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Paper short abstract

Drawing on research with Zapatista communities and solidarity networks in Europe, the paper uses coffee to explore how dichotomies of in/formality and infra/politics take shape in practice. Popular economies are approached as terrains where struggles over legitimacy and value emerge beyond binaries.

Paper long abstract

This paper engages with debates on popular economies by using ethnography as a point of observation to examine analytical oppositions that continue to structure discussions of economic life. Drawing on long-term research on coffee circulation between Zapatista communities and solidarity networks in Europe, it uses coffee to explore how dichotomies of in/formality and infra/politics take shape and are displaced in practice.

Popular economies are approached through the ways economic action acquires legitimacy in concrete situations. Zapatista cooperatives rely on their own authorizations and collective procedures to regulate production and circulation. These devices hold no validity in the eyes of the Mexican state. They nonetheless affect how goods move, how intermediaries operate, and how risks are distributed. Cracks in ordinary distribution expose how formality operates as performance, through negotiation and recognition, always embedded in precarious power relations.

Following these movements allows to question interpretations that frame popular economies primarily in moral terms or through assumptions polarizing silent and overt resistance. The paper suggests approaching popular economies as terrains where concrete practices and political ethics remain entangled without stabilizing into clear binaries. They make visible the socio-political life of coffee, revealing how struggles over value emerge through ordinary transactions that do not consistently speak the language of overt political action. Yet they reorganize economic relations and obligations in ways that matter for social reproduction, through contested forms of legitimacy. Polarizations between the loud and the silent, the rational and the moral, appear as analytical divides that actors themselves do not necessarily draw.