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Beyond exploitation/empowerment: re-imagining Southern producers in commoditystoriesShari Dayaa

a Department of Environmental and Geographical Science, University ofCape Town, Rondebosch 7701, South Africa;Published online: 20 Jun 2014.

To cite this article: Shari Daya (2014) Beyond exploitation/empowerment: re-imagining Southern producersin commodity stories, Social & Cultural Geography, 15:7, 812-833, DOI: 10.1080/14649365.2014.929728

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Beyond exploitation/empowerment: re-imaginingSouthern producers in commodity stories

Shari DayaDepartment of Environmental and Geographical Science, University of Cape Town,

Rondebosch 7701, South Africa, shari.daya@uct.ac.za

One of the most dominant strands of research within cultural geography’s ‘materialistturn’ is that of commodity stories. Through everything from phones to flowers,geographers have attempted to reveal the myriad connections between (Northern)consumers and (Southern) producers. Following commodities and tracing their networks,this research tends to privilege consumption as the primary site of social and culturalmeaning within the global economy. Where producers are the focus, the theoreticalframework for understanding their lives is typically a developmentalist one,foregrounding exploitation and/or empowerment. Thus, we learn little from commoditystories about the ordinary lives of Southern producers and the co-production of thesociocultural and the economic through their everyday practices. This paper argues thatdeeper sociocultural analysis of the processes of production is necessary to balance thecurrent dominance of consumption-led commodity stories and, more importantly, to openup space for a re-imagining of Southern producers. Through the personal accounts offourty beadwork producers in Cape Town, I explore how the everyday practices of craftproduction sustain existing social relations, generate new networks, and help to shapeboth a sense of belonging and a sense of self. This commodity story reveals Southernproducers’ lives to be both richer and more mundane than dominant constructionssuggest.

Key words: Southern producers, commodity stories, South Africa, beadwork, culture,economy.

Introduction

The ‘materialist turn’ taken by cultural

geography over the past two decades has

yielded a wealth of new stories and ideas about

the nature of things. Alongside related work in

anthropology and social theory more gener-

ally, geography has seen a reworking of its

traditional materialist paradigms (Crang

2005; Whatmore 2006), along with many

calls for—as well as critiques of—a ‘remater-

ialisation’ of the discipline (Anderson and

Wylie 2009; Jackson 2000; Kearnes 2003;

Lees 2002). While geographers’ theoretical

approaches to understanding matter differ,

sometimes significantly, there can be no doubt

that materialism has come to be widely

embraced ‘as a mode of practical and

philosophical engagement’ within geography

(Kirsch 2012: 434). Of the different strands of

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work within this ‘materialist turn’, one of the

most dominant has been that concerned with

‘the pursuit of commodity stories’ (Reimer and

Hughes 2003) or what Page (2005: 294) calls

‘the new geography of commodities’ and its

attempts to understand the co-production

of the sociocultural and the economic.

Although, again, their theoretical paths can

be widely divergent, commodity stories within

cultural geography have covered much empiri-

cal ground. Fruit (Cook et al. 2004), flowers

(Hughes 2000), carpets (O’Neill 1999), handi-

crafts (Green 2008), mobile phones (Pfaff

2010) and caterpillar fungus (Yeh and Lama

2013) are just a few of the things that have

been followed (Appadurai 1986) in projects

aiming to understand how power, value,

identities and social relations are ‘materia-

lised’. In this paper, I acknowledge the richness

of these accounts, and aim not to add another

item to that list simply for the sake of a more

‘complete’ inventory of researched commod-

ities, but rather to use a particular kind of

thing—contemporary, urban, African bead-

work—as a means of addressing certain

lacunae in this literature. That is, I aim to

offer some balance to the emphasis that tends

to be placed on consumption as the main site

for the materialisation of social relations and

cultural meaning, by focusing on a set of

objects in production and circulation through

trade. Further, I argue that such a shift enables

an important move towards reconsidering the

ways in which Southern1 producers are

represented in (or indeed left out of) commod-

ity stories.

For some, the project of telling commodity

stories has been one of defetishisation:

‘removing the veil’ (Hudson and Hudson

2003) that hides the conditions of production

from the consumer, or exposing the ‘hidden

lives’ of objects (Crewe 2008: 29). However,

the concept of the fetish, and particularly the

idea of the social analyst revealing a coherent

truth behind the commodity, have been hotly

contested in recent writing (Cook and Crang

1996; Cook et al. 2011; Goodman 2004;

Hughes 2000). These debates have been

fruitful, producing commodity stories that

increasingly draw on nuanced concepts of

value, power and truth, avoiding both the

assumption that the consumer is the dupe of

large corporations, and the implicit suggestion

that the unmystified analyst holds a privileged,

all-seeing position (Page 2005). Although it is

a more complex task than a simple ‘unveiling’,

the telling of such stories remains driven by the

political imperative of rendering visible the

social relations that structure global econom-

ies. More specifically, commodity stories seek

to expose and understand the inequalities in

the relationships of power and knowledge that

structure value chains.

Without diminishing either the political or

the moral value of such accounts, this paper

seeks to challenge the construction of produ-

cers in geography’s commodity stories. I argue

that producers in the global South, in

particular, are imagined primarily in develop-

mental terms, such that the literature gives

little sense of Southern producers as more than

economic actors, narrowly defined. As Edjabe

and Pieterse (2010: 5) point out in the context

of urban Africa, where this paper too is

situated, the ‘ordinary’ stories of the lives and

social relations of subjects in the South are

seldom told:

Pick up any academic or popular publication that

deals with urban life in Africa and be prepared to

be overrun by caricature, hyperbole, stereotypes

and moralistic hogwash. Urban Africans are either

bravely en route to empowering themselves to

attain sustainable livelihoods or the debased

perpetrators of the most unimaginable acts of

misanthropy. Explanations for these one-

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dimensional distortions vary from historical

dependency perspectives, to the vagaries of the

peddlers of neoliberal globalisation agendas, or to

the glorious agency of dignified actors who persist

with their backs straight, chin up despite the

cruelties bestowed by governmental neglect and

economic malice. Amidst these registers it is

almost impossible to get any meaningful

purchase on what is actually going on in the

vibrant markets, streets, pavements, taxi ranks,

hotel lobbies, drinking halls, clubs, bedrooms,

rooftops, gardens, dump sites, beach fronts, river

edges, cemeteries, garages, basements and other

liminal spaces of daily life and the imaginary.

Therefore, in this paper, I explore Southern

producers as people who are both more

ordinary and more interesting than dominant

accounts allow, through an analysis of bead-

work production and trade in two well-known

craft markets in the city of Cape Town.

Because all the beadworkers I interviewed

were also traders—of their own and some-

times also of others’ work—their accounts of

production included stories of selling, and the

relations and identities thus generated. (Just as

the concept of ‘consumption’ encompasses a

mosaic of activities including purchasing,

using, collecting, gifting, etc., so ‘production’

is often more than simply the act of making.

The latter, especially for small-scale producers,

may include activities such as designing,

copying, marketing, selling one’s own work

and more and it is in this wider sense that this

paper discusses producers and practices of

production.)

The beadworkers’ narratives examined in

this paper challenge the dominant construc-

tions within commodity stories of Southern

producers as either empowered by particular

socio-economic initiatives, or else the subjects

of inequitable and exploitative economic

relations. Instead, they reveal ordinary people

whose economic practices are both mundane

and socially rich, ‘materialising’ and sustain-

ing such human capacities as love, dignity,

memory, friendship and kinship. In short, it

becomes clear from these interviews that

production is not only—perhaps not even

primarily—about livelihood strategies and

struggles, but rather about the creation of

both identity and a sense of belonging.

The personal narratives of these beadwor-

kers demonstrate the social and cultural work

that is done by the practices of making and

trading, challenging the economic bias of much

of the research on production. For the

beadworkers represented here, almost all of

whom were migrants from African countries

outside South Africa, making and trading

beadwork were instrumental in shaping social

relations: generating connections with new

friends and teachers, and sustaining links with

distant family. At the same time, the process of

making beadwork became a process of holding

the self together: allowing crafters to remember

and to forget in ways that enabled them to cope

with lives that had undergone dramatic change

in recent years, and were often socially and

economically precarious. At times, the labour

of production simply helped to pass the time, to

alleviate boredom and enable beadworkers to

get through the day. And for many, the material

processes of making beadwork also shaped a

new, autonomous identity, providing ways of

valuing their own work and finding a place in

the world that are not reducible simply to ideas

of economic agency or empowerment. Their

stories, as I will show, are thus deeply resonant

with Miller’s (2010: 135) notion of ‘things

making people as much as people make things’.

Hence, this story of African beadwork, told

through the narratives of beadworkers them-

selves, provides a means of rethinking pro-

duction as more than economic, as well as a

way of imagining Southern producers as much

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more than the subjects and objects of

development.

Producers as protagonists in commoditystories

Several recent reviews within cultural geogra-

phy have noted the privileging of consumption

over production in the commodity stories and

related literature.2 Cook and Tolia-Kelly

(2010: 111), for example, remark on the

relative absence not only of producers but also

of ‘designers, distributors, sellers, repairers,

disposers, collectors, re-sellers, thieves, coun-

terfeiters, etc.’ in ‘material cultural geogra-

phies’. Similarly, Mansfield (2003: 177)

observes that ‘recent literature on material

culture of consumption, the culture industries,

and business culture has not been able to

address the dynamics of production’, and

Jackson (1999) notes that consumption tends

to be privileged above production as the

economic point at which ‘culture’ is created.

While consumption has come to be read as a

site of creativity, interpretation, and identity

formation, production is generally seen as

primarily economic, less tangled in the

intricacies of signification, sociality, emotion,

and cultural meaning.

Scholars from disciplines including geogra-

phy, anthropology, cultural studies, and

sociology have shown that consumption

shapes us as human beings in profound

ways, through studies of domestic spaces

(Daniels 2010; Miller 2001; Tolia-Kelly

2004), shopping (Colls 2006; Miller 2004),

dressing (Woodward 2007), eating (Hayes-

Conroy and Hayes-Conroy 2008; Jackson

2010) and drinking (Miller 1998). As Barnett

et al. (2005: 4) point out, such research ‘has

demonstrated that everyday commodity con-

sumption is a realm for the actualisation of

capacities for autonomous action, reflexive

monitoring of conduct, and the self-fashioning

of relationships between selves and others’. To

argue for a more attentive examination of

production is not to deny these insights, nor is

it to call for a return to ‘a simple production-

ism in which economic activity determines

culture and the cultural context of commod-

ities’ (Mansfield 2003: 180). Rather, it is an

attempt to recognise that producers and the

practices of production (in the broad sense

described above, including such activities as

designing and selling) are as intrinsically

cultural as consumers and their purchasing,

collecting and gifting behaviours. That is to

say, the former are as materially generative of

social relations, identities and meaning as we

now readily accept to be true of consumption.

In this section, I explore the ways in which

producers have been constructed in cultural

geography’s commodity stories, to clear the

ground for rethinking the spaces and practices

of production, and more specifically, for

reconsidering the subject position of Southern

producers.

Producers are by no means absent in

commodity stories; indeed, a sense of respon-

sibility towards Southern producers typically

provides the impetus for such studies. Harvey

is often credited with initiating this trend, via

his call in 1990 for more politically respon-

sible consumption. Although the field has been

criticised as losing its radical edge (Castree

2004; Hartwick 2000; Leslie and Reimer

1999), it is clearly driven by a politics of

connection and compassion: commodity stor-

ies and cultural economic geography more

generally have over the last two decades

increasingly been enlivened by theories of

responsibility, the moral economy, relational-

ity and ethics of care (Barnett et al. 2005;

Clarke 2008; Mansvelt 2010; Massey 2004;

McEwan and Goodman 2010; Popke 2006).

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Broadly, this research aims to reveal the

unequal relationships of power on which

the globalised economy depends—to expose

the myriad connections between Southern

producers, the Northern consumers of their

goods and the many agents in between.

However, as Benson and Fischer (2007: 802)

note, in their study of non-traditional agricul-

ture, research on Southern producers tends ‘to

either critique the economic exploitation and

increased risk of global capitalism or celebrate

[production practices] as local resistance to the

world market’.

The former emphasis is certainly evident in

many influential geographical commodity

stories. For example, Cook et al.’s (2004)

‘following’ of papaya, in addition to telling the

stories of Northern actors (supermarket

buyers, consumers, etc.), provides a compel-

ling narrative about the multiple ways in

which Southern producers (farmers, pickers,

packers, weighers, wrappers, etc.) may be

marginalised, ‘ripped-off’, and put at physical

risk by the ‘cut-throat business’ of fruit

production and export. Similarly, Hughes’

(2000) examination of the commodity net-

works of cut flowers emphasises the dispro-

portionate amount of ‘risk and uncertainty’

shouldered by individual producers in the

global South, and the pressure on the latter ‘to

comply with the [Northern] retailers’

demands’ (181, 187). She points out that

while ‘retailers, designers and consumers’, and

‘the complex networks of relationships’

between them, are what create these pressures,

Southern producers are the ones who ulti-

mately shoulder the risk of not meeting

requirements on time (Hughes 2000).

As a third example, this time of the clothing

industry, Crewe’s (2008) commodity stories of

jeans, t-shirts and shoes stress the risks

attendant on many different ‘fashion victims’

(25). This includes Northern consumers, but

the study focuses particularly on factory

machinists in Asia and Africa who worked

‘like slaves’ (Crewe 2008: 30), or like

‘automatons’ (28), labouring long hours for

pitiful wages, and living in ‘crowded and

unsanitary’ conditions. While Crewe (2008)

notes that the attention given to ‘sweated

labour practices’ may be excessive (27), her

paper nonetheless foregrounds the exploita-

tive nature of production practices in the

global fashion industry and the unfair health

and economic risks borne by the Southern

producers of cheap western clothing, with the

aim of conscientising Northern consumers.

Additional examples of this emphasis on

exploitation and risk are evident in Goodman

(2004) and Dolan’s (2010) critiques of the

exploitative representations and discourses in

(what they see as) the increasingly neoliber-

alised ‘alternative’ movement of Fair Trade.

Their studies challenge the ways in which tea,

coffee and flower farmers are ‘commoditised’

and ‘fetishised’ (Goodman 2004) by the

discourses and images of Fair Trade, and

‘marginalised’, ‘patronised’ and ‘alienated’ by

more powerful agents—including global cor-

porations and auditing and certification

organisations—whose practices exclude them

‘from the processes of information dissemina-

tion and knowledge production’ (Dolan 2010:

38). Both authors contextualise their argu-

ments within broader development discourses

and aspirations which, they contend, can

become complicit in the exploitative social

relations of global capitalism.

These examples are indicative of the power-

ful exploitation narrative within commodity

stories. However, as Benson and Fischer

(2007) note, the flip side of that narrative is

a focus on the resistance, the empowerment

and the agency of Southern producers—

recalling Edjabe and Pieterse’s (2010: 5)

‘dignified actors . . . with their backs straight,

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chin up’. Goodman’s (2004: 893) emphasis on

‘Southern livelihood struggles’, for example

(the article cited above contains no fewer than

eleven references to the ‘livelihood struggles’

or simply the ‘struggles’ of people in the

South), is indicative of this discourse that

constitutes the second major thread in the

commodity stories literature and in work on

Southern producers more specifically.

Such work certainly foregrounds the agency

of producers and provides nuanced theoris-

ations of what constitutes empowerment

through studies of handicraft producers

(Ateljevic and Doorne 2010; Le Mare 2008,

2012; Oakes 1993), argan oil producers

(Waroux and Lambin 2013), and farmers of

tea (Dolan 2010), rooibos (Daya and Authar

2012; Nel, Binns, and Bek 2007) and sugar

(Phillips 2011), among others. While the focus

here is on the agency of producers, construct-

ing them as active participants in global

markets, the lens of empowerment never-

theless retains a relatively narrow focus on the

economic realm, defining producers by their

needs and their livelihoods.

Producers in this literature thus continue to

be imagined in terms of their (unequal)

economic relationship with Northern consu-

mers and other Northern actors, rather than as

multidimensional people in their own right,

with lives, interests and connections that extend

beyond, even as they are enmeshed in, the

realm of the economic.We learn little about the

ordinariness of their lives, relationships, dom-

estic spaces, leisure spaces, dreams, joys,

boredom, pleasures, hobbies or petty resent-

ments—the kinds of things that commodity

stories increasingly tell us about Northern

consumers. We learn little about Southern

producers, in fact, except as actors sketched in

developmental terms that rarely extend to real

understanding of the co-production of the

economic and the sociocultural.

The tendency to construct Southern produ-

cers as exploited and at risk, on the one hand,

and/or resistant, dissenting or empowered on

the other does not necessarily diminish the

political and moral value of commodity

stories. Nor does a shift from these dominant

narratives necessarily mean ignoring the

unequal power relations that shape the global

economy. The particular economic focus of

their developmentalist perspectives does

suggest, however, that some depth may

usefully be added to the discursive construc-

tion of Southern producers in this literature.

A few recent commodity stories illustrate

how greater depths might be plumbed, as they

imagine Southern producers in ways that

escape the exploitation/empowerment narra-

tives underpinning so much of the literature.

Two studies in particular illustrate the

potential of alternative perspectives to achieve

this re-imagining. The first is Benson and

Fischer’s (2007: 802) study of non-traditional

agriculture, cited above, which begins with the

intention of ‘uncover[ing] exploitation at the

hither side of the commodity chain’ but,

crucially, finds farmers’ stories to be more

ambiguous than this conventional lens allows.

Their analysis therefore explores producers’

economic engagement instead through a

framework of desire which, while ‘not elid

[ing] crucial questions of power [and, indeed,

empowerment], agency, and inequality’, cap-

tures more human dimensions of existence

than dominant frameworks of need, liveli-

hood, oppression and resistance. Incorporat-

ing ‘cultural values, moral models, and hopes

for the future’, this study ‘resist[s] the urge to

reproduce the simple lopsided equation of

southern need versus northern desire’ (Benson

and Fischer 2007: 814). The result is a

portrayal of Southern producers as simul-

taneously more ordinary and more culturally

rich than many commodity stories suggest.

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Ramsay (2009) also trains a novel lens on

Southern producers, here Swazi craft produ-

cers, in her theorisation of production,

marketing, selling and purchasing as forms

of enchantment.3 Noting that commodity

stories which aim to connect producers and

consumers tend to overlook—in their focus on

exploitation—‘those encounters which fall

beyond the “commodity” status of an object’

(Ramsay 2009: 200), Ramsay elides questions

of economic oppression and empowerment in

favour of an understanding of producers as

weaving a kind of magic through a range of

strategies. These include ‘inviting tourists to

watch souvenir production processes’

(Ramsay 2009: 204), and offering ‘entertain-

ment and explanation’ to captivate potential

buyers. Rather than suffering, struggling or

overcoming, Ramsay’s producers appear as

magicians, conjurers, alchemists and story-

tellers, infusing objects with memories and

stories that entice and enchant.

Moving beyond the dominant narratives of

exploitation/empowerment without ignoring

the questions of power and agency that drive

the socio-economic analysis of commodity

stories, these researchers open up the possi-

bility of re-imagining Southern producers as

interesting people in their own right. While the

economic participation, the needs and the

livelihoods of the latter are vital parts of their

stories, they are not everything—the farmers

and crafters in these studies are defined by

much more than their relationship to a

Northern consumer in a global economic

marketplace.

In what follows, I examine some of what

thus exceeds the economic in the lives of

beadwork producers in Cape Town. Their

accounts demonstrate that while livelihood

obviously matters, the important outcomes of

their practices of production include relation-

ships of friendship, kinship and solidarity, and

a sense of identity that exceeds notions of

agency and empowerment.

Beadwork in Cape Town

To explore the production of African bead-

work and its significance as a site of social and

cultural meaning, I undertook research in a

large open-air craft market, and an enclosed,

permanent tourist market, in central Cape

Town, observing and interviewing around

fourty beadwork producers and traders, most

of whom were entrepreneurs running their

own businesses. Almost all of the interviewees

were migrants to the city, most from other

African countries and one or two from the

more rural provinces of South Africa. The

ratio of men to women was roughly 1:3.

Interviews with these traders were informal

and semi-structured. They took place over a

period of 8 months during the autumn and

winter of 2011. Most participants were

interviewed once during this time, in sessions

lasting from 20min to over an hour; on a few

occasions, we had a second or third conversa-

tion. As several participants expressed, early

on in the research, their reluctance to have

their voices recorded, detailed notes were

made during interviews and written up after

each day’s work. The stories quoted here are

therefore not verbatim, but have been recon-

structed from these field notes. Most partici-

pants were happy, however, for their

photograph to be taken, and gave permission

for these to be reproduced in published

research.

There were some limitations to exploring a

commodity story in this way. The primary

research method employed, namely inter-

views, relied on producers themselves to

articulate their stories of production, in

relatively short periods of time. With more

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time and resources (particularly to enable

greater researcher mobility), these interviews

might fruitfully be brought together with a

more physical ‘following’ of the beaded

objects in question. This would enable

researchers (a) to trace and unpack more

fully the myriad social relations generated

through production, and (b) to combine the

sociocultural analysis undertaken here with a

materialist analysis of the beaded objects

themselves.

The benefit of the methods employed,

however, was to enable participants’ own

narratives to take centre stage, and allow them

to direct the conversation to themes and topics

that they most wanted to discuss. Initially, all

participants were asked about where they were

from, how they had come to be earning a living

through beadwork, what they had studied or

worked at before entering the craft industry,

how they had learned to bead and how they felt

about the work—whether they saw it as art,

craft or something else, andwhat they sawas the

benefits of this kind of work. Most participants

took these questions as cues to talk about their

experiences of and feelings about craft rather

than the economic impacts of this kind of work.

Through their responses and through obser-

vation of their everyday production activities, it

became clear that the practices of learning to

make beaded objects and the act of making

itself, as well as the processes of setting up a

business and selling their handmade objects,

produced multiple forms of personal and social

meaning and connection.

Most of these producers were migrants to

South Africa or at least to Cape Town. Craft,

with its low start-up costs and relatively easy

market access, was for them a livelihood

strategy born of necessity. Their stories

emphasised, however, that learning to bead,

and making and selling their work, exceeded

the economic realm, being at heart social

experiences that created and sustained

relationships of all kinds. The completed

beadwork was far from the only or even the

most important outcome of these relation-

ships; rather, the relationships themselves were

what most of the stories were ‘about’.

The stories of these commodities, as told by

their producers, were therefore seldom about

prices, income and value, although these

topics did arise, as I will show. Mainly,

however, they focused on the capacities of

production practices to produce a sense of

community and belonging, structured by

dynamics of gender, kinship, regional solidar-

ity and collegiality. In addition, many

described how production had restored or

provided a new sense of self-identity, with

practices of beading and selling facilitating

greater emotional and psychological strength.

In the sections that follow, quotations and

vignettes from the beadwork producers’ own

experiences are used to demonstrate how the

practices of producing bright, contemporary

crafts also produce them as people, connected

across space and time to both strangers and

loved ones.

Producing gender

Many producers’ stories centred on memories

of learning to bead in their home countries or

regions. The memories of some of the women,

in particular, illustrate the power of traditional

production practices to sustain particular

forms of sociality and identity, such as gender

roles. For Mama Toni, Maybele and Mama

Bonni, learning to bead at home, with other

women, had provided an excuse to socialise

while simultaneously creating a distinctively

feminine space in which appropriate roles

could be learned and carried out. The

productive activity made it possible—and

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legitimate—to sit chatting for hours, thus

escaping duller or more demanding chores,

without actually neglecting their childcare

duties or appearing to abandon domestic

tasks. As Mama Toni related:

It is very popular for women in the Congo to bead.

We often sit for the whole afternoon under a tree

and talk while we are beading. It is a very social

activity. Beading for women is a way to leave the

house and get away from everyday duties. It is also

seen as a very respectable thing to do and so the men

do not mind if we sit and bead all afternoon.

Similarly, Maybele reflected on her experi-

ence of growing up in rural Mpumalanga,

where beading was a clearly gendered practice

that helped to reinforce understandings of the

appropriate roles, education and skills for men

and women.

We used to often sit with our friends and chat and

bead together. It was fun. It was a thing for the

women. The men were out all day with the cattle

and they learnt different things from each other.

And Mama Bonni, from Kenya, related

experiences that were resonant with both of

these:

It seems that I always knew how to bead. Everyone

in my family knew how to bead as it was seen as a

good social thing to do. All the womenwould go and

sit outside for a few hours and bead while they talked

to each other. The childrenwould then also come out

and would either sleep if they were still young, or we

would play games close to our mothers.

For all three of these women, producing

beadwork meant producing gender roles at the

same time. Beadwork provided a way of

evading certain expectations while still retain-

ing a solid appearance of social propriety.

Their accounts, while they demonstrate the

often gendered nature of beadwork, do not

show—as most work on African beadwork

suggests (see Carey 1998; Jolles 2010)—that

gender or other (pre-given) social identities

determine the kind of beadwork that is

produced, but exactly the reverse: that the

processes of producing material goods also

produce identity and social norms. In this case,

they do so by reinforcing, through the

dynamics of practice, appropriate social roles

for girls, wives and mothers.

While the men were out in the bush or fields,

learning about farming and agriculture, the

women were learning to enact womanhood,

creating social spaces in which distinctively

feminine activities such as child rearing could

be carried out. Mama Toni’s observation that

‘the men do not mind if the women sit and

bead all afternoon’ hinted that simply sitting

and doing nothing was not permissible, not

‘respectable’. Keeping the hands busy by

beading, however, allowed the women to

relax and socialise without being criticised for

being lazy or unproductive.

Although beadwork is typically regarded as

a feminine activity, it is by no means

exclusively so. Indeed, groups of Zimbabwean

young men in Cape Town have effectively

reconfigured beaded wirework as an ‘esteemed

trade, a more masculine domain [than trading

cheap Chinese-made goods] through which

they are able to demonstrate artistic skills and

produce uniquely distinguished crafts’ (Mat-

shaka 2009: 73). Several of the crafters in my

study, too, were men. For some of them, as the

‘Sustaining kinship, friendship’ section shows,

the physical practices of beading evoked even

more powerful senses of belonging than for the

women cited above, bringing to the fore

memories and emotions that connected them

with loved ones, whether present, distant or

permanently absent from their lives.

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Sustaining kinship and friendship

Bruno, from the Democratic Republic of

Congo (DRC), described how the act of

beading together had facilitated greater close-

ness between him and his wife. For him, the

pleasure of beadwork lay less in the product or

even primarily in the income it brought, and

more in the way that the practice united him

and his wife in shared activity, establishing the

two of them as ‘a team’ (Figure 1). His story

emphasised how simple co-presence—the act

of physically sitting with his wife as they both

worked at the similar tasks—strengthened

their relationship:

My wife taught me how to bead and I have been

helping her do it ever since she taught me. I make

the wire structures and bead, and she beads with

me. I enjoy beading because it is something I can do

with mywife. It is nice to do it together when we are

at the market. It makes us happier with each other

because we can work as a team.

For Fungai, a young man whose stall was

made up mainly of beaded animals of all sizes,

beadwork meant providing continuity within

his family, and remaining connected them even

though they were in Zimbabwe while he lived

on his own in Cape Town. He expressed his

pride in being able to continue the ‘family

business’ of craft production. He and his

father shared the work by each spending

1month in Zimbabwe making craft with the

rest of the family, and the next in Cape Town

selling their goods at a large craft market

(Figure 2).

My father, and earlier my grandfather, both made

beaded animals and statues using wire to give the

statues shape. I was taught by my father and

grandfather. I enjoyed it very much and when I

finished school I was happy to join the family

business. I am very proud to be working with my

father and doing the same things my grandfather

also used to do.

Andrew told a similar story of beadwork

connecting him to his grandmother, who

taught him to bead at home in Malawi. He

spoke in detail about their close

relationship after the death of his grandfather

when Andrew was very young. With her

eyesight failing, his grandmother asked

Figure 1 Bruno’s stall.

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Andrew to help her with the beadwork she

loved to make. She taught him the skills,

telling him she hoped that he would enjoy it as

much as she did. After she passed away in

2008, Andrew moved to Cape Town and used

his craft skills to support himself (Figure 3).

My grandmother taught me to bead in many

different styles. She showed me how to use wire to

make certain shapes and structures. I am now able

to make necklaces, earrings and beadwork coasters.

My grandmother showed me everything there is to

know about the art, how to tie the thread and the

wires so it looks neat and how to match different

bead sizes and colours. All the things that I bead

now are done in the style that my grandmother

taught me, as this makes me feel closer to her.

For both Andrew and Fungai, craft pro-

duction in the styles taught them by their

Figure 2 A sample of Fungai’s work.

Figure 3 Andrew’s stall.

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elders, who were no longer present, served as a

means of connecting with them. The act of

making invoked both memories of those

relatives and the kin relationship itself, which

was not now manifest in any easily accessible

form. Making beadwork provided for these

men a way of making real their place in the

world and their belonging to others both seen

and unseen.

For Lise, beadwork played a similar role,

enabling a kind of ‘psychic travel’ by which

she could retreat into memories of her life in

Gabon, which she had not wanted to leave.

Having learnt to bead with her friends while

growing up, Lise subsequently travelled to

Cape Town and gained a degree in electrical

engineering. As her husband needed help in his

shop, she did not seek work in her field but

joined him instead. ‘I enjoy beading’, she told

us, ‘It allows me to play with different colours

and shapes and sizes. But most importantly it

reminds me of my friends back in Gabon and

how we used to all bead together.’ Lise had not

wanted to migrate as all her family were still in

Gabon. ‘But sometimes it happens that you

have to do things that you do not really like to

do, like move to another country that you

know nothing about,’ she said. As for Andrew

and Fungai, the act of beading provided for

Lise a way back to relationships and places

that were deeply missed, making tangible the

memories that helped to make her current

circumstances more tolerable.

More immediate connections were created

across distance and national boundaries for

some producers, through a familial division of

labour. For entrepreneurs such as Elisa from

Kenya, Sifiso from Durban (about 2 days’ bus

travel from Cape Town), and Veronica and

Mavis from Zimbabwe, the mobilities of

beadwork supplies and completed products

helped to sustain and develop family net-

works. All these women had immediate and

extended families in their home regions who

collected and/or made craft products to send

to Cape Town to be sold. Elisa, for example,

travelled home to Kenya every 2 months to see

her family, including her children, and to

collect the goods they had accumulated in her

absence. Their making and purchasing craft

for her ‘bought’ her free time: ‘So when I am in

Kenya I do not have to run around and look

for goods. I can spend most of my time with

my children.’

Sifiso’s family in Durban also bought craft

products and sent them to her in Cape Town,

along with big boxes of beaded necklaces and

earrings that they had made. Sifiso herself also

made many of the beaded items that she sold,

and she proudly declared that her family was

the sole producer of beaded jewellery for her

stall. And like Sifiso, Veronica and Mavis

made their own goods and sold both these and

the beadwork that their families at home in

Zimbabwe made for their stalls. They often

travelled back to Zimbabwe, too, in order to

bring back more goods. In Mavis’ case, her

‘suppliers’ included children in the family as

young as eight, as well as relatives by

marriage, and the profits from the stall were

shared equitably among everyone.

For all four of these women, beaded objects

were the means by which family networks

were sustained across sometimes great dis-

tances. The shared industry of the separated

family members cemented their connection

through daily activities of buying, making and

selling, and the completed boxes of crafts,

waiting for collection, both created the need

for, and enabled, mobility and face-to-face

visits on a regular basis. The mobility of craft

objects in production and in networks of trade

plays an important role in sustaining transna-

tional lives and networks. With the processes

of production and exchange able to be split

across nations, yet contained within kin

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relationships, intimate connections are kept

strong even as entrepreneurs leave their

families and travel to live and work in distant

cities.

Producing solidarities, producing others

In addition to their roles in the reproduction

and sustenance of existing social norms, such

as gender, and existing connections, such as

those of kinship, the material objects and

practices of craft production and trade also

help to produce new social networks, as well

as to shape boundaries of inclusion and

exclusion. For all participants, beadwork

production served to bring together strangers

as teachers and students, as colleagues and/or

as traders and tourist consumers. Isabel, for

example, started working at her uncle’s stall

based in a large craft market ‘shed’ in Cape

Town. She made several friends in the market

and some of them taught her to bead.

Although she already knew ‘the basics’, as

she put it, her friends taught her more intricate

styles. Mary, similarly, quickly made friends

with other stall-holders when she set up a craft

stall at a different market to the one where she

had started out.

I particularly became friendly with one man who

promised to teach me how to bead. He showed me

which beads to buy and which colours to match

together. He also showed me the different wires I

could bead on and the various beading techniques

that were available as well.

Many crafters gave similar accounts of

trading, making new friends and learning new

skills from them. Cared, a young Zimbabwean

entrepreneur, took pleasure in coming to the

market every day and seeing the same people

at their stalls: ‘They become your family and

very close friends.’ Macy expressed the same

sentiment: ‘It is much better now that there are

many people around me who I can talk to. I

have made many friends.’

Through the processes of learning new

production skills and the necessity of sharing

spaces of trade, relationships were forged that

were often mutually beneficial, as the ‘student’

typically helped the ‘teacher’ by working at,

and producing stock for, their stall. These are

links born of pragmatism and opportunity

rather than an initial emotional ‘spark’, but

they are no less meaningful for that. Their

situatedness in and around the objects of

beads, wire and string, and in the specific

geographies of market stalls and squares,

highlights the simple but powerful role of

material production in generating the social

dynamics that enable migrants to get by in

unfamiliar and sometimes unfriendly (and

recently violently xenophobic) cities.

The connections thus forged are not limited

to fellow traders but extend to the consumers

of their work. These, even more than the

collegial relationships with other stall-holders,

are restricted within the bounds of commercial

transactions and the limited amount of

interaction that leads up to and follows on

from them. Such forms of sociality both are

material and matter in an existential sense,

giving a sense of worth to the labour and

creativity of the entrepreneurs. Participants

frequently commented, for example, on the

pleasure they felt when consumers compli-

mented their work. Both the admiration from

tourists and the pride of the traders in these

exchanges were rooted in the same thing: the

hand-produced nature of the object. The

knowledge of the mental and physical effort

required to shape the item in question gave it a

value that far exceeded the monetary cost of

the raw materials. As Mama Lucy explained:

‘The tourists often like to buy my bracelets

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because they like hearing that I myself made

them.’ And Sylvia agreed: ‘I think that beaded

items are what the customer wants more

because they appreciate the skill and technique

that goes into them’ (Figure 4). Sifiso, too,

emphasised the value of the handmade:

‘Tourists really like my necklaces as they

always find it shocking that I myself made

something like that.’ Veronica summed

up their sentiments:

I am very proud when they buy my own beaded

products. Since it is so hard to make them, it feels

good when you can sell it to someone who really

appreciates the work.

Not all encounters with tourists were

positive, however. Several participants indi-

cated that the processes of selling also produced

less genial forms of connection. For them, these

drew lines of identity and difference between

consumers in a perhaps unexpected way,

marking out locals as sympathetic and foreign

tourists as (at times) insensitive and ignorant of

the realities of life in South Africa. No one

among our interviewees proposed the opposite,

suggesting that thismaybe a generally accepted

notion of the difference between local and

foreign consumers.

While on the one hand traders felt that, as

Katrine put it, ‘it is normal for us to haggle

about the price—it makes the day more fun’, it

was clear, on the other hand, that the

negotiation was often taken too far by foreign

tourists, or undertaken in ways that traders

considered impolite. As Joselina put it:

The tourists [as opposed to the locals] have been

told that you must try to cut down the price as much

as possible. And so when they come here they will

start to barter with the price of R5 [about US60c].

What is R5? I cannot feed myself and my husband

with R5!

Maybele shared Joselina’s displeasure:

The [foreign] tourists are an interesting group. They

often like to come and barter the goods in order to

decrease the price. Often this is done in a friendly,

good-natured manner. However, sometimes the

[foreign] tourists can be quite rough in their

mannerisms.

Figure 4 Sylvia at her stall.

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By contrast, there were several remarks by

crafters as to the shared understanding of the

value of their craft between themselves and

local (South African) consumers. Joselina

expressed it thus: ‘The locals understand us.

They will look at what I have to offer, remark

on how well it is made and then ask for the

price. If they want to buy it, then they will.’

Irene articulated the comparison in the clearest

terms:

I also get many people who come to my stall who are

locals. I enjoy serving them as I feel they have more

knowledge of my products as they understand the

culturalmeanings that goes into them.They locals are

also keen to barter but they do so in amuch friendlier

way than the tourists. The tourists, it feels, were told

they must bargain a price down as low as possible,

sometimes so low that it does not even cover the

materials itwasmade from.They also often get angry

when you tell them you are not happy with the price.

The locals are different. They understand that you

alsoneed tomakea livingand so theyaremorewilling

to pay a more just price for them.

As the catalyst for many new, if transient,

social interactions, beadwork produces both

shared identities and difference. Through learn-

ing in close proximity with a fellow trader, and

selling to different types of consumers, the

everyday production and trading practices of

these entrepreneurs create connections thatmay

bemomentary or lasting, but in a real sense also

produce the people involved: as skilled craft

producers, as people who belong in a place, as

‘those who are like us’ and those others who are

not. Simply put, the processes of making and

selling help to materialise boundaries of

belonging, including someandexcludingothers.

As with the gender roles discussed earlier, these

identities do not necessarily pre-exist the

practices in question, or at least are not wholly

pre-given. Rather, they are fundamentally

relational and are produced through everyday,

material interactions and performances.

Producing selves

The analysis thus far has suggested that

contemporary African beadwork—through

the processes of its production, through its

mobilities within and between African

countries and through being exchanged for

money—actively generates and sustains con-

nections of all kinds. The multiple acts

encapsulated in the term ‘production’ cannot

simply be reduced to the realms of the

economic; the accounts excerpted here clearly

demonstrate how economic motivations,

decisions and actions shape social roles and

norms, create new networks, relationships and

others, and generate among producers the

kinds of intimacies that are the very stuff of

which society and culture are made. In this

final analytical section, I want to reflect on

how the material practices of production also

shape producers as individuals.

Economic autonomy was a major feature of

many of the beadwork producers’ stories.

Interviewees took pride in the beauty of the

objects they produced and the skills required

to make them, as well as reaping satisfaction

from running their own businesses. As Mama

Lucy put it, in words that were resonant across

the interviews:

It is good to know that I can work when I want, but

if I don’t work hard then I do not get any gain. But I

know that when I work hard, all the money that I

make is from my work, and I get paid for my

hardship . . . I get out what I put in.

Like Mama Lucy, many producers empha-

sised the hard work and diligent perseverance

that had been required to develop their skills,

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stressing that learning their craft had been

difficult and even painful at times, but that

ultimately they had succeeded. Their stories

thus foregrounded not their economic margin-

alisation or victimisation, their struggles and

hardships, but rather the control they enjoyed

over their own lives and the value of their

work.

The sense of self that such control produced

was encapsulated in Boris’ story, which was

related by his wife Bernice. Having lost a leg in

an accident, Boris was unable to find work. To

pass the time, he began to make beaded wire

art in the styles that his grandmother had

taught him years before.

My husband realised his days got better when he

beaded and so it became a normal occurrence. The

number of his beaded items grew and soon I decided

we needed to clear it all out to make space. I saw it

as a hobby at that time. A friend told me that maybe

I could sell the pieces to make some money. So I

walked to a few places . . . I was shocked that

someone would pay so much for it! The sale made a

good impact on our family as my husband now felt

that he was contributing to the family income and

this brightened his mood each day. He felt

important and useful again.

It would be tempting to explain the stories of

producers such asMamaLucy andBoris simply

as evidence of their agency, to counter the

powerful construction of Southern producers

as exploited by the global economic system and

its inequalities. Indeed, these producers’ stories

do lend themselves to this kind of interpret-

ation, but the ways in which beadwork shapes

these individuals is not reducible to a frame-

work of agency. Such an analysis would miss

the fact that the impacts of production, for

these craft producers, both ran deeper andwere

more ordinary than simply an extended

capacity to act in the world or to change their

lives—‘to make their own histories and

geographies in conditions of their own choos-

ing’ (Lee 2010: 273). Indeed, even though such

full agency or choice was not always available

to participants, much value was still to be

found in their economic and artistic autonomy.

The artistry of their work was certainly

foregrounded by many participants, who

described how the act of making had turned

them into (or reinforced their sense of

themselves as) skilled artisans. This provided

them with a status that did not necessarily

yield significant economic benefits or the

power to bring about life changes, but carried

personal and cultural value in its own right.

They insisted on the intrinsic value of the

hand–mind connection, what might be called

‘the intelligent hand’ (Sennett 2008),

demanded by their work. As Macy argued,

handmade produces should always be seen as

art, as they embody both careful thinking and

mechanical skills. These producers’ craft

required ‘a lot of imagination’ (Alice), ‘so

much thought’ (Macy), constant creativity

(Sylvia), and planning and design. These

mental processes, coordinated with the

body—the arms, wrists and fingers—in

painstakingly developed techniques, consti-

tuted the artistic value of the goods they

produced and their own status as skilled

artisans. As Sifiso suggested, the work

demanded by art and craft was something

fundamentally human (Figure 5):

In beadwork, you use your hands and your head to

make beautiful things. Both art and craft show the

skill which only a person can hold, and so they

show what can be made completely by a person.

To reduce this gradual production of skill,

self-esteem, pride and emotional engagement,

and the pursuance of high-quality artisanal

work for its own sake, to notions simply of

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agency or empowerment, is to miss the

internal, emotional or psychological sense of

self—the very humanity—that is being honed

as part and parcel of pursuing high-quality

work and thinking of oneself in those terms.

The production of an artist is thus both more

and less than the enhancement of one’s ability

to bring about change in the world.

Finally, besides economic autonomy and a

senseofartistry, beadwork shaped individuals in

more ordinary yet still important ways.Making

intricate beaded objects provided a way to pass

the time, alleviate boredom, and push fears and

worries, negative feelings and sad memories to

the background, albeit temporarily. For several

participants, the act of beading served almost as

a therapy, or simply a means of making

themselves feel better. By demanding that

creative decisions be made about style and

colour, and affording the chance to ‘lose

themselves’ in the repetitive actions and the

concentration required for shaping wire fames,

threading beads and tying tidy knots, beadwork

offered an emotional escape.

While Lise’s story (in the section entitled

‘Sustaining kinship and friendship’) indicated

the importance of beadwork in materialising

memory, here the processes of forgetting are

more central. Thus, for Stella and Alice, as for

Boris, the practices of beading were comfort-

ing in themselves. As Stella put it, the process

was ‘de-stressing’, allowing her to ‘just sit for a

couple of hours and thread the beads and

make beautiful things’. Alice, who came to

Cape Town to escape the war in Togo,

similarly explained:

Beading takes the bad emotions away. I can get lost

in the process and forget about everything that is

worrying me at the moment.

Even more mundanely, beadwork was

simply a way to alleviate boredom and

keep oneself ‘amused’ when few other activities

were available, as Monique related. Sitting at a

stall all day, especially when there were few

customers, could be tedious, and beading

helped to pass the time as well as increase the

stock for the shop. Mavis explained:

Sometimes sitting at the stall can be quite slow and

boring, so I make more jewellery while I sit there.

That alsomeans that I havea constant supply coming

in and I can see what is popular and what is not.

Figure 5 Sifiso’s necklaces.

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By affording autonomy, enabling ‘psychic

travel’ away from particular places, times and

feelings through active processes of forgetting,

and simply in keeping the mind occupied to

make the time pass more quickly, the practice of

making beadwork played an important role for

participants in establishing and reaffirming

themselves as individuals. It should be seen,

therefore, as having a generative status with

regard to the self as much as to social roles and

networks. Relieving anxiety and easing

emotional pain, the processes of making bead-

work, for these participants, alsomeant making

themselves, not necessarily as agents of change,

but as artists, and as stronger and more resilient

people.

Conclusion

This paper has suggested that the tellers of

commodity stories might fruitfully turn their

attention to production rather than privileging

consumption as the site at which social and

cultural meaning is generated. Like consump-

tion (the purchasing, gifting and using of

goods), the activities of production (including

designing, making and selling) cannot be

divorced from the sociocultural or confined

to the realm of the economic. The stories of

Elisa, Fungai, Bruno and all the other

producers interviewed here clearly demon-

strate how the two realms are entangled from

the start, each constantly shaping the other.

The learning, making and trading processes

involved in the production of African bead-

work are, it is clear, always already social and

cultural, shaping the individuals concerned

and their relationships with others.

Through the recognition of production as a

culturally rich and dynamic sphere, the figure

of the Southern producer can begin to be re-

imagined. Thus, this paper has tried to move

away from the ‘caricature, hyperbole, stereo-

types and moralistic hogwash’ that Edjabe and

Pieterse (2010: 5) denounce, and to go beyond

the framing of Southern producers primarily

in terms of their exploitation, marginalisation,

empowerment or livelihood ‘struggles’. In

contrast to the developmentalist underpinning

of many commodity stories about Southern

producers, this sociocultural analysis of the

production of beadwork in Cape Town craft

markets has opened up some of the ways in

which belonging and identity are shaped

through everyday economic practice.

The very ordinariness of these socialities is

the point of this shift in perspective. The

producers interviewed for this project are not

exceptional; their stories of migration, remem-

bering, forgetting and economic necessity are

common to thousands in South Africa’s cities,

and their experiences of sustaining connec-

tions, forming relationships, developing a

sense of self, and getting through the working

day are much like everyone else’s. While

North–South economic power relations,

manifested in the global tourist market,

undoubtedly shape their lives, these clearly

do not determine all that is interesting about

these individuals.

If more commodity stories, with their

critical, cultural lenses, focused on the every-

day practices and processes of production,

Southern producers might begin to be seen as

more than exploited and marginalised, or,

alternatively, agential and empowered. Their

ordinary economic lives, rich and mundane in

equal measure, might begin to be seen as

interesting in their own right rather than only

in relation to Northern consumers. In this way,

the many relationalities that constitute such

lives could be opened up, including those

among colleagues, family members and

friends, as well as between strangers both

near and distant.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Joanna Szewczyk for help with

interviews and photography, and to Ash Amin

for thoughtful critiques on earlier drafts of this

paper. Thanks also to three anonymous

reviewers for their insightful and constructive

comments.

Funding

This work was supported by research funding

from the South African National Research

Foundation and the University of Cape Town,

and sabbatical funding from the Urban Studies

Foundation.

Notes

1. Many different terms exist to distinguish between the

richer, poorer nations of the world. ‘Third-world’,

‘majority world’, ‘developing world’, ‘global South’

have all been, are all, used to refer to nations including

SouthAfricawhohave not experienced the same forms or

rates of industrialisation, economic development as

America, Europe, Australasia, certain parts of Asia. All

of these terms have their histories, contexts, their benefits,

disadvantages. However, ‘South’, ‘Southern’ have come

to be the preferred terms for most contemporary

geographers, as they are generally understood, accepted,

they are the terms employed in this paper.

2. It should be noted that the surge of interest in

consumption in recent decades is itself, in part, a

reaction against its neglect in earlier, Marxist-inflected

geographies of commodities that concerned themselves

almost exclusively with production. The call by these

scholars, indeed by this paper, for renewed attention to

production does not indicate the desire for a

straightforward return to earlier forms of analysis.

Rather, what is being sought is a socially, culturally

sensitive analysis of production that was lacking in

earlier geographies of production, remains somewhat

neglected in contemporary, consumption-focused

studies.

3. Drawing of course on Jane Bennett’s work on the same.

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Abstract translationsAu-dela de l’exploitation/emancipation: re –imagi-ner les producteurs du Sud dans des histoires deproduits

Un des elements les plus dominants de la rechercheau cœur du ‘tournant materialiste’ de la geographieculturelle est celui des histoires de produits. Destelephones aux fleurs, quel que soit le produit, lesgeographes ont tente de reveler la myriade deconnections entre les consommateurs (du Nord)et les producteurs (du Sud). En suivant les produitset en retrac�ant leurs reseaux, cette recherche atendance a privilegier la consommation comme siteprincipal de signification sociale et culturelle dansl’economie mondiale. La ou les producteurs sont aucentre de l’attention, le cadre theorique pourcomprendre leur vie est en principe developpemen-taliste, mettant en avant l’exploitation et /ou

l’emancipation. De cette maniere, nous apprenonspeu de chose des histoires de produits sur les viesordinaires de producteurs du Sud et la coproductiondu socioculturel et de l’economie a travers leurspratiques quotidiennes. Cet article argue qu’uneanalyse socioculturelle plus approfondie des pro-cessus de production est necessaire afin d’equilibrerla domination actuelle d’histoires de produitsmenees par la consommation et, ce qui est plusimportant encore, afin d’ouvrir un espace pour unere-imagination des producteurs du Sud. A travers lerecit personnel de 40 producteurs d’artisanat deperles au Cap, j’examine comment les pratiquesquotidiennes de la production artisanale maintien-nent les relations sociales existantes, creent denouveaux reseaux et participent a la formation d’unsens d’appartenance en meme temps qu’un sens dela perception de soi. A travers cette histoire deproduit, les vies de producteurs du Sud se revelent ala fois plus riches et plus ordinaires que lesconstructions predominantes le suggerent.

Mots-clefs: producteurs du Sud, histoires deproduits, Afrique du Sud, artisanat de perles,appartenance, identite.

Mas alla de la explotacion/empoderamiento: re-imaginando los productores del sur en las historiasde mercancıas

Uno de los capıtulos mas dominantes de lainvestigacion dentro del ‘giro materialista’ en lageografıa cultural es el de las historias de lasmercancıas. A traves de todo tipo de producto, desdetelefonos a flores, los geografos han intentadorevelar las innumerables conexiones entre consumi-dores (del norte) y productores (del sur). Medianteun seguimiento de mercancıas y el rastreo de susredes, la investigacion tiende a dar privilegio alconsumo como sitio primario de significado social ycultural dentro de la economıa global. Cuando losproductores son el foco, el marco teorico para lacomprension de la vida suele ser desarrollista,poniendo en primer plano la explotacion y/oempoderamiento. De este modo, se aprende muypoco de las historias de las mercancıas sobre la vidacotidiana de los productores del sur y la co-produccion de lo socio-cultural y lo economico atraves de sus practicas diarias. Este documentosostiene que un analisis socio-cultural mas profundo

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de los procesos de produccion es necesario paraequilibrar el dominio actual de las historias de lasmercancıas orientadas hacia el consumo y, masimportante aun, para abrir espacio a una re-imaginacion de los productores del sur. A traves delos relatos personales de 40 productores de abaloriosen Ciudad del Cabo, se explora como las practicascotidianas de la produccion artesanal sostienenrelaciones sociales existentes, generan nuevas redes,

y ayudan a dar forma tanto al sentido de pertenenciacomo al sentido de ser uno mismo. Esta historia demercancıa revela que las vidas de los productores delsur son mas ricas y mas mundanas de lo que lasconstrucciones dominantes sugieren.

Palabras claves: Productores del sur, Historias de lasmercancıas, Sudafrica, Abalorios, Pertenencia,Identidad.

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