Related Papers
Rethinking the informal and criminal economy from a global commodity chain perspective: China–Paraguay–Brazil. Pinheiro-Machado Global Networks Copyrights © 2018
2018 •
Rosana Pinheiro-Machado
The criminalization of Chinese counterfeit goods in the global market calls for a fresh approach to understanding well-established binary distinctions such as legal/illegal, licit/illicit, and formal/informal. Based on a multi-sited ethnography in China, Paraguay and Brazil, I examine five commodity chains of two products – toys and watches – and their regulatory frameworks in terms of merchandise status, business formality, and international transaction legality. Certain merchandise produced in the formal economy has no legal definition a priori, but legal variability starts when goods leave the factory. A great interchangeability of a product's legal status existed along its chain according to governance structures, legal cultures, geographical domains, and power relations. These findings suggest that the illicit is a relational category and the so-called criminal economy is not a segmented market, but part of a global process integrated with formality and marked by great legal variability within and between nations. When Keith Hart (1973) coined the concept 'informal income' in his ethnography on Ghana, the goal was to perceive informal labour as employment. In a debate with the International Labour Organization (ILO), he drew the gaze of policymakers to invisible activities and argued that there was 'more going on in the grassroots economy than bureaucratic imagination allowed for' (Hart 2015: 37). Ever since then, social scientists have consistently contested the formal–informal dichotomy. Few contemporary scholars would disagree that the pair is mutually constituted in the most varied economic settings. In the last decades, the literature advanced in several directions, emphasizing the legitimacy of informality through recognition of the complex linkages that the formal and the informal, the legal and the illegal, and the licit and illicit poles maintain to each other. Thus, it is sufficiently clear that there is no such thing as a
Review of Counterfeit Itineraries by Piza, D.
Rosana Pinheiro-Machado
Rosana Pinheiro-Machado In Counterfeit itineraries, Pinheiro-Machado offers a vivid anthropological account of the world system beyond the traditional lenses of core and periphery. In fact, she refuses such a binary perspective while recognizing the material and historical conditions of the current international division of labor that undergird the global political economy and inform the channels of commodity circulation. She doesn’t simply replace that view with a reductionist argument about globalization as the intensification of flows and cultural hybridization either. Rather, she provides a detailed and powerful analysis of a transnational commodity circuit across the Global South – from China to Brazil via Paraguay – by exploring the frictions of the global discourse on intellectual property, law enforcement, trade routes, national economic policies, cross-border practices, localized sociabilities, and adapting selves. That is to say, “the invisible human experience that created a transnational commodity circuit in the Global South, and the dialectical relationship through which people and value constituted each other” (p. 2).
Tempo Social
Review of Pinheiro-Machado, Rosana. Counterfeit Itineraries in the Global South.
2018 •
Douglas de Toledo Piza
Copied goods and informal economy in Brazil and China: outlining a comparison of development models
Rosana Pinheiro-Machado
Economic Globalization from Below
Gustavo Lins Ribeiro
The Power of Chineseness: Flexible Taiwanese Identities during Times of Change in Asia and Latin America @ Journal of Latin America and Caribbean Anthropology
Rosana Pinheiro-Machado
<http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jlca.12327/full> In the 1970s, Taiwan was in the middle of an industrial boom. The country's diplomatic links with Paraguay facilitated Taiwanese trade and migration to Ciudad del Este, a Paraguayan city bordering Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil. In the 1980s, China's economic reforms lowered production costs: Taiwan's factories moved to mainland China, and Taiwanese migrants started trading there. These changes in the politics of value had an impact on the migrant community, and the Taiwanese began to reimagine their “Chineseness”—that is, their sense of belonging to the “greater China” area. In the present area of study, this development was intensified by an economic crisis that occurred in the Brazil–Paraguay border region from 2003. Drawing on ethnographic research, this article examines how identities changed during such distinctive periods of flexible accumulation. In a context marked by a transition from abundance to collapse, the identity of “Chineseness” constituted a mobile resource in a deterritorialized way of life, as well as a manifestation of power relations and cultural supremacy that culminated in interethnic inequality and conflict. [Brazil, China, Chinese diaspora, Chineseness, flexible identity, Paraguay, Taiwan]
Non-hegemonic globalizations
Gustavo Lins Ribeiro
The attribution of authenticity to real and fake branded commodities in Brazil and China.
Rosana Pinheiro-Machado
Media Piracy in Emerging Economies, Chapter 5: Brazil
Pedro Mizukami, Luiz Fernando Marrey Moncau
Chapter 5 of the Media Piracy in Emerging Economies report: http://piracy.americanassembly.org/the-report/ Contributors: Susana Abrantes, Olívia Bandeira, Thiago Camelo, Alex Dent, Joe Karaganis, Eduardo Magrani, Sabrina Pato, Elizete Ignácio dos Santos, Marcelo Simas, and Pedro Souza
City-stories: Narrative as diagnostic and strategic resource in Ciudad del Este, Paraguay
Jennifer Tucker
Too often, planning theory misidentifies how planning and governance practice actually works in troublesome zones understood as unplanned or ungoverned. To counter this tendency, I use ethnographic research in one of the most active border economies in the hemisphere, where noncompliance with trade and use-of-space laws is widespread. In contrast to the commonly held assessment that Ciudad del Este, Paraguay is lawless and unplanned, I show how planners promote elite-led and exclusionary urban transformation via the strategic deployment of narratives of the unplanned city, what I call “city-stories.” However, city-stories are also a terrain of contestation. I analyze the city-stories of precarious street vendors as a diagnostic of power, as embodied perspectives on everyday practices of regulation that can clarify how local state actors actively foster spatial disorder and legal uncertainty as part of planning practice.
