Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 1
·
May 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
115
subject to increasing civic regulation as a
‘neighbourhood’ space, and immigrant
vendors relocated to a parking lot across
the street: the latter cheerfully insisted that
they simply sought to make money, but
did so by capitalizing on the performance
of the ethnic identity that their customers
(misguidedly) deemed indexical of the
authenticity of what they sold, whilst the
former sought to put themselves on the
moral high ground in this battle of
identity-(re)construction by presenting
themselves as educators, artists and
activists engaged in social projects of
benefit to the global South.
The chapters vary in terms of the
thickness of their ethnographic description,
but all recognize the importance of
historical contextualization. In an opening
chapter that looks at recent reconstitution
of the historical ‘Silk Road’, Olivier Pliez
seeks to capture the broader organizational
logic of the movement of garments
between China and North Africa,
something that could not easily be grasped
simply by a localized study of any of the
‘anchor points’ of this network and may
outlive recent geopolitical perturbations.
The scale as well as historical depth of
analysis is also ambitious in José Carlos
Aguiar’s use of commodity chain analysis
to explore the roles of different actors and
their transnational connections in the
development of the pirate CD market in
Mexico, and Fernando Rabossi’s account
of the range of actors involved in the
development of the ‘bag trading’ of the
Paraguayan-Brazilian-Argentinian
tri-
border area. Both chapters enable us to
understand the way that shifting patterns of
state intervention and the international
evolution of the capitalist economy shape
the complex local articulations between
the legal and illegal that emerge through a
perspective that includes the processes of
non-hegemonic globalization.
But as Gordon Matthews points out
in his analysis of the coming together of
traders from the most peripheral regions of
the global South to buy the products of
China’s ‘low-end manufacturing’ in the
hyper-neoliberal space of Chunking
Mansions in Hong Kong, however much
such ‘small entrepreneurs of globalization
from below’ seem able to outwit agents of
globalization from above striving to
eradicate illegalities, we need to remember
that
fundamental
inequalities
are
maintained in our present world by the fact
that capital is free to move across borders
but labour is not. Yang Yang’s account of
African traders in Guangzhou emphasises
the while going to China may offer
Africans new and better opportunities for
personal advancement within the global
economy, the hostility of the social
