketplaces in the Pacific and Asia.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
Marketplaces both create, and are created by, particular ideas about personhood and social relationships. This paper examines contemporary moral evaluations of production and work, gift and commodity exchange, and social obligations to kin and non-kin in the context of the Goroka fresh food market.
Paper long abstract:
In his 1955 article "Morality and the Concept of the Person among Gahuku-Gama", Kenneth Read argued that moral evaluation among Gahuku-Gama of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea in the early 1950s did not operate from a fixed perspective of universal obligation but instead depended on social context and the particular social, and especially kinship, relations involved. On the basis of this, he argued that Gahuku-Gama conceptualize persons as "social individuals" rather than as persons distinct from their social statuses and social relationships. Discussions of Melanesian personhood have, of course, been prominent in the anthropology of the region in the 60 years since Read's article, a period which has seen enormous social and economic change in Melanesia, the Papua New Guinea Highlands, and indeed among people who Read called Gahuku-Gama. In this paper, I take up themes of morality and personhood in the contemporary context of the Goroka fresh food market where Gahuka-Gama, and their culturally-similar neighbours, transact food both with people with whom they have, and do not have, previous social relations. In particular, I examine contemporary moral evaluations of production and work, gift and commodity exchange, and social obligations to kin and non-kin, and the implications of those evaluations for contemporary concepts of personhood.
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on an ethnographic research on Vietnamese migrant traders in Mafia-controlled wholesale markets in Moscow, Russia, I seek to reveal the complexities and contradictions in the ways the Vietnamese personhood is imagined and negotiated at the intersection of mobility, class, and ethnicity.
Paper long abstract:
Drawing on an ethnographic research on Vietnamese migrant traders in Mafia-controlled wholesale markets in Moscow, Russia, I seek to reveal the complexities and contradictions in the ways the Vietnamese personhood is imagined and negotiated at the intersection of mobility, class, and ethnicity. The vast majority of the estimated 150,000 Vietnamese immigrants in Russia live in irregular status for indefinite periods of time with minimal settlement prospects. Post-communist Russia with a fragile economy, an extremely restrictive (and heavily corrupt) migration regime and disturbing levels of hostility towards foreign migrants proves to be a particularly unwelcoming host society. The routinisation of uncertainty and precariousness in everyday life holds both productive and destructive potential for social relationships. Through the conceptual lens of the notion of uncertainty, I discuss how Vietnamese men and women negotiate their collective identities as well as construe themselves as distinctive individuals in the course of migration. Central to my inquiry is the question of how money features in people's meaning making of the moral self and their navigation of market life. Money, Zelizer (1997: 19) notes, is a socially created currency, 'subject to particular networks of social relations and its own set of values and norms.' In the transnational life of Vietnamese irregular migrants, money emerges as a new anchor against which social relationships are benchmarked and around which social values and norms are redefined.
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses diverse sites of market place research in Malaysian Borneo from the perspective of belonging and exclusion.
Paper long abstract:
This paper discusses market place research in Malaysian Borneo primarily from the viewpoint of belonging and exclusion. I examine how market place actors, interact with each other, taking note of their language usage and ethnicity.
The most important markets in regard to this paper are the recently established Asap fresh foods market, and the even more recently established open air fish and game market at the Bakun jetty. The latter two are of prime importance because they were both set up in response to a government scheme which displaced fifteen longhouses from the Balui River to a new location. Their river became a lake and their land was largely submerged beneath the waters of the lake. Recent events have enabled the displaced people to claim exclusive rights to the numerous fish in the lake and game in the remaining forest, but contestation from government bodies and other ethnic groups with only tenuous ties to the area make the position of the indigenous Orang Ulu of the Balui/Rejang River rather precarious. Sovereignty over their domain, officially degazetted in the late 1990s, once again becomes an issue but this time the Orang Ulu of Asap/Koyan are united in their claims, and each and every longhouse in the Bakun Resettlement Scheme is striving to capture its share of the market as well as repossess the land and waters they involuntarily surrendered to the State for the 'good of the nation'.
Paper short abstract:
Melanesian markets are key economic institutions in cities, towns and districts. Market operations reflect prevailing norms of gender-based inequality and exploitation. This session proposes increased women’s consciousness and agency and men’s responsiveness and morality as new norms for equality and development.
Paper long abstract:
Public markets in Melanesia are traditionally planned, managed by rural or urban councils. During the colonial period they operated with standard by-laws and taxing regimes adapted from the Commonwealth tradition. But the bylaws, rules and regulations have commonly fallen into decline and disuse post independence. Women have always dominated markets as vendors while men have tended to assume control of day-to-day management and finance. Weak local governance combined with low recognition of the importance of markets in local and household economies, and women's pivotal role within that, have resulted in neglect, stagnation and decline of market facilities, conditions and governance. Heightened disempowerment of women and criminal impunity have become the ‘new normal’. The propensity of men located at every level of local government structures, systems and staff, to exploit the gender relations of power and weak market governance for their own gain, reveals the immorality that underpins enduring inequality. Recent efforts to research, analyse, address and change the discriminatory status quo and enable women's economic and political empowerment in a new era for marketplace development are presented and appraised. Key principles for a renewed development paradigm centered on equality, participation, morality, and civility are proposed.
Paper short abstract:
As the site where the Tokarara Village Court hears local disputes and where the banned betelnut is openly traded the Tokarara Market presents multiple ways to think about morality.
Paper long abstract:
This paper presents findings from several months of ethnographic research at the Tokarara Village Court. The focus of the research has been on the Village Court, however given that the Village Court is situated at the Tokarara Market various issues relating to morality are presented. The market provides a specific space where issues of moral concern are raised in a very public manner. Considering that matters of sexual indiscretion is one of the top two reasons why people access the Tokarara Village Court, the Tokarara market becomes a lively hub of community conversation on a Monday morning and on other days when mediation is taking place.
In addition to housing the local Village Court and community mediation processes, the Tokarara market hosts vendors who publicly sell the prohibited betelnut (buai). The sale of buai adds another dimension to ideas of morality as buai sellers and their customers openly disregard municipal authority by continuing to sell and buy buai. This disregard for the recently introduced law has led to frequent, often violent raids and clashes between police and buai sellers. To this end, this paper will examine the moral dimensions of the Village Court, the buai ban and police brutality in the context of the Tokarara market.
Paper short abstract:
This paper looks at the discourses of shame in the Goroka market that maintain a gender divide both within and outside of the market and along certain foods. I will look at what situations mean that men override the Melanesian construct of shame and sell food in the market regardless.
Paper long abstract:
The Goroka marketplace has been a space occupied mainly by women selling their fresh food produce since its beginnings in 1957. Highland's ideologies of gender have contributed and legitimised this, whilst the state's management of the space is entirely carried out by men - engendering the marketplace with multiple power hierarchies. To sell fresh produce in the market is something perceived as shameful to many men in the highlands. However men make up roughly 10% of market vendors and this appears to be on the increase. The men that do sell food in the market often justify overcoming initial embarrassment through terms of making 'a good life'. This paper will examine the kinds of narratives that are used to justify why marketing of fresh produce is the pursuit of women, particularly mothers, and not men and how these are contented with modern discourses of aspiration. Overall the notion of 'sem' (Tok Pisin for shame or shyness) that is given to explain why men do not sell in the market is due, in part, to concerns about a public recognition of poverty. Yet the men gaining a monetary income from selling in the market is understood as preventing them from suffering such poverty that others are shameful of. Selling in the market does not necessarily challenge broader constructions of gender, but does demonstrate some of the ways in which gender as actions, as understood by Strathern (1988), can be blurred through economic activity.
Paper short abstract:
In informal settlements in Port Moresby, PNG, small house-road stalls, located at homes, provide similar functions to public markets as spaces to make money. This paper considers these intimate spaces as sites where vendors, usually women, embody and lead contestations between value spheres.
Paper long abstract:
For many women living in urban settlements in Papua New Guinea, childcare, waiting in queues to fetch water, collecting firewood and attending to domestic and community engagements, means that local settlement public market spaces are not a practical avenue for making money. Low incomes and dynamics of crime and violence in cities create local economic conditions that are rather insulated from the broader city economy. In this context small house-road stalls, located at homes or on nearby roads, because of their proliferation and availability to the public, provide a similar function to public market places as spaces to make money.
House-road vending stalls are at the same time public and intimate spaces where the vendor, usually a woman, embodies and leads contestations between spheres of value. In a context of scarcity and inequality, making money, morality and local ascriptions of value involve tension between the public ethos of what custom says about helping others and personal morality in which daily budget dilemmas are reasoned. House-road stalls are sites where the intimate and gendered sphere of household money making, marked by male wage employment and female house-road vending, comes head on with the public ethos of sharing and supporting others during times of scarcity. These interplays between money making spheres, money scarcity and value as they unfold at house-road stalls are the focus of this paper.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper I explore the morality of negotiations around price and value in contemporary betel nut marketplaces. In doing so, I examine the social relationships and power asymmetries between transactors, the specificities of the trade, and betel nut’s moral ambiguity.
Paper long abstract:
Early studies of modern Melanesian marketplaces emphasised the suppression of competitive trade practices, including the absence of haggling. The character of marketplaces has changed since these early observations. Competitive practices, if sometimes subdued, are now a feature of marketplace exchange. In the Papua New Guinean betel nut trade, characterised by long-distance wholesaling and the proliferation of intermediaries, competitive trade practices are especially prominent. Highland betel nut traders pride themselves on their ability to push buying prices down, much to the frustration of lowland betel nut producers. But while competitive practices are now prevalent, they are not without moral contestation. In this paper I explore the morality of negotiations around price and value in contemporary betel nut marketplaces. In doing so, I examine the social relationships and power asymmetries between transactors, the specificities of the trade, and betel nut's moral ambiguity.