240524 SE MM3 Anthropology of Rural Markets: Inequality, Dependency and Sharing Economies (2024W)

This seminar gives an overview of the structure of rural markets and addresses their important economic and social role for the peripheral regions of the Global South. The lectures, classroom discussions and student presentations of assigned readings will consider a definition of rural markets informed by material culture and social practice theory. Such rural markets consist of extractivist commodity chains with first and second-level middlemen and a transport infrastructure, as well as a population of households who self-reproduce by supplying products to the commodity chain. Just like other equipment the market has a subjective meaning for its users that is part of a totality of involvements (referral nexus of significance). Rural markets can thus be viewed as tools for environmental niche construction by peasants and fishers, hunters or gatherers, as opposed to an independent exogenous variable that causally determines population-environment interactions. Here is an ethnographic illustration. During spring tides, fishing people in Madagascar catch mud crabs with baited traps (a with-which), in the practical context of a small-scale fishery in mangrove forests (an in-which), in order to sell the crab as commodity to Chinese traders (an in-order-to), which is aimed towards meeting subsistence needs of the household (a towards-this), for the sake of their well-being as migrant fishers (a for-the-sake-of-which).

Ethnographic issues covered in the seminar include resource frontiers, access regimes and enclosure, money and gender, charcoal-making, small-scale fisheries, swidden agriculture, deforestation, human ecology of coral reefs and mangroves, social memory and livelihoods, population growth and commodity prices, rural migration, food sharing obligations, self-provisioning, women traders, and status-seeking consumption. The assigned readings were selected with regard to four intersecting themes especially relevant to a material culture and social practice analysis of rural markets. The first theme “commodity chains”, concerns the institutional structure and social organization as well as the economic volatility of rural market exchanges. The second theme, “niche construction” focuses on the supply side of the rural market and its environmental impact on production and working conditions in agriculture, forestry and fishing. The third and fourth themes concern the cultural dimension of rural markets, which can be observed either at the level of the economic rationality of individual households (“household rationality: cash, credit and subsistence”) or at the collective level of ethnic or inter group relations (“group ethos: trade, consumption, and sharing”). The way of life, social and cultural identities of certain population groups depend materially on their joint participation as individual households in unequal terms of exchange, which lead to social exclusion and environmental degradation. Inequality, dependency and degradation characterize and mutually reinforce “extractivism”. The exclusionary mechanisms that create inequality can be sustained over time only thanks to so-called “sharing economies”, particularly shared access to unenclosed commons, tools and equipment or other means of production, and the embedding of market exchanges in patron-client relations and ethnic social networks. The social embedding of markets may take the form of loans (or advance payment in food or other basic goods) from urban traders and middlemen to local producers. Thus, producer households often prefer the social inequality enacted by rural markets to a complete market collapse, which would be even more detrimental to their well-being.