Women traders in cross-cultural perspective: mediating identities, marketing wares

Abstract

WOMEN TRADERS IN CROSS-CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE: Mediating Identities, Marketing Wares Linda J. Seligmann, ed. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001; 308 pp. In myriad ways, women of the informal economy must negotiate and suture together very complex and disparate social spaces, such as the home, the market, the family, rural and urban settings. In addition, women's social identities of gender, race, class, and ethnicity are negotiated through these social spaces as well as broader political, economic and social relations. Women Traders Cross Cultural Perspective: Mediating Identities, Marketing Wares is an edited collection which examines how these ideas come together particular Third World contexts. The contributors provide perspectives from Bolivia, Ecuador, Ghana, Hungary, India, Mexico, Indonesia, Peru, Morocco and the Philippines. The collection proposes to augment a traditional political economy perspective that frames much of the previous anthropological scholarship studying women the informal economy. Editor Linda Seligmann notes that these essays move beyond an examination solely of economic structures to encompass an examination of the social and political contexts which market women are situated. The articles the collection primarily draw upon cultural analyses and some postmodern theory to investigate cultural constructions of identity, and localized forms of agency and resistance by social actors the ground. References to structural critiques and a political economy analysis are made but are not the primary theoretical approaches of the authors this collection. Each contributor examines the ways which the activities and practices of women traders localized settings interact with and shift ideologies and culturally constructed categories. Reciprocally, the authors study how these same ideologies and categories influence the activities and actions of women traders. A range of methodological tools are used by different authors that include archival, historical, and linguistic analysis along with life narratives and interviews in the field. The starting point for each contributor begins with the lives of women the informal economy. The practices, experiences and varied social locations of these women serve as the entry point into broader discussions of class, race, ethnicity, kinship, gender, nationalism, language, neo-liberalism, police repression, political resistance and the tension between demarcations of social space as private/public, rural/urban, informal/formal and local/global. The book is composed of four sections. The first section, entitled Gender Ideologies, Household Models and Market Dynamics consists of two articles which examine the ways which gender ideologies and household structures within late nineteenth-century Guadalajara, Mexico and contemporary Java, Indonesia respectively serve to impinge upon the work of women traders. In both contexts, the authors illustrate how women must delicately balance their labour the marketplace with cultural expectations of women's work general and the expectations brought to bear upon women the home. This is contrast to other cultural contexts such as Ghana where women are expected to participate economic activities as an extension of their labour as nursing mothers. In the second section, Fields of Power, Gracia Clark highlights the ways which Structural Adjustment Policies (SAP) and global economics have placed pressure within families and induced state repression on the informal markets of which women depend. …