AN    INTERNATIONAL     JOURNAL     OF
CULTURAL  AND SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Volume 49, no. 2 (Spring 2010)

TWO GENERATIONS OF BOLIVIAN FEMALE VENDORS

Isabel M. Scarborough
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Indigenous market women in the Bolivian Andes have challenged ethnic-based notions of class in a highly stratified society by nurturing a reputation for successful entrepreneurship based on their marketing knowhow. Today, these market women embody Bolivia's indigeneity with their distinctive ethnic dress and also represent an astute entrepreneurship that has ruled these marketplaces for generations. The arrival of economic restructuring accelerated upward mobility for the youngest generation of female market vendors (cholas) who gained unprecedented access to formal education and are returning to the informal open- air markets armed with degrees in business and economics. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, this essay shows how this generation is negotiating a space in Bolivia today by claiming indigeneity through entrepreneurial practices they code as "indigenous" and "non-indigenous." (Indigeneity, informal market, identity politics, economic anthropology, Bolivia).

MOROCCAN WOMEN EMBROIDERERS: TECHNICAL AND ETHNICAL RECONFIGURATIONS

Claire Nicholas
Princeton University

Historically, embroidery demonstrated a Moroccan woman's worth as potential wife and homemaker. In recent decades it has come to serve as a widespread income-generating activity with the potential to upset normative notions of Moroccan womanhood even while it maintains a residual affiliation with proper feminine activity. The transitional statuses of Moroccan womanhood, on the one hand, and embroidery work and its objects, on the other, are interdependent. Both are linked to the intensified circulation of embroidered objects in markets throughout the twentieth century and into the present, and to women's increased participation in a formalized labor market. The marketization of women's labor and its products necessarily entails remaking producers, their work practices, and their orientation towards "work." Thus, ongoing status transformations of Moroccan embroidery and embroiderers give insight into neoliberal reconfigurations of gender and work, and ambivalent recodings of their values today. (Morocco, embroidery, development, gender, work).

SMALLSTOCK AS CASH CROP, SMALLSTOCK AS HABBANAYI: FULBE EXCHANGES IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Karen Marie Greenough
University of Kentucky

Pastoralist Fulbe have always exchanged livestock with each other as loans, and with cultivators for grain and other commodities. Today, because of their quicker growth and easier convertibility into cash, smallstock have become the slush funds of pastoralist households. Bucks and rams buy food and commodities, but young nannies and ewes still enter customary loan circuits that cement social networks and facilitate access to resources. The dialectic between communal and market systems and the growing network that connects pastoralist economies to global economies confounds old theories, and calls for more research and new theory that explains the networks and chains of these local, national, and global connections. (Pastoralism, livestock markets, livestock loans, socio-economic networks, commodity chains, Fulbe, West Africa).

COMMERCIAL INTERACTIONS IN THE BUENOS AIRES CENTRAL WHOLESALE PRODUCT MARKET

María Laura Viteri
National Institute for Agricultural Technology (INTA)

Alberto Arce
Wageningen University

The Buenos Aires Central Wholesale Produce Market (BACWM) in Argentina supplies 1,500,000 tons of produce yearly to more than 11 million consumers and receives about 13,000 trucks a week from areas within and outside the country. This market faced global transformations with the emergence of supermarkets in the 1980s. Supermarkets started buying fruit and vegetables from wholesalers, but later dealt directly with producers. To understand the evolution of the relationship between wholesalers and supermarkets, this essay uses the concept of knowledge interface. The research question is how knowledge is transferred and negotiated between different kinds of actors, and how wholesalers and supermarket procurement managers negotiate conflicts and acquire knowledge. The relation between buyers and sellers involves different kinds of knowledge and power, and their interactions generate unplanned results. The negotiation between tacit knowledge embodied in the wholesalers and the knowledge about quality and logistics that supermarkets want in their procurements allows the actors to resolve problems. This social encounter is a clear example of how geographically distant actors (e.g., international supermarket companies) shape social processes, strategies, and actions in local settings. (Wholesale produce markets, knowledge interface, negotiation, Buenos Aires).