Itinerant Merchants Research Articles

The Contribution of Cattle Fattening to the Improvement of the Living Conditions of Households in the Village of Konna (Mopti)

The purpose of this study is to analyse the impact of the practice of cattle fattening on the live conditions of the populations in the village of Konna (Mopti). One hundred and thirty one (131) cattle fatteners were interviewed based on a questionnaire focusing mainly on the conduct of the fattening activity; the constraints encountered and the impact of the fattening activity on the living conditions of the respondents, including observations in the field. A descriptive analysis is made with the analysis software SPSS-18 has shown that 95 (72.5%) men against 26 (27.5%) women practice cattle fattening activity. Respondents encounter some difficulties; only 16% benefited from loans from financial institutions. Cattle rationing is mixed, the most used feeds being brown cake (90.8%) and rice bran (85.5%). The acquisition of veterinary products is done on the local market (83.2%), itinerant merchants (6.9%) and ordered from outside (9.9%). The aim of the cattle fattening activity is to increase the pecuniary income for a better living condition. We witness that out of the 131 respondents 31, 3% were able to cover their medical expenses; 26.7% were able to pay for school supplies for their children; 10.7% were able to pay their rent; 67.2% saw an improvement in their food; 24.4% were able to carry out other income generating activities; 15.3% had access to drinking water; 13.7% had access to electricity, and about 23.7% of respondents sleep under an impregnated mosquito net.

“Pharaonic Egypt: a Singular Pathway to Statehood in the Early Bronze Age”

Abstract Situated at the crossroads between Northeast Africa, the Mediterranean, the Near East and the Indian Ocean, ancient Egypt was a strategic pathway that facilitated contacts and the circulation of peoples, products and ideas across these vast regions. Sometimes the monarchy took the initiative in these contacts, whereas in other cases, mobile populations, local leaders, itinerant merchants and independent individuals fulfilled such a role. Egyptian regions participated in these exchanges in distinctive ways. Hence, control over wealth flows, access to coveted goods, contacts with privileged trading partners and attracting royal support represented significant moves in their strategies. A constant tension between different political models (centralized, confederacies of cities and territories, regional kingdoms) reemerged through the millennia. This often led to the collapse of the central authority (as it happened around 2160 bc) and was inspired, at least in part, by the political impact of trading activities.

Itinerant merchants: between networks of migrants and survival strategy (16th–20th)

ABSTRACT In dictionaries as well as in literature, the pedlar is an ambiguous figure. Urban sources testify to the desire of the urban authorities and sedentary merchants to exclude them. A few bankruptcy files do, however, make it possible to document failures as well as to provide information on the tours and the credit necessary to exercise the trade. However, to overcome the purely urban viewpoint, one must leave the town behind and concentrate instead upon the home villages and its notarial archives in order to link individual departures to the social framework to which they belonged and to understand the organisation of these networks of migrants. However, the municipal archives on poverty, on markets, as well as the archives of the police, justice and guilds allow us to enter into certain economic practices of the most destitute. In the first part, the essay describes the organisation of migrant networks and their evolution between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. In the second part, it analyses urban peddling, which is the economic resource of the poorest people, particularly women, and the battles waged against them by the elites and established merchants in order to keep them off the streets.

Knowledge And Habits Of Solar Exposure In Street Traders Of A Market In Chiclayo, Peru

Background: people who work outdoors are exposed to long periods of ultraviolet radiation; such is the case of street vendors. Objectives: determine the knowledge and habits of solar exposition in itinerant traders around a Chiclayo market. Materials and methods: A questionnaire were applied to 291 itinerant merchants located around the Mercado Modelo of Chiclayo, who evaluated sun exposure habits, photo protection measures, a history of sunburn and skin cancer, as well as knowledge of ultraviolet radiation and sources of information. Results: the following results were found: the age ranges were 18-25 (42.3%), 36-54 (38.1%), 55 -78 (19.6%). At the level of education, 13.1% have completed primary school, 32.6% have full secondary and 8.2% complete. At the time of the study, 71.9% had been working as street traders for more than 3 years. The phototype of the participants were phototype I (0.3%), phototype II (4.5%), phototype III (24.7%), phototype IV (48.8%), phototype V (19.6%), phototype VI (2.15). A 90 ± 3.5 %% recognizes that causes skin cancer, 53.6% recognizes that a feature of skin aging by radiation are spots and warts, 56% responded that solar radiation causes cataracts, a 52,92 % replied that white-skinned people are more sensitive to the sun's rays. 59.5% of traders indicated that they go to work from Monday to Sunday, 39.4% work 5-6 days a week, and 4.1% work 4 or less days a week. A 48.5% of them declared to expose themselves more than 6 hours to the solar rays, 24.7% are exposed of 3 - 6 hours a day, while 8.6% registered the shortest time of solar exposure (0 - 2 hours). 75.3% did not use sunscreen, 24.7% of merchants used sunscreen at the time of being surveyed as a measure of photo protection; of them, 63.9% said that a family member recommended their use, 94.4% use it 1-2 times a day, 38.9% only apply it when they go to work, 52.8% use it on their face , neck, ears and hands, and half of them (50.0%) get it from a catalog. Conclusions: the knowledge and habits of solar exposition in itinerant traders were equal or inferior to that described in other studies. It was found that the knowledge is from regular to adequate and poor habits.

Wir Unsichtbaren. Geschichte der Polen in Deutschland by Peter Oliver Loew

Reviewed by: Wir Unsichtbaren. Geschichte der Polen in Deutschland by Peter Oliver Loew Jie-Hyun Lim Wir Unsichtbaren. Geschichte der Polen in Deutschland. By Peter Oliver Loew. Munich: C.H. Beck, 2014. Pp. 336. Paper €18.95. ISBN 978-3406667084. In a recent review essay, Michał Nowosielski pointed out that no monograph has been written so far on the history of the Polish minority in Germany (“Polacy w Niemczech. Stan i Perspektywy Badań,” Przegla˛d Zachodni 3 [2012]: 26). The existing scholarship in his estimation is fragmented, descriptive, narrowly focused, gender blind, or framed by the national history. Nowosielski called for a comprehensive history of the Polish minority in Germany from a transnational perspective (26–27). Peter Oliver Loew’s book is just that. For Loew, however, the reason why scholars have yet to write such a monograph derives from the difficulties with its terms: Germany, Poland, and minority (11). All three components of this topic resist easy or agreeable definition. Loew’s pioneering work intends to make the “invisible” visible. Poles in Germany have been marginalized, silenced, erased, and deprived of agency. As subalterns, they have spoken discreetly, but were hardly heard. Or worse, their voices were hijacked for the purposes of national histories: for instance, when historians try to determine [End Page 208] whether they were really “Polish Prussians” or “Prussian Poles.” Such an interrogation simplifies and singularizes their fluid, multiple, and often interchangeable identities in an ahistorical effort to fix them. Even today, “Poles in Poznań and Pomorze are jokingly called ‘Prussian Poles’ for their Prussian virtues” (122–123). Such self-identification defies national categorization. Indeed, people in borderlands often adhere to these fluctuating, multiple, elusive, and joking identities. Keenly conscious of these methodological dilemmas, Loew sees identity both as a “pragmatic concept” and a “working concept.” Pragmatically Loew frames historical Germany encompassing both German territorial states and German-speaking states where Poles lived. The large part of East Prussia, Silesia, Pomorze, the Habsburg monarchy, and so on, were parts of Germany in this sense. As a working concept, he defines Poles in terms of both a subjective and an objective nation (12). In this way, Loew can count Marcel Reich-Ranicki—the Polish Jewish German “literary pope” (Literaturpapst)—as a Pole. Though Reich-Ranicki did not regard himself even as half Polish, he maintained a strong bond to Polish language and poetry (206). Yet this approach leaves open the question of where to place the “Polonized Germans” who had belonged to “group 4” in the Deutsche Volksliste (171), the Nazi institution that classified the peoples of Occupied Europe according to racial desirability. In Loew’s schema, they seem to be subjective Poles but objective Germans—which would make them ultimately Germans. Loew ends up defining Poles, minorities, and Germany either too broadly or too narrowly because he still tends to reify identity. To be sure, he sees identity flexibly as multiple, fluid, and fragmented; but he often uses a mix of constructivist language and essentialist argumentation. The term itself seems responsible for that reification. Referring to identity still allows readers to imagine that it exists independent of the actions that create it and the norms that legitimize it. An alternative might be to use the concept of identification as it draws attention to the agency of historical actors in dialectical interplay with power institutions and thus the tension between relational and categorical modes of identification. Nonetheless, Loew’s panoramic description of the Polish minority in Germany is colorful, dynamic, wide-ranging, and transnational. His illustrations, postcards, and photos are fabulous. In the place of the stereotyped clichés of Poles as migrant workers, forced laborers, and seasonal workers, he explores the broad spectrum of their diverse historical traces. They include itinerant merchants at the Messe, the intelligentsia in exile, revolutionaries in the socialist movement, students at universities, artists in performance, inmates in concentration camps, prisoners of war in German POW camps, volunteers and conscripts in the German army during the two world wars, war expellees, postwar settlers, displaced persons, commuters, peddlers, marriage emigrants, and athletic stars, among others. That much diversity “makes it impossible to speak sweepingly of ‘Poles in Germany’” (278–279). The virtue of...

Recovery of consumer waste in India – A mass flow analysis for paper, plastic and glass and the contribution of households and the informal sector

In most municipalities in India, the collection, transportation and disposal of municipal solid waste deviates from the mass flow envisaged by the municipal agencies and planning authorities. While multiple studies have focused on the environmental problems arising due to uncontrolled waste dumping and combustion, we present a qualitative study of the efforts towards resource conservation and recycling by various actors involved, and a quantitative estimate of the amount of material recovered at various stages.Both the informal sectors (garbage collectors, waste pickers, waste dealers, small stores and itinerant merchants) and the households in India, play a vital role in recovering consumer waste. In order to have an in-depth understanding, a case study has been performed to better understand the contribution of households, garbage collectors and itinerant waste merchants towards recovering consumer waste. Our study shows that consumer waste is far more efficiently recovered in India than what has been reported in literature until now. The waste recovery takes place in multiple-stages and the final waste that reaches the municipal corporation mostly comprises of biodegradable waste, inerts and highly non-recyclable waste.Households, itinerant waste merchants and garbage collectors in India jointly recover 1.2–2.4 million tonnes of newspapers, 2.4–4.3 million tonnes of cardboard and mixed paper, 6.5–8.5 million tonnes of plastic, more than1.3 million tonnes of glass, more than 2.6 million tonnes of metal waste and 4–6.2 million tonnes of other recyclable material per year. Overall, 30–60% of all paper and cardboard, 50–80% of all plastic and close to 100% of all glass bottles produced in India are recycled.

Impact of a Cooperative Society on the Arecanut Marketing in Kerala — A Case Study of Central Arecanut Marketing and Processing Cooperative Ltd

The marketing system of arecanut in Kerala includes primary, secondary and terminal markets. The trade in arecanut was monopolistic in nature. But this has changed since mid-1970s as a result of formation of a co-operative society called Central Arecanut Marketing and Processing Co-operative Ltd (CAMPCO). The establishment of CAMPCO has raised the farm price and wholesale price of arecanut in Kerala, of course with minor fluctuations. Arecanut marketing channel involves a number of market intermediaries. Most of the produce passes through village traders, itinerant merchants, private wholesalers, the CAMPCO and the retailers. A lower price spread and a better price through CAMPCO to arecanut growers among different marketing channels in Kerala is the most important impact of this co-operative venture. The CAMPCO has also educated the growers on the grading of arecanut in a scientific manner according to its size and quality. All these effects of CAMPCO have made arecanut cultivation more remunerative and has improved the economic status of arecanut farmers.

MERCHANTS, MARKETS, AND THE STATE

The end of the cold war witnessed the emergence of a commercial web sprawling from the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region in western China and extending into Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan), Pakistan, and Russia. Running parallel to the state-managed exchange in hydrocarbons, raw materials, technology, and infrastructure, this new Eurasian trade had an informal component as everyday consumer items manufactured in China were imported into neighboring countries, bypassing formal regulatory mechanisms. This inter-Asian trade began as shuttle trading by itinerant merchants for local markets; by the mid 1990s, shuttle trading was overshadowed by largescale export for national markets in neighboring countries without losing its informal character. This informality extending across national boundaries defined the post–cold war commerce in innermost Asia; at the same time, it also signaled a return to pre-cold war trading structures. Moving away from the “retreat of the state” thesis that found traction following the cold war, the author attributes informality in this inter-Asian trade to three factors: (1) a restructuring of state power where informal trade was a new comparative advantage sought in an evolving geopolitical climate; (2) the actors in this inter-Asian trade—party and regional officials in China, along with traders and intermediaries—who found and exercised agency through this exchange; and (3) a chain of inter-locking, commercial macro-regions, which are economically sustainable and which transcended international boundaries. Working in conjunction, these factors constitute a dynamic inter-Asian trade and challenge static state imaginaries of a “New Silk Road” or “Eurasian Continental Bridge.”

African Trading Post in Guangzhou: Emergent or Recurrent Commercial Form?

Abstract In the early 2000s, nationals of Sub-Saharan Africa who had settled in the market places of Hong Kong, Bangkok, Jakarta, and Kuala Lumpur, moved to Guangzhou and opened offices in the upper floors of buildings in Baiyun and Yuexiu Districts. These were located in the northwest of the city, near the central railway station and one of the two fairs of Canton. Gradually these traders were able to create the necessary conditions of hospitality by opening community restaurants on upper floors, increasing the number of showrooms and offices as well as the services of freight and customs clearance in order to live up to an African itinerant customer’s expectations. From interviews carried out between 2006 and 2009 in the People’s Republic of China and in Hong Kong, Bangkok, Dubai, and West Africa, the article will first highlight the economic logics which have contributed to the constitution of African trading posts in China and describe their extension from the Middle East and from Asia. The second part will determine the respective roles of migrants and traveling Sub-Saharan entrepreneurs, before exploring their interactions with Chinese society in the setting up of these commercial networks. It will also look at the impact of toughening immigration policies. It is the principle of the African trading posts of anchoring of some traders in strategic places negotiated with the host society that allows the movement but also the temporary settlement of many visitors. The first established traders purchase products manufactured in the hinterland to fulfill the demand of the itinerant merchants who in turn supply customers located in other continents.

An Ottoman Portrait

This carefully composed portrait of a high-ranking Ottoman bureaucrat is striking for several reasons. First, at nearly 16 by 13 inches, it is at least four times larger than most portraits of this period and lacks the ornamental cardboard frame into which portraits were commonly placed, instead being pasted directly onto a cardboard support. Second, although there is a long tradition of documenting men at work or places of business in the photography of the late Ottoman Empire, these images tend to privilege traditional occupations (e.g., itinerant merchants or craftsmen) and sites of commerce, such as outdoor markets, the covered bazaar, or shops along the Grande Rue de Pera in Istanbul. Third and finally, in its setting, the objects chosen to be included on the desk, and the pose of the central figure, the portrait insists upon the modernity of the subject as its primary message, raising questions about its intended audience.

A Reflection on the Concept of Social Identity: Migrant Merchants in Early Modern Europe

This essay reflects on the theoretical and methodological complexities of the concept of social identity, using a case study of migrant merchants in early modern Europe. The essay opens with an analysis of historians’ usages of the important but contested concept of identity. Then, it attempts to demonstrate how the literate society, political and religious officials, sedentary merchants, and the host populations with which itinerant merchants entered into contact, tried to impose identities on these migrants. Finally, the study attempts to show how migrants used this polyphony of external representations in order to understand the limits of the merchants’ abilities to utilize these imposed identities for their own advantage.

The Möbius Strip: A Spatial History of Colonial Society in Guerrero, Mexico

One of the things you notice in talking to Latin Americanist historians about the work of celebrity biogeographer Jared Diamond is their almost visceral reaction to his two-dimensional view of history, particularly evident in the wildly successful Guns, Germs, and Steel (W. W. Norton, 1997). As a colleague observed, “He doesn’t understand that Latin American history plays out in three dimensions, not two,” and this allusion to John V. Murra’s notion of verticality could easily have been extended to n-dimensions. If you keep that in mind, Jonathan Amith’s ambitious and impressive account of the historical geography and ecology of the Iguala Valley in central Guerrero falls into place, down to the enigmatic title. Perhaps one should add that Amith’s argument is neither Diamond’s nor Murra’s, despite the fact some historical geographers in Mexico, such as Bernardo García Martínez, have observed that portions of Guerrero bear more than a passing resemblance to Murra’s well-known theory of ecological niches.The agricultural potential of the Iguala Valley, Amith observes, diminishes as one travels south because average rainfall declines while temperature rises. Consequently, population densities were higher in the north; this, combined with the proximity of markets in Taxco, Cuernavaca, and Mexico City, drove up relative land rents in the north. By 1750, this process had reached something of equilibrium, and with it, effected a transition from ranching to agriculture. As elsewhere in New Spain, the potential profitability of the grain trade attracted investment and further commercialization. At the same time, the absence of investment and markets in south-central Guerrero made for “bifurcated patterns of development into northern and southern regions . . . between the increasingly impoverished south-central jurisdictions of Tixtla and Chilapa and the richer Taxco and Iguala jurisdictions to the north” (pp. 68, 257). This divergence precipitated a complex series of struggles between colonists, indigenous village authorities, migrant peasants, and the colonial authorities that exacerbated, rather than mitigated, regional economic disparities. The late-colonial cacao boom between Guayaquil and New Spain through the port of Acapulco, for example, only served to increase the demand for mules and muleteers from the Iguala Valley and had important spillovers into the salt and cotton trades as well. Even “well-intentioned” policies, such as the establishment of the famous spinning school at Tixtla under the subdelegate Juan Antonio de Rivas, could not withstand the effects of outmigration to the Iguala Valley and came to naught. Throughout Amith’s account, there is a continuing emphasis on native agency and on “place making and place breaking” as something more than mere reaction to an alteration in relative prices. The analysis is firmly based on impressive archival research, much of it in previously neglected materials. Indeed, it is difficult not to admire a study in which even the activity of itinerant merchants is analyzed down to the level of individual journeys between such places as Tenancingo, Acapulco, and Tepecuacilco.The novelty of Amith’s effort lies in his argument that southern Guerrero’s unique system of exchange was not organized around a dominant market center but instead consisted of “a series of loosely articulated small markets strung together by petty trade in specialized production and endless webs of credit and debt,” or a “model of exchange over multiple sites of acquisition and sale” (pp. 360, 361). It suggests, albeit from a generally conventional anthropological perspective, that there is something wrong the neoclassical model that views exchange and arbitrage as essentially identical. Of course, there have been other efforts to bring such a perspective to colonial Mexico, particularly Enrique Semo’s Historia del capitalismo en México (Ediciones Era, 1973), which gets a footnote but deserves better. The question is, and always has been, whether market incentives alone were sufficient to organize commercial activity in New Spain, as Stanley Stein pointed out over a generation ago. You don’t necessarily qualify as, God forbid, a Marxist for asking. Despite what our colleagues in economics believe, the answer isn’t written in the axioms. As Woodrow Borah astutely observed, cotton was a tributary good before the arrival of the Spaniards because that was the only “efficient” way of bringing it to the highlands to be woven, especially in a world of nontrivial transportation costs and ethnic subjugation.Somewhere out there, a historically sophisticated economic history of colonial Mexico remains to be written. When it is, one suspects that books such as Amith’s — and others like it — will finally give us a “new” economic history worthy of the name.

Sound Memory: Paris Street Cries in Balzac's Pere Goriot

At the heart of Le Père Goriot, on the eve of one of "les jours les plus extraordinaires de l'histoire de la maison" (3:91),1 is an episode in which Madame Vauquer's boarders, flush with Bordeaux wine, recite and bellow the cries of Parisian street peddlers at dinner. Rastignac has apparently committed himself to two mutually exclusive romantic plots, either of which would secure his fortune, by both courting Victorine Taillefer and accepting Goriot's offer of a garçonnière. That night, Taillefer fils will be murdered, enabling Rastignac to obtain Victorine's dowry and share the profits with Vautrin, the mastermind behind the deal. This will be Vautrin's last meal at the Pension Vauquer before he is unmasked and arrested as Trompe-la-Mort. At this moment, as each intrigue is wound tighter, it may seem odd that the lodgers are imitating street peddlers, those itinerant merchants who circulated among the faubourgs crying out their wares. Yet this short scene, which stages Vautrin's relationship to the other main characters, relates to a long tradition of discourse on street cries dating back to the Middle Ages. Representations of street cries had renewed appeal in the mid- to late-nineteenth-century writings of, among others, Jo–seph Mainzer and Victor Fournel. Seen in this broader context and in the context of Balzac's other references to modern Paris, the street cries in Le Père Goriot draw out the novel's ethnographic discussion of the sounds and class dynamics characteristic of early-nineteenth-century Paris. Like the ethnographic literature with which it shares a common interest in the crieurs de Paris as expressions of Parisian identity, Honoré de Balzac's novel reconstructs a folkloric aural past and shows the extent to which sound defines identity. From the Middle Ages onward, chapmen or colporteurs traveled from village to village advertising their wares in the streets. Each trade [End Page 67] had a distinctive cry, a combination of words and characteristic tune, such that buyers could identify the itinerant merchant by a sound marker; however, street criers are frequently conflated into a broad category of peddlers. Although originally colporteur signified the official profession of the itinerant vendor of broadsheets (papiers volants) and images, the word came to designate all hawkers.2 By the eighteenth century, colporteurs were viewed with increased suspicion, because they sold goods illegally, sold defective merchandise, or spread malicious and subversive information, and laws were created to regulate hawking.3 The evolution of street criers' representation parallels the sedentary bourgeois' increased suspicion toward lower-class transience, marginality and criminality. Street cries eventually become a metonym for the working class as a whole, now defined by raucousness and criminality as opposed to bourgeois silence and respectability. The Cris de Paris refer both to the historical practice of peddling and to an art (either written, visual or aural) form that dates back to Guillaume de la Villeneuve's thirteenth-century poem "Les Crieries de Paris," and to sixteenth-century woodcuts.4 A modern revival of interest in the Cris de Paris from as early as the 1820s coincided with a gradual decline in the practice. As Balzac and Fournel were keenly aware, the reorganization of space following the urban renewal begun under Napoleon I and spearheaded by Baron Haussmann in the 1850s was changing sound culture, and street criers were increasingly confined to the older neighborhoods of Paris. Their perceived disappearance, and their concomitant association with Vieux Paris, was likely what motivated nineteenth-century writers engaged in Parisian ethnography. These ethnographers drew on the genre set out in Louis-Sébastien Mercier's Tableau de Paris to document their societies and capture what was new and changing. Balzac heeded this documentary impulse by contributing to an evolving body of littérature pano–ramique5; moreover, his novels, especially Le Père Goriot, can be productively read as a folkloric record or a literary ethnography...

A Political Economy View of ASSA Meetings: The U.S. Mexican Border

The URPE tour to Tijuana unveiled the social underpinnings of regional integration. Alongside the dance halls, cheap eateries, and “schlock” stores are the sexoservidoras and itinerant merchants hawking their wares. The city is privatizing public services while many of its industrial plants have moved to China. Most workers’ housing lacks basic public services, and authorities on both sides of the border refuse to implement a growth management strategy to reverse the environmental disaster that benefits powerful elites, North and South.

Andean Transnational Merchants: An Indigenous Community in Globalization

Diaspora 12:1 2003 Andean Transnational Merchants: An Indigenous Community in Globalization José Itzigsohn Brown University Andean Entrepreneurs: Otavalo Merchants and Musicians in the Global Arena. Lynn A. Meisch. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002. Transnational Peasants: Migrations, Networks, and Ethnicity in Andean Ecuador. David Kyle. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Introduction These two books describe and analyze the ways in which the people of Otavalo, an indigenous community in Northern Ecuador, adapt to and integrate into the contemporary global economy. Otavalo , a small town in the Ecuadorian Andes north of Quito, is the administrative, commercial, and cultural center for the Otavalo people. The Otavalos live in seventy-five small communities dispersed throughout the valley where the city is located. They also constitute, however, a diaspora that “is now worldwide, with permanent expatriate communities in Europe, the Caribbean, and the Americas and temporary or permanent transmigrants on six continents ” (Meisch 11). Otavalo can be considered a successful case of adaptation to globalization. This is an indigenous group that has acquired unprecedented economic wealth and political power through participation in global trade circuits. Its members have used the commodification of ethnic identities, characteristic of the contemporary moment of globalization, to their economic advantage. Success, however, comes at a price, which has become evident in the form of internal stratification, in the resulting social tension, and in heated discussions about the defining elements of Otavalo identity. Yet Otavalos have managed to recreate and renovate their identity while participating actively in global networks of trade. Lynn Meisch’s Andean Entrepreneurs is a detailed ethnography based on long periods of living in Otavalo, and it describes the economic and cultural changes in the region. Her narrative portrays in rich detail the social practices and cultural dilemmas of the xxxxxxxxxxxx 131 Diaspora 12:1 2003 people of Otavalo. Meisch also addresses several theoretical discussions about the place of community and identity under the present conditions of globalization. David Kyle’s Transnational Peasants is based on a combination of qualitative and survey research and focuses mainly on the forms and effects of migration in two Otavalo communities. Kyle compares migration in these communities with others located in the southern Ecuadorean province of Azuay. His book is part of the growing contemporary scholarly debate on transnational migration. These two books complement each other in many ways. Meisch provides an in-depth view of life in Otavalo, while Kyle establishes a comparative analytical framework that helps us to understand the general and the particular in the Otavalo case. Also, the authors know each other and shared time in Otavalo, and they appear in each other’s narratives. Through the analysis of a very peculiar and particular case (or two cases, in Kyle’s book), the two authors tackle important questions on the intersection of the global and the local in contemporary processes of social, economic, and cultural change. This review cannot do justice to the richness of the texts. I will therefore focus my discussion of them on two points: first, the possibilities and paths open to community economic prosperity under contemporary forms of globalization; and, second, the question of identity and community solidarity in conditions of population dispersion. Communities as Actors in Globalization Otavalos have learned to “market ethnicity” to Western tourists and consumers. These days, in Otavalo, merchants sell crafts from the entire Andean region. Moreover, Otavalo merchants are found in most cities in the developed world. Some are settled there, creating a new “merchant diaspora,” and some are itinerant merchants who travel for shorter periods, carrying crafted goods to sell in the streets of New York, Madrid, or Paris. In a fascinating chapter tracing the changes in local economic organization, Meisch traces the “migratory patterns” of yarns, showing how Otavalos have moved up the textile commodity chains from spinning and weaving to becoming middlemen and independent merchants. Otavalo’s particular insertion in the world economy is partly rooted in its unique history. The presence of commercialized textile production goes far back in the region. During colonial times, the economy of Otavalo was based on textile production in obrajes (textile sweatshops based on forced labor) rather than on agriculture or mining. The latter were the...

The origins and early development of medieval towns in northern Europe

Tn the I950S, the debate over Pirenne's Mahomet et Charlemagne, which Chad dominated historical writing about early medieval towns since it was published posthumously in I937, came to an end. Simultaneously, new syntheses concerning the early history of towns in Europe were published. Among the most important of these is Ennen's book on the European town, which appeared only in I953 though work on it had begun Io years earlier.2 The volume emphasized the originality of the Germanic town as a new phenomenon in northern Europe. Its most important element was a merchants' settlement, characterized by the placename wik. Furthermore, Ennen considered these wik settlements to be the precursors and prototype of the northern and central European medieval town, the origin of which Pirenne had dated to the tenth or eleventh century. Basically, Pirenne explained these wik settlements as creations of the originally itinerant merchants who eventually surrounded their wik with ramparts in the tenth and eleventh centuries, thus putting an end to the 'protohistoric' phase and in effect founding the real medieval town. In Bonn, where Ennen worked, archaeology within the context of interdisciplinary Landeskunde (regional historical geography) had already been recognized as a source for the history of the middle ages. For some years before the start of the Second World War, Jankuhn had carried out excavations on the site of the deserted early medieval traders' settlement of Haithabu on the German-Danish border. 3 Nevertheless, archaeology plays only a subsidiary part in Ennen's work. Her book is based mainly on written sources, though she did pay some attention to the topography of the later medieval towns as a potential source for earlier situations. This was not uncommon in the I930s and I940s,4 but it was as far as historians were prepared to go in adopting an interdisciplinary approach to the study of early towns. Similar remarks can be made with respect to another German book, published in I958 and also dedicated to the emergence and early development of towns in Europe north of the Alps.5 It is a collection of studies, the

The Early Sources on Guinea

The Guinea coast and near interior was a region of almost wholly preliterate societies before the coming of the Europeans. Islamic culture, with its literate strands, which had been spreading through the northern parts of West Africa over many centuries had barely begun to touch the Guinea region—although a handful of literate itinerant merchants and missionaries was to be encountered by the Portuguese, and Islamic religious practice had penetrated at least one royal court in Senegal. Hence the “medieval” sources in Arabic which are informative on the history of the Sudanic states of West Africa tell us little or nothing about the Guinea region. As for the oral traditions of the region, mostly collected only since 1850, these have an inbuilt “horizon” of recollection which falls far short of the arrival of the Europeans five centuries ago. Ethnographic, cultural, and linguistic evidence, systematized in recent times, can be extrapolated backwards to earlier times, but this can only be done, with any security, when trends over time have been identified from earlier hard evidence.Such trends can of course be obtained from archeology, as well as from written sources. But the limited investigations of archeologists in Guinea to date, while they certainly inform on general issues such as agriculture and technology, are as yet decidedly weak, for a variety of good reasons, on the regional details of human settlement and population, and on the varieties of political structure. Moreover it is doubtful whether archeology per se can inform to any significant extent on ethnicity, language, and social characteristics. It is therefore only marginally debatable to refer to the earliest European written sources on Guinea as “the early sources.”

Comments on Drennan's "Long Distance Transport Costs in Pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica"

In addition to the goods brought in from the neighbouring villages there are some from considerable distances offered for sale by the Tarasco peddlers, the so-called huacaleros (crate-carriers). These men travel all over the country, carrying on their backs enormous crates (huacales) made of bamboosticks, resembling those used for loading mules, only very much larger and rectangular in shape. Into this light receptacle the merchant packs his wares, whatever they may be, chiefly pottery, and closes it with a netting of ixtle. Often he ties to the outside the baskets which he also has for sale, and on top of all he fastens his chino. These itinerant merchants forcibly demonstrate the commercial instinct of the Tarasco tribe. The peddlers, generally natives of the Sierra, travel on foot as far as to the city of Mexico in the east, to Guadalajara in the west, and to the coast towns of Acapulco, Colima, and Tepic .... In former times Tarasco merchants used to make their

Nepalese traders: Itinerant merchants of Southeast Asia

Abstract Itinerant merchants have been an integral part of world trade since at least the time of the earliest Silk Route from China to the West. Today a group of traders from Nepal maintain this tradition. Today their travel is by economy jet and inexpensive train. The countries involved are primarily thos6 with historic ties to the mercenary Ghurka forces under the British. The traders are well organized and limited to a few‐families, primarily from the Pokhara Valley in Nepal. Their goods begin with products from Nepal and Tibet, but they also move goods gathered along their route. They represent a charming anomaly in the modern world, a touch of the old Asia.

Darbo Jula: The Role of a Mandinka Jula Clan in the Long-Distance Trade of the Gambia River and Its Hinterland

Through the peak years of the Gambia River slave trade, a clan with the surname Darbo was one of several Mandinka jula (merchant) clans whose members participated in the carriage and exchange of slaves, cloth, iron, salt, European manufactures, and other commodities between the lower Gambia and its broad eastern hinterland. Itinerant merchants had conducted long-distance trade along a general Gambia-Niger axis for several centuries prior to Portuguese arrival on the Senegambian coast. Thereafter, the growing demand for slaves at coastal and riverine points led to an increase in the east-west flow of merchandise. Most slaves exported from the Gambia through the middle of the seventeenth century came from populations living reasonably close to the river's banks, but for the century or more after 1650 Gambian slave exports came increasingly from the river's eastern hinterland, the several hundred miles of savannas stretching between the upper reaches of the navigable Gambia and the upper Niger. From this region merchants conveyed slaves of the Tanda, Mandinka, and Bambara ethnic groups down the Gambia for what was normally ultimate exchange into the Atlantic slave trade. Well placed to conduct this longdistance trade were members of the Darbo clan of jula. Like segments of other Mandinka jula clans, extended families of Darbo jula were settled in commercial villages along the river, where over the years they had developed social and economic ties with local residents and with members of the ruling families of the appropriate Gambian Mandinka states. From these locations, and with the aid of their strong local and regional influence, Darbo jula were able to participate actively and regularly in the long-distance trade of the Gambia-Niger commercial axis. Such a study as this, of the commercial operations of a specific jula clan and the importance of the clan's social integration in its overall economic success, takes on added meaning when placed in the proper context of longdistance trading operations in the larger Western Sudan. Therefore, relevant background information on the broad Western Sudanic trading complex, the general landlord-stranger types of relationships that made possible efficient long-distance trading, and jula clans in general precedes the more particular study of the Darbo jula.