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Accepted Contribution:

Parties as markets or markets as parties? Economic rationalities in the festive encounters of Bolivians in São Paulo  
Vinícius Mendes (University of São Paulo (USP))

Contribution short abstract:

Bolivian festivities in São Paulo, Brazil, are becoming enterprises dependent on material and symbolic resources. It has resulted in the emergence of a set of “festive markets” organized around flows, and so their organizers (“pasantes”) must have network capital to organize and direct the flows.

Contribution long abstract:

After the pandemic, the Bolivian festivities in São Paulo, Brazil, have grown both in quantity over time and in their physical dimensions in space. A true total social fact (Martins, 2005), these festive events have become huge enterprises and, therefore, dependent on a series of material and symbolic resources. It has resulted in the emergence and dynamization of a set of “festive markets” that they have created and maintain active to supply them. For all this to work, the organizers (“pasantes” or “prestes”) must not only have sufficient economic capital, but also network capital to maintain contact with some of the distant actors mobilized for the fiestas. Above all, they must be able to define, organize and direct the flow of people, but also of objects, narratives and images that make up their festivities at different global scales. My argument is that these Bolivian fiestas are anchors (Freire-Medeiros, Lages, 2020, Urry, 1997) not only in the sense of a space produced by the movement, but also in the subjective sense: as social events that anchors flows of ideas and imaginaries about the migratory experience. So, more than an alternative way of understanding the various elements (social, religious, economic, cultural) that cross Bolivian social life in the metropolis, this research offer a way of observing how these individuals manage to articulate and make complementary two rationalities that, at first glance, seem antagonistic: one of a more communitarian nature, exemplified in the “ayni” system, and another capitalist.

Workshop P048
Collaboration and knowledge commoning from the perspective of Indigenous economies