Dear all,
Please consider this call for abstracts for the AAA in Minneapolis (Nov 16-20, 2016).
Feel free to forward this to other researchers working on these issues. Many thanks,
*Markets, Mall, and Exhibition: transforming spaces of trade*
organized by Tabea Scharrer (MPI for Social Anthropology) & Neil Carrier (University of Oxford)
Throughout the world spaces of trade are being transformed. Public market places are being swallowed by private shopping malls in the wake of neoliberal restructurings of the economic sphere, while all sorts of spaces are being transformed through the activity of informal traders. Place is not just a backdrop for such trade, but a constitutive part of it, structuring it and being structured by it in turn: places such as Hong Kong’s Chungking Mansions, or Nairobi’s Eastleigh estate, highlight the transformative powers of the global economy on urban space, and also the power of certain spatial forms to mould and develop this trade. Both are critical hubs of global commerce, and both show how a blueprint of tiny shops crammed into cavernous space has become standard for much of this trade. Of course there are numerous other blueprints, in particular the use of street space by hawkers, the repurposing of space designed for other activities, and the outdoor markets common for this kind of trade the world over.
These different spatial forms comprise different patterns and logics of trade, different types of goods being sold, and different levels of inclusion and exclusion. While open air markets are public places accessible to all, Western style shopping malls keep out “undesirables” such as the urban poor, homeless or street children. "Marts of low-end globalization" (Mathews 2011, 20) are situated in between these two models, as they are privately owned, but still open to all, offering the cheap goods of “low-end globalization” imported from Dubai, Turkey, Thailand, Indonesia and China. These spaces are not just spaces of trade, but also offer opportunities for forming wider social bonds beyond commerce: places of trade are always places of sociality.
This panel intends to put such spatial transformations of trade into a comparative perspective and will explore how these different trading spaces are interlinked, in terms of the owners and traders transforming these spaces, the logics of trade moulded by those spaces, and the types of goods sold.
As a starting point the panel will consider the following points of discussion:
1) What is the dynamic behind the growth of the different spaces and forms of trading? Do different historical contexts result in different developments?
2) How widespread are these spatial forms? How far do they travel?
3) How are informal and formal spaces of trade interlinked? How do these trading places evolve over time?
4) Can informal trading spaces become more formal? Under what circustances become formal trading spaces informal?
4) How do different spatial modalities lead to different practices of trade?
5) What measures do states and key economic players take to control, capture or eradicate such places? How are trading spaces governed?
6) What forms of sociality beyond commerce do these spaces facilitate, encourage or preclude?
Please send an abstract of 250 words to
[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> or [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> by April 5th.
————————————————————————————
Dr. Tabea Scharrer
Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology
Advokatenweg 36
06114 Halle/Saale
Tel.: +49 (0) 345 29 27 148
E-Mail: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
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