Paper short abstract:

This paper troubles growth by analyzing a Ugandan way of imagining and enacting sociocultural change that we here call bundling.

Paper long abstract:

Even a casual observer within contemporary south-central Uganda would notice the widespread amassing of often identical commercial services and goods in a small shared area, like fruit vendors, gas stations, street food, or motorcycle taxis. In this paper, we bring the dynamics of this phenomenon into view under the heuristic rubric "bundling," and conceptualize it in relation to a pervasive social aesthetics. Rejecting inadequate explanatory frames from economics, which would see bundling as either "irrational" or as a risk-minimization behavior, we take the phenomenon seriously as an alternative form of social change and exchange, and one that is also quite distinct from liberal and neoliberal imaginaries of the unlimited flow of goods, people, things and services. Bundling, we argue, is the result of a social aesthetics wherein both material value and personal relationships are imagined to arise through the accumulation of like persons and things, assembled and ordered in spatial proximity and symmetry. Tracing some concrete examples of bundling, we show that it is an agonistic conviviality, involving cooperation and competition. Bundling, we also show, has a long history and highly elaborated conceptual and practical repertoire that shapes actions at multiple scales, from the person to the household to the state. Finally, we show that bundling, though widespread in south-central Uganda, is not simply self-evident or taken-for-granted there but is rather critically interrogated along discernible stratifications of socioeconomic class and education.