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- Convenors:
-
Elisabeth Schober
(University of Oslo)
Alina-Sandra Cucu (Institute of Advanced Studies, Nantes)
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- Discussants:
-
Massimiliano Mollona
(University of Bologna)
George Baca (Dong-A University )
- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- SO-C497
- Sessions:
- Friday 17 August, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Stockholm
Short Abstract:
The panel problematizes taken-for-granted notions such as "flows" and "mobilities" in commodity production. By investigating how the life cycle of goods impacts the dynamics through which capital mobilizes labor, we will look at how value chains structure the field of possibility for workers.
Long Abstract:
Our panel aims to problematize taken-for-granted notions such as "flows" and "mobilities" in the realm of commodity production. By investigating how the life cycle of goods impacts the local, regional, and transnational dynamics through which capital mobilizes labor, we want to look at how value chains structure the field of possibility for the workers' own "staying, moving, or settling". Global commodity (value) chain studies, in the way they have been inaugurated by Hopkins and Wallerstein and their disciples, have at times prioritized long-term macro-flows at the expense of the kind of everyday encounters that ethnographers interested in labor are keen on exploring. Our proposed panel will build up the middle ground between macro- and ethnography-based traditions. In order to attend to how commodity chains reconfigure spaces of production and distribution, as well as centers of accumulation and control, we are looking for ethnography-based contributions coming from scholars who, broadly speaking, engage in the study of global commodity chains by conducting research at global workplaces (i.e. localized industries that are centrally tied into large-scale economic processes). Some issues to be discussed in conjunction with a focus on the commodity are labor flexibility and precarity, work insecurity, new sources of social fragmentation, and novel repertoires of resistance. We also invite methodological reflections on the perks and perils of studying commodity chains from an anthropological perspective.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 17 August, 2018, -Paper short abstract:
This article challenges global commodity chain analysis with ethnographic insights to illuminate changes in the coffee industry. While economists focused on pricing, the market paradox demands greater understanding of how financial issues intersect within and across the GCC nodes.
Paper long abstract:
Following the decay of the International Coffee Organization (ICO) in 1989, which mediated the price of coffee and the relations between producing and consuming countries, the liberalization of the market brought about crucial transformations to the coffee industry. Classic economic analysis on the matter has focused on bulk pricing and fair trade as well as new trends in ethical consumption. In this article it is demonstrated how rich ethnographic insights may help to deepen our understanding of the Global Commodity Chain (GCC) rather than just scraping the surface of economic flows and price speculation. The emergence of a quality market is shaping taste by widening of the spectrum of consumer demand and challenging industrial trade along traditional product fetishisms. These transformations increased mobility for producers and roasters across and within the GCC, challenging the inherited industry paradox.
This ethnographic endeavor based on interviews and participant observation in coffee shops and with producers in Guatemala, Mexico and Indonesia, as well as roasters and importers in Vienna and Germany explains the financial intersectionality abiding producers, importers, exporters and roasters. It also provides a framework better suited to understand contextual challenges ahead sustainability, traceability and fairness. While fair brandings collided with different organizational models in producing countries , direct trade fosters interpersonal relations creating resistance and exposing market weakness. In order to understand how market intermediaries shaped changing consumer taste and the opportunities that these changes afford for empowering small-scale producers and transforming producer/consumer relations, we take a regional and global approach to adequately observe the interplay of this multi-sited global field.
Paper short abstract:
This paper seeks to fill a gap in the existing literature on The Pink Tide by providing an ethnographically-grounded, multi-scalar account of the efforts of the Venezuelan government to transition from regimes of growth based on the capture of rent to a productivist model based on internal markets.
Paper long abstract:
In recent decades, the so-called 'Pink Tide' or the rise of a number of 'left' governments in Latin America has garnered the attention of scholars for its challenge to the neoliberal consensus and inspiration of popular movements across the region. Yet little attention has been paid to the ways in which these leaderships have sought to restructure capital accumulation and convert resource-based surpluses into new forms of labor, livelihood, and value. This paper seeks to fill a critical gap in the existing literature on The Pink Tide by providing an ethnographically-grounded, multi-scalar account of the efforts of the Venezuelan government to transition from a regime of growth based on the capture of rent from natural resources to a more productivist model based on internal markets for agricultural and industrial products. Taking its inspiration from Terry Byres (2004) and Henry Bernstein's (2010) critique of 'neoclassical-neo-populism,' it uses the concept of 'Fordist-Neo-populism' as a lens to investigate the coupling of large-scale, state-run, industrial enterprises with small-scale, peasant farming and the ways in which these different forms of value and labor relations intersect with and diverge from Venezuela's historical resource capitalism. Seeking to move beyond the theoretical impasse represented by world systems theory and the dependency school (both of which are notorious for their neglect of value and slippery definitions of class)(see Roseberry 1985), the paper provides a molecular account of the processes involved in the relocation of the frontiers of capital accumulation in Venezuela and its implications for subaltern struggles.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the ways in which the gold from a Colombian town that enters the global commodity chains is created by “traditional” gold miners in the relationship they establish between their personhood as moral-economic agents and a metal as an elusive and mysterious agent.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the ways in which the gold from a Colombian town that enters the global commodity chains is created by “traditional” miners in the relationship they establish between their personhood as moral-economic agents and a metal as an elusive-mysterious agent. I depart from two ethnographic concepts, luck and energy, to understand how, before coming into existence and being sold, the gold hidden in the mountain emerges to whom it corresponds to find it. For the miners, gold is mysterious and lively, since it has the ability to hide itself from those who seek it with ambitious desires, which is considered bad energy. In contrast, gold reveals to those who seek it with good vibe, which is considered positive energy. Thus, luck emerges in relation to the miner as an energetic person, which defines the monetary value once he finds it. Turning to the concept of "distributed personhood" by Strathern, "intersubjective spacetime" by Munn and the reflections on morality by Graeber, this paper exposes the extraction of gold as a moral process in which the miners distribute their personhood through practice, creating their personal value as selves capable of attracting wealth and the value of gold in a monetary regime. In this way I define miners as material, economic and moral agents, drawing on the extractive practices in Latin America as sites of global value production.
Paper short abstract:
My work contrasts the trajectory of some migrant workers accessing Brazil via humanitarianism with the global circulation of the religious commodity they produced. Scrutinizing the ascension of Brazil as the leading exporter of halal meat sheds light to how commodities help fabricate "the human".
Paper long abstract:
Brazil recently became the leading exporter of halal (Arabic for lawful) meat worldwide. The Islamic regime and its modern interpretation of the Quran prescribe a set of practices for food to be considered licit for Muslim consumption. Regarding animal protein, its core premise lays on how practicing Muslims must render meat lawful via praying for Allah at the act of manually slaughtering the to-be-consumed animal. Within a scheme of large scale production, the Brazilian meat industry with Islamic certifiers recruit Muslim asylum seekers to perform the religious ritual. This means that the production of this Sharia-compliant commodity depends on and is legitimized by the country's humanitarian apparatus, which supplies a low-skilled - yet religiously qualified - labor-force. Based on ethnographic research in Brazil and Europe - among halal slaughtermen mostly of Bangladeshi and Senegalese origin, as well as with institutions involved in the global halal business - I will analyse the conjunction of the precarious and often smuggled trajectories of migrants to Brazil and the strictly regulated trajectories of the halal commodity from Brazil to its consumers around the world. I will elaborate how global food markets are not only consolidated through flows of goods, information and cultural and religious premises, but also, and most crucially in this case, through the supply of people not desired as citizens yet made "useful" as labor force to the over 300 halal meat factories in Brazil.
Paper short abstract:
By focusing on the case of the ceramic Industrial District (ID) of Castelló (Spain), we show how this ID influenced the emergence of a Romanian migrant enclave with a particular mode of emplacement. Such emergence should be interpreted taking into account the international organization of value.
Paper long abstract:
So far, the relationship between Industrial Districts (IDs; clusters of interconnected local industries) and migrant enclaves (areas with a high concentration of international migrants from a single nationality) has been studied mostly by focusing on the emergence of "ethnic enclave economies"? within the district and/or by highlighting racist conflicts that achieved notoriety in the media. In this study, we contend that there is a more general and complex interaction between the two phenomena. This interaction is mediated by the local context, national regulations, and the organization of the international market, among other factors. By focusing on the case of the ceramic ID of Castelló de la Plana (Spain), we show how this ID with a high rate of job formality, combined with other job opportunities and a unique ?institutional completeness?, set up the conditions for a non-conflictive Romanian migrant enclave that reached 14% of the town?s total population in 2012. Finally, and also considering another case study of ID and migrant enclave (Prato, and its Chinese enclave), we suggest a model of interaction that should be interpreted taking into account the general dynamics of the international organization of value and the requirements of flexibility and reduction of costs that frame IDs.
Paper short abstract:
Harris Tweed can only be produced in the Outer Hebrides. It is hand-woven at home - but exported to over 50 countries, trademark protected in over 30. This paper explores how parallels between various kinds of 'movement' can illuminate experiences of work uncertainty and ideas of a 'good life'.
Paper long abstract:
Harris Tweed is the only cloth in the world protected by an Act of Parliament (1993). This legislation establishes that, in order to be certified and stamped with the 'Orb' trademark, a cloth needs to be 'handwoven by the islanders at their homes in the Outer Hebrides, finished in the Outer Hebrides, and made from pure virgin wool dyed and spun in the Outer Hebrides'. Harris Tweed is exported to over 50 countries, trademark protected in over 30.
In a region threatened by depopulation, where limited work opportunities have, for decades, led to substantial migration 'away' from the islands, the tweed industry has long played a crucial role in local socio-economic dynamics. Fluctuations in global demand for the cloth have had profound implications at a local level. These transnational movements have also importantly shaped the imaginations, expectations and aspirations of different manufacturing workers.
The industry's legal protection entails an unusual production model where social relationships and mutual interdependence are vital. Workers in woolen mills, self-employed handweavers working from home, and Harris Tweed Authority employees - each perform a set of duties that, brought together, contribute to making the cloth.
I propose considering the relationships between these processes, workers' personal narratives, and diverse aspirations for a 'good life'. Tracing some of the moments, settings, and people involved in the production of Harris Tweed, in this paper I explore how ideas of 'stability' and 'movement' can improve our understanding of different manufacturing workers' lived experiences in contexts of relative uncertainty and 'flexibility'.
Paper short abstract:
For post-socialist Serbia, the global value chain of raspberries has provided a main export commodity. The paper traces the value chain from its creation during socialism over its transformation in the 1990s to contemporary trends of "conquering" novel standards and battling increased competition.
Paper long abstract:
This paper tackles the relationship between transnational capitalist competition and agriculture during Serbia's transformations from self-managed socialism to post-socialist capitalism. Based on 20 months of fieldwork since 2009 resulting in articles on the "moral appreciation" and the "shrinking capitalism" of smaller-scale agricultural sectors (Thiemann 2014, 2017), I trace the Serbian desires and practices of raspberry growing for world markets to sketch a relational anthropology of the state from the perspective of family farming in the global countryside. Viewing the global value chain of raspberries as a messy co-production of knowledge, power and society, the paper disentangles diverse modalities of accumulation: techno-scientific gardening, indebting and kinning, standardising and sorting quality, branding, and protesting against deregulation and for governmental re-regulation. This open-ended assemblage is approached from its hilly heartland in south-western Serbia, unearthing the polyphonic practices and the boundary work of farmers and "land-workers", scientists and municipal officials, representatives of cooperatives and corporations. Salvaging their worlding practices, it reconstructs the trajectory of raspberry commodification since Yugoslav late socialism - when the plantations of the "red gold of Serbia" grew in leaps and bounds and the industry "conquered" the international DIN norm - to late capitalism, when the traveling models of transnational standards and increased global competition pose new translation problems.
Paper short abstract:
Little is known about how professional internet workers are experiencing this process. Therefore, this paper answers this question by focusing on how social relations are reconfigured and subsumed in the capital accumulation process in the realm of the internet content industry.
Paper long abstract:
Since 2015, Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent have constructed a BAT empire in the Chinese internet content industry via mergers and acquisitions. However, little is known about how professional internet workers are experiencing this process. Therefore, this paper answers this question by focusing on how social relations are reconfigured and subsumed in the capital accumulation process in the realm of the internet content industry. This paper argues that fresh graduates are subsumed into the accumulation by dispossession process as the immaterial resources in the circulation of capital. They become the silent cogwheels of the enlarged internet content empire.
Moreover, this paper explores the way monopolies shift the risks of development onto independent start-ups by not funding the failures and using market power to extract low purchase prices for copyright and patent. It is necessary to criticise that the capitalist accumulation by dispossession in China's internet content industry subsumes large numbers of fresh graduates as well as shifts risks and costs of failure onto independent start-ups. This paper therefore suggests a further discussion on dynamics between China's digital monopolies and independent start-ups as well as individual young workers.