The Clothes of Extraversion. Circulation, Consumption and Power in Equatorial Guinea
This thesis is about grassroots strategies of material and political extraversion. It is an ethnography of the provisioning of clothing goods in Equatorial Guinea and it bridges the everyday lives of ordinary people with issues related to political economy and power configurations. Based on more tha...
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| Tipo de recurso: | tesis doctoral |
| Estado: | Versión publicada |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2017 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | CBUC, CESCA |
| Repositorio: | TDR. Tesis Doctorales en Red |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:www.tdx.cat:10803/586183 |
| Acceso en línea: | http://hdl.handle.net/10803/586183 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Antropologia econòmica Antropología económica Economic anthropology Consum (Economia) Consumo (Economía) Consumption (Economics) Mercats Mercados Markets Àfrica occidental África Occidental West Africa Guinea Equatorial Guinea Ecuatorial Equatorial Guinea Ciències Humanes i Socials 572 |
| Sumario: | This thesis is about grassroots strategies of material and political extraversion. It is an ethnography of the provisioning of clothing goods in Equatorial Guinea and it bridges the everyday lives of ordinary people with issues related to political economy and power configurations. Based on more than twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork, mainly localised at Malabo’s principal marketplace but also complementarily carried out in Spain, it describes the strategies Guineans engage with in order to generate livelihoods but also to be able to make material statements about their self-worth in a context of uncertainty and precariousness. The exploitation of off-shore oil wells in the mid-nineties has provided an injection of resources to a regime that has been able to consolidate its power and an outside-oriented economy. While the extraversion strategies of the political elite are known and described in the political economic analyses of the country’s contemporary situation, studies about how ordinary Guineans deal and engage with this extravert system, an intended contribution of this thesis, are practically non-existent. The protagonists of my ethnography are market women, who have made from clothing provisioning both their source of livelihood and also their mechanism for social inclusion and political participation. The argument begins with a historical account, showing how rentist capitalism and extraversion strategies are not a recent phenomenon related to oil exploitation but have a longer trajectory in Equatorial Guinea. This process has signified the production of specific idioms for wealth and power that are deeply gendered and that make comment upon differential access to foreign rents and goods. These understandings of wealth and power are also associated with particular ideas about space that draw upon specific substantial and imagined geographies. These geographies are reproduced in the provisioning and valuation of foreign goods, but also by keeping trading routes and networks, which I describe for the two main categories of clothing goods consumed in Equatorial Guinea. By accessing valuable geographies and managing rents, market women manage to contest gender roles, reach certain levels of public participation and generate political debates. This participation, however, is co- opted by the elite and more specifically by the first lady who, through a non-profit organisation, offers her protection to female petty traders in exchange for political support. The ethnography of the everyday of these women reveals how, by engaging with rent managing strategies and by connecting with the powerful elite market, women are able to source their households. However, their capacity to generate income, to make political claims, and to gain access to certain levels of power is limited by a hierarchy that is ultimately maintained by such extraversion strategies. The dissertation contributes to debates within economic and political anthropology surrounding rentist capitalism and extraversion, but also about markets and consumption. While it questions extraversion as totalizing theory, and as a particularity of African states and elites, it recovers it as a concept useful to explain processes of active material and political dependency. |
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