Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 1
·
May 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
113
studies of transnational activist movements
and localized ‘grassroots’ movements that
could reasonably be described as
‘resisting’ aspects of contemporary
neoliberal capitalist accumulation, either
by refusing to collaborate or by actively
seeking to pursue alternative economic
models. This is a book about people who
are, by and large, seeking to participate in
a world economy in which neoliberal
capitalist
principles
and
global
corporations are hegemonic, contributing
in their own ways to the extension of
neoliberal-style market society. Yet they
can only be successful, if they are
successful at all, by evading the costs
associated with official rules and
regulations on tariffs, trade, taxation, and
intellectual property rights, exploiting the
opportunities for appropriating value that
exist within the interstices of dominant
systems of production, exchange and
consumption, and creating their own
market niches by exploiting the gaps in
regulatory regimes and corruptibility of
those charged with their implementation.
The book’s twelve case studies include
African traders who bring cheap mobile
phones from Chinese factories back to
their regions of origin, family businesses
in Hong Kong that try to establish small
manufacturing operations in China,
Mexican and Filipina traders who take
used clothing over international borders,
and an array of other purveyors of
contraband, pirated and fake-branded
products that enable lower-income groups
some participation in globalized patterns
of consumption. Even if much of this
participation is inferior in quality to that
enjoyed by the more affluent, the advance
of copying technologies may, as Ribeiro
observes in his closing remarks,
progressively undermine the rents accruing
to the owners of global ‘superlogos’ even
as it contributes to ‘the fetishized
(re)production of social identities and of
distinction’ characteristic of the virtual age
(p 233).
The contributors advance earlier
debates about the ‘informal’ economy
(with
an
enhanced
attention
to
transnational processes that reflects
patterns of urban development since the
1970s) as well as engaging more recent
anthropological work on illegal and illicit
economies. The analyses emphasise
connections across the blurred boundaries
between the economy documented by
conventional statistics and the less readily
quantifiable but pervasive activities that
constitute globalization from below, using
ethnographic research to offer a wealth of
new insights. Alan and Josephine Smart
show us, for example, how the days in
which Hong Kong’s petty investors could
