Review of “Making It at Any Cost: Aspirations and Politics in a Counterfeit Clothing Marketplace”

Abstract

In Making It at Any Cost: Aspirations and Politics in a Counterfeit Clothing Marketplace Study of La Salada, Matías Dewey brings Latin America in focus for the study of counterfeit markets, and the morality of those involved in them. Performing a classic ethnographic trick, by showing the actual moral order of a space seen as unorganized and morally corrupt from the outside, the book is the result of over a 100 interviews, and 7 months of participant observation, first in 2013, with a revisit in 2019, scrutinizing the role of morality in a market not ethically dubious by definition (as in the traffic of organs) but rather just at the margins of global chains, and of state oversight and regulation. The book is an important contribution to the role local economic practices play in organizing commitments, subjectivities, and personal trajectories, and marries European and US economic sociology with Latin American studies of urban and labor informality, aiming to expand some of its lessons beyond the site-specific characteristics of La Salada, one of the largest markets for illegal, informal and/or illicit goods in the world, located in metropolitan Buenos Aires. The book calls our attention to the creativity, and resilience of subaltern agents in the global economy.