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Are Markets Moral?: Understanding the Roles of Fairness and Power Relations in Rural Trade in the Bolivian Altiplano

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 September 2022

Rachel Godfrey-Wood  and
Graciela Mamani-Vargas
Rachel Godfrey-Wood
Affiliation:
Institute of Development Studies, United Kingdom
Graciela Mamani-Vargas
Affiliation:
Fundación “Jacha Uru,” La Paz
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Abstract

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Ethnographic research has established the centrality of markets to Andean rural livelihoods, but understandings of fairness and different market actors' power relations in these markets are less clear. Using ten months of ethnographic research in Bolivia's Altiplano, this case study reveals strategies and moral narratives of peasant producers and market traders in an emerging pea market. While traders attempt to deceive producers, the latter have their own means of exploiting competition between traders and advancing their own moral narratives about how the market should operate. Thus, the market is an economic field and a moral one, and traders can be punished for excessively prioritizing profit maximization. The moral nature of the pea trade should be viewed not as a quirk of Andean culture but as an illustration of the embeddedness of all markets and the need for critical examination of the moral economies of market interactions across the capitalist world.

Resumen

Resumen

Mientras que la investigación etnográfica ha establecido la centralidad de los mercados en la vida rural Andina, hay menos claridad sobre el papel de la comprensión de la justicia, y las relaciones de poder de los distintos actores económicos en estos mercados. Con base a diez meses de investigación etnográfica en el Altiplano boliviano, mostraremos un estudio de caso y las estrategias y narrativas morales de los productores campesinos y comerciantes en un mercado emergente de arveja. Mientras que los comerciantes intentan engañar a los productores, los productores también tienen maneras de explotar la competencia entre los comerciantes, utilizando también los chismes para promover sus propias narrativas sobre cómo se debe funcionar el mercado. Por lo tanto el mercado es más que simplemente un campo económico, sino también es un campo moral en el cual los comerciantes pueden ser castigados si buscan excesivamente al lucro. La naturaleza moral del comercio de arveja no debe ser vista como una característica idiosincrática de la cultura Andina, sino como una ilustración del embeddedness de todos los mercados, y de la necesidad para un análisis crítico de las economias morales de interacciones comerciales en todo el mundo capitalista.

Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 51 , Issue 3 , 2016 , pp. 123 - 141
Copyright
Copyright © 2016 by the Latin American Studies Association

Footnotes

We would like to thank all of the comunarios with whom we spent ten months conducting ethnographic fieldwork between 2012 and 2013. Thanks also go to Stephen Devereux and Chris Béné for their orientation in the development of this article, and to the three anonymous LARR reviewers who provided extremely insightful and constructive comments on earlier drafts. This research was financed by a fieldwork grant from the Society of Latin American Studies, and we are extremely grateful for the support.

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