Suchergebnisse

"Fashion knock-offs are everywhere. Even in the out-of-the-way markets of highland Guatemala, fake branded clothes offer a cheap, stylish alternative for people who can't afford high-priced originals. Fashion companies have taken notice, ensuring that international trade agreements include stronger intellectual property protections to prevent brand 'piracy.' Regulating Style approaches the fashion industry from the perspective of indigenous Maya people who make and sell knock-offs, asking why they copy and wear popular brands, how they interact with legal frameworks and state institutions that criminalize their livelihood, and what is really at stake for fashion companies in the global regulation of style"--Provided by publisher

This article takes Eric Wolf's concept of the closed, corporate community as a starting point for exploring how senses of community take shape in highland Guatemala in relation to contemporary property and production models that are premised on the sovereignty of legal corporations (i.e., multinational firms). Findings are based on ethnographic fieldwork among indigenous Maya entrepreneurs who own small‐scale clothing manufacturing businesses and who routinely copy trademarked fashion brands. Their understandings and practices of community reveal a great deal about the unique dilemmas forged by global rights regimes and transnational capitalist production. Small‐scale manufacturers interpret their relationships to international intellectual property protections and maquiladoras [foreign‐owned, large‐scale factories] through a moral economy that privileges the sharing of knowledge and resources across kin and neighbors and in ways that reinforce senses of belonging to spatialized communities.

This article examines the cultural and moral context of trademark piracy in Guatemala. In particular, I analyze what accusations of envy among small-scale Maya garment manufacturers who participate in trademark piracy reveal about two aspects of the social field: first, the changing economic and cultural conditions following waves of neoliberal reform including the criminalization of piracy; and, second, the nonlinear reproduction of forms of moral and legal reckoning at the margins of the global economy. I examine how practices of copying and imitation among manufacturers and competitive behavior more generally are evaluated locally in light of kin relations that promote the sharing of knowledge and resources within a somewhat loose property regime and given ideologies of race and nation that encourage class-based solidarity among Maya people. I find that the normative models and business practices evident among these manufacturers parochialize official portraits of progress, business ethics, and development promoted in neoliberal policy agendas and international law.

This article explores the value of ethnographic methods in identifying and addressing ethical issues in qualitative research on stigmatized populations. Examples come from two anthropological projects carried out in populations where stigmatized and illicit activities are prevalent: tobacco farmers in the USA and brand pirates in Guatemala. In both cases preliminary ethnographic research proved essential to understanding potential ethical dilemmas and tailoring research practice to avoid stigmatization. Cultural competency is discussed as a useful concept for approaching ethical issues in the study of stigmatized populations, especially when complemented by ethnographic attention to moral experience, the values, meanings, and relationships that are at stake within a given population. Complicating the professional meaning and application of approaches to research ethics, including cultural competency, that privilege formal research techniques and formal ethical guidelines, our case studies describe ethnography as a process involving interpersonal skills, learning through participation, and situational ethics. Critical reflection on ethnography as process is relevant to debates about institutional review and research ethics and points to the need for enriched professional training and ethical reflection on the social skills amenable to effective and responsible field research.

An ethnographic account of the putative shift away from state-sponsored violence and the emergence of new patterns of violence in postwar Guatemala challenges liberal political and moral models that narrowly interpret violence in terms of individual suffering and/or culpability. Such models converge with a resurgence of right-wing political activity. The origins and outcomes of violence are more usefully and accurately conceived in terms of structural and societal conditions. Guatemala's new violence (e.g., crime, gang activity, and vigilantism) is not the chaos of media accounts but a manifestation of enduring legacies of state violence and the social and economic insecurities brought on by structural adjustment policies.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Securing the City An Introduction -- Living Guatemala City, 1930s–2000s -- Primero de Julio Urban Experiences of Class Decline and Violence -- Cacique for a Neoliberal Age A Maya Retail Empire on the Streets of Guatemala City -- Privatization of Public Space The Displacement of Street Vendors in Guatemala City -- The Security Guard Industry in Guatemala Rural Communities and Urban Violence -- Guatemala's New Violence as Structural Violence Notes from the Highlands -- Spaces of Structural Adjustment in Guatemala's Apparel Industry -- Hands of Love Christian Outreach and the Spatialization of Ethnicity -- References -- Contributors -- Index