Higglers in Kingston: Women's Informal Work in Jamaica

6. Dirty and Dis/eased: Bodies, Public Space, and Afro-Jamaican Higglers

141 6 Dirty and Dis/eased Bodies, Public Space, andAfro-Jamaican Higglers As we know it, dirt is essentially disorder. There is no such thing as absolute dirt: It exists in the eye of the beholder. If we shun dirt, it is not because of craven fear, still less dread of holy terror. Nor do our ideas about disease account for the range of our behavior in cleaning or avoiding dirt. Dirt offends against order. Eliminating it is not a negative movement, but a positive effort to organize the environment. —Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger Most cities in developing and developed countries contain dual and interrelated economies: formal and informal.1 Socially formed meanings of markets and market activities in each economy vary, often privileging formal markets as more legitimate than informal markets. In Jamaican society, the informal economic activity of higglering is generally perceived as a low-status, illegitimate, or illegal occupation. Higglers have also been constructed as deviants in the public imagination; Richard Burton notes, for instance, that the higgler is “regarded with ambivalence by the wider society: admired for her ‘manlike’ autonomy and assertiveness , she is also derided on account of her often invasive physical presence, her loud dress, and her even louder demeanor and language” (1997, 64). One can account for this ambivalence when one understands that public representations around higglers in Jamaica have focused on their laboring bodies, constructing higglers as unfeminine while simultaneously presenting them as an ideal source of cheap and disciplined labor for potential investors, as mentioned earlier. So the higgler’s praiseworthy autonomy and assertiveness are associated with her ability, through hard labor, to fend for herself and her family (and make her a valuable 142 Higglers in Kingston resource for capitalist investors). At the same time, the higgler’s labor helps place her outside racialized and classed norms of femininity. A conundrum, indeed. The issue I address in this chapter is how public representations of higglering and higglers affect the ways in which these microentrepreneurs experience their work in the informal economy, evidenced primarily in newspaper articles and letters to the editor published from 1980 to 2006 in two of Jamaica’s most popular newspapers, the Daily Gleaner and the Jamaica Observer.2 These news articles addressed, among many issues, tensions between the Jamaican government, the formal economic business community, uptown city residents, and higglers over the removal of these informal economic activities and workers from city streets.3 Cities and Markets: Constructed and Produced Markets are lived experiences that are embodied, as I have suggested in the preceding chapters. We cannot reduce our conceptualization of formal or informal markets to a series of abstract economic processes and impersonal exchanges, because to do so conceals complex operations of power, especially power shaped by race/color, class, and gender. Markets are indeed a set of relations that occur in particular social , economic, and geographical contexts and involve the experiences, practices, and embodiments of everyday social actors.4 The bodies of particular kinds of women (brown and black), for example, and the spaces in which they engage in informal work influence how that economic activity is conceptualized and experienced. Public discourses regarding higglering, then, shed light on lived experiences of markets because these discourses feed into the practices of everyday commercial life. An explosion of informal economic activity has occurred in the city of Kingston over the last several decades, as Jamaica continues to grapple with economic decline and all the challenges associated with it. The struggles between higglers, the formal business community, uptown city residents, and the state reveal a relationship between city imaginaries and the spatial organization of Kingston within this context of acute economic and social challenges. My interest lies in the racialized/colored, classed, and gendered dimensions of those imaginaries, and how they are re/produced and negotiated through struggles over city space. Understanding cities as both physical and imagined helps illuminate ways in which “differences are constructed in, and themselves construct, Dirty and Dis/eased 143 city life and space” (Bridge and Watson 2002, 507). One feature of city spaces is their high population density and the likelihood of encounters with difference. These differences help shape and are shaped by social relations in city spaces and by the spaces themselves (Fincher and Jacobs 1998). Sophie Watson points out that “space is both produced and consumed within relations of difference where women and black people are...