Paper short abstract:

The paper looks at traders associations in Accra’s main marketplace, Makola market. I analyse how Makola market traders creatively adapt travelling ideas that seek to condition their claims for entitlements vis-à-vis state authorities in line with capital’s logic of (taxpayer) citizenship.

Paper long abstract:

The paper looks at traders associations in Accra's main marketplace, Makola market. As a site of intense sociality and connection (Braudel 1984), marketplaces closely connect traders to global flows of capital, goods and ideas. In view of their connectedness and marked by their entrepreneurial innovation and creativity, traders represent perfect facilitators of translations between competing significations of order. Drawing on Benjamin's notions of heterotemporality and the evasion of capitalist modernity in the moment of everydayness, I analyse how Makola market traders creatively adapt travelling ideas that seek to condition their claims for entitlements vis-à-vis state authorities in line with capital's logic of (taxpayer) citizenship. Transported into the market by transnational NGOs, among other vectors of capital time, these ideas about the person, (political) community and the relationship between the two are not assimilated one-sidedly, but traders evade the only superficially universalizing thrusts of capital time through continuous translations in the recurring moments of convergence between coeval temporalities.