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9. Fair Money, Fair Trade: Tracing Alternative Consumption in a Local Currency Economy
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Fair Trade Craft Production and Indigenous Economies 197 Rogers, M. 1996 Beyond Authenticity: Conservation, Tourism, and the Politics of Representation in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Identities 3(1–2): 73–125. Salomon, F. 1987 A North Andean Status Trader Complex under Inka Rule. Ethnohistory 34(1): 63–77. Scrase, T. J. 2003 Precarious Production: Globalization and Artisan Labour in the Third World. Third World Quarterly 24(3): 449–461. Smith, J. 2007 The Search for Sustainable Markets: The Promise and Failures of Fair Trade. Culture and Agriculture 29(2): 89–99. Stein, P. n.d. Fair Trade Divergences: The Case of Child Labor and Sustainability in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Unpublished manuscript. Stephen, L. 2005 Women’s Weaving Cooperatives in Oaxaca. Critique of Anthropology 25(3): 253–278. Strong, P. 1996 Animated Indians: Critique and Contradiction in Commodified Children’s Culture. Cultural Anthropology 11(3): 405–424. Sylvain, R. 2002 “Land, Water, and Truth”: San Identity and Global Indigenism. American Anthropologist 104(4): 1074–1085. Taussig, M. 1980 The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Thomas, N. 1991 Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Turner, T. 2007 Indigenous Resurgence, Anthropological Theory, and the Cunning of History. Focaal—European Journal of Anthropology 49: 118–123. Wilson, P. C. 2003a Ethnographic Museums and Cultural Commodification: Indigenous Organizations , NGOs, and Culture as a Resource in Amazonian Ecuador. Latin American Perspectives 30(1): 162–180. 2003b Market Articulation and Poverty Eradication? Critical Reflection on TouristOriented Craft Production in Amazonian Ecuador. In Here to Help: NGOs Combating Poverty in Latin America. Robyn Eversole, ed. Pp. 83–104. New York: M. E. Sharpe. This page intentionally left blank [3.81.222.152] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 19:49 GMT) 199 Part III Relationships and Consumption in Fair Trade Markets and Alternative Economies The final three case studies in this volume approach alternative trade from the vantage point of consumption. Despite the expanding range of certified fair trade commodities in recent years, most goods remain entirely outside fair trade networks. This applies even to those items (especially manufactured goods) involving great inequities in their production and sale. Faidra Papavasiliou examines concepts of “fairness” that animate alternative currency movements, drawing on the example of the HOURS system in Ithaca, New York. The HOURS alternative currency circulates in a market parallel to that of dollars, but it is geared exclusively to the consumption of local goods and services. Hence, it is viewed as a means of strengthening social relationships and retaining wealth within the community rather than facilitating exchange over more distant geographical horizons. HOURS signals more equitable relations of exchange among its participants, indicating a new consumption discourse that challenges the neutrality of money as simply a measure of value. As such, it is both a direct counterpart to and embodiment of alternative trade initiatives that seek greater justice and strengthened bonds between producers and consumers. Yet, as Papavasiliou admits, the alternative trade network imperfectly substitutes for the dollar economy, as the vast majority of commodities and exchanges in Ithaca remain fully outside its sphere of exchange . The limited circulation of HOURS, despite the system’s nearly two decades of existence, itself serves as a metaphor for fair trade networks that benefit a privileged minority of commodity producers. Molly Doane’s chapter contrasts the meanings that fair trade activists and roasters in the United States impute to “relationship coffees” with the attitudes that fair trade coffee growers in Mexico invest in the new trading networks. North American fair trade roasters tend to be well-educated and highly traveled professionals who emphasize the transnational relationships established between producers and consumers of fair trade coffee . These encounters are almost always framed in the idiom of reciprocity and mutual respect. Much as is suggested by Lyon and Dolan in part 200 Part Iii 2, similar views are also (strategically) invoked by the leaders of Mexican coffee cooperatives who communicate regularly with their fair trade partners in the United States or who travel to conferences there. However, these discourses of reciprocity rarely penetrate beyond the small minority of well-traveled leaders from fair trade producer groups. Most coffee producers themselves possess little knowledge of the fair trade system or its purposes, viewing it instead as part of a longstanding strategy of seeking improved incomes, better living standards, and greater autonomy. Indeed , Mexican producers speak at length about the rigorous demands of organic and fair trade certification...