In the frontier zone of market transition: Economic possibilities across the market/non-market divide

Abstract

This paper engages with two important approaches theorising the co-existence and even close entanglement between the market and non-market to rethink the making of actually existing market economies. The first, that is, the diverse/community economies approach, underscores alternative relations and ethics to capitalism but often views community economies as external to market processes. A second approach on market frontiers rejects the idea of the non-market domain as a Utopian space but re-imagines it as a constituent part within capitalism, while powerful actors manage and utilise non-market differences to configure particular regimes of accumulation. However, it says relatively little about how the market/non-market divide is navigated and appropriated to suit the wellbeing of grassroots people and communities. This paper calls for a dialogue between the two approaches and argues that community economies provide important ‘background conditions of possibility’ for ordinary people to advance their needs, interests, and wellbeing by negotiating or traversing the market/non-market divide. Our empirical study investigates recent socioeconomic transformations in two villages, Lolong and Nyiru, located within the Potatso National Park, Yunnan Province, China. In both villages, local people keep alive communal norms of reciprocity and mutual support. The persistence of the non-marketised community economies is partly attributed to a state-capital coalition that outlaws grassroots participation in local tourism economy. Subsequently, villagers devise a number of tactics to penetrate the market realm and meet emerging lifestyle and consumer needs. Three of such tactics are discussed in this study.

Keywords

Market making the market/non-market divide alternative/community economies market frontiers Potatso region China

Introduction

It is now an established view in cultural economic geography that market economy does not assimilate the entire world in undifferentiated and homogenous manners; rather, our world is defined by the profligacy of economic differences and heterogeneities, with rich non-capitalist practices existing cheek by jowl with market mechanisms (Escobar, 2008; Fraser and Jaeggi, 2018; Gibson-Graham, 1996, 2006, 2008; Sanyal, 2007). In line with this view, two theoretical approaches have engagingly and extensively theorised the key roles of non-market realms in making contemporary capitalisms and markets. The first, pioneered by the authorial pair Gibson-Graham (1996, 2005, 2006, 2008), underscores alternatives to capitalist economies that are underpinned by ethical concerns, noncapitalist institutions of production, labour, and transaction, people’s direct wellbeing, and efforts to channel surpluses into social and cultural benefits. This approach is not only interested in actually existing ‘other worlds’ (St Martin et al., 2015) but also active experimentation that brings the virtual, the possible, into realities. Primarily, the diverse/community economies agenda has privileged ‘a politics of possibility’ (St Martin et al., 2015: 2), as well as a performative ontology of economies as contingent effects enacted by the assemblages of relations, objects, and practices.

The second approach is concerned primarily with market frontiers, namely, the contact zones between market and non-market arrangements (Berndt and Boeckler, 2023). It casts doubt on the idea of the non-market domain as a Utopian space positioned outside capitalism but imagines the former as a constituent part within the latter (Tsing, 2009). The co-existence of marketised and non-marketised aspects of life is an intrinsic feature of markets, indeed built into the DNA of capitalism (Fraser and Jaeggi, 2018). In particular, this epistemology argues for the mutual constitution between capitalist production modes and the non-market arenas of social reproduction, nature and cultural differences, as the latter make up a rich source of actionability, affordance and manoeuvrability to institute particular sociopolitical orders and regimes of accumulation (Berndt and Boeckler, 2023; Collins, 2003, 2014; Fraser and Jaeggi, 2018; Pun, 2005; Tsing, 2009, 2015). The boundary between the market and non-market is thus contingent, dynamic and potentially penetrable. Analytics of power are central to this approach because the interplays of market and non-market logics are infused with authorities, controls and struggles.

In sum, the diverse/community economies approach underscores alternative relations and ethics that prevent capitalism from eroding the fullness of human existence. However, it often analyses community economies as external to, or at least separate from, the market, rather than situating them in the liminal space between market and non-market to interrogate their coexistence with capitalist development and market participation. In parallel, the approach on market frontiers sees the market and non-market as fuzzy realms and accounts for the hybrid economic formations at the margins and in contact zones (Berndt and Boeckler, 2023). However, in this approach we often see powerful actors such as state and market forces that control and manipulate people’s lifeworlds to generate stability for market processes. Less has been said about how the market/non-market divide is creatively and inventively navigated and appropriated to suit the wellbeing of grassroots people and communities.

In reality, community economies often exist in complex hybridisation with market processes (Gibson-Graham, 2005, 2006), while market frontiers are fraught with grassroots agency, often undergirded by community-based ethics, norms, and relations (Berndt and Boeckler, 2023; Mahanty, 2019; Qian et al., 2023). It is thus important to engage with the intrinsic inventiveness and creativity of community-based relations, practices, and economies (Gibson-Graham, 2006), and how they negotiate, problematise and even redraw the market/non-market divide to render it relative and obsolete, thus ushering in diverse interactions among a host of market and non-market logics. This theoretical inquiry is relevant because the non-market realm is constitutive of the market not only by providing venues of exploitation, control, or discipline but also a wide range of ‘background conditions of possibility’ (Fraser and Jaeggi, 2018) for plural forms of market engagement and participation that enrich the possibilities of everyday life and enhance people’s wellbeing. It necessitates a cross-fertilisation between the two approaches mentioned above to envisage how people can harness community-based resources, relations and practices to transcend the market/non-market divide and align market processes to everyday wellbeing, and vice versa, how market participation articulates with, and even reaffirms the legitimacy and necessity of, community-based arrangements. Through these practices, community-based ethics, relations and solidarities work in tandem with, not in opposition to, people’s aspiration for market inclusion, development, and the proliferation of livelihoods possibilities (Matthews, 2017).

To illustrate these arguments, the empirical study of this paper investigates the entanglement of market and non-market processes amidst unprecedented socioeconomic transformations in two villages, Lolong and Nyiru, inhabited by people of Tibetan ethnicity (but outside of the core of Tibetan cultural region, namely the Tibetan Autonomous Region) and located within the Potatso National Park, Shangri-La City, Diqing Prefecture, Yunnan Province, China – the first national park in China in operation since 2006.¹ In both villages, local transition towards market economy has been underpinned by the co-existence of market-oriented outlooks and a persistent and flourishing realm of non-monetised production, labour, and exchange, in the forms of subsistence production, the survival of traditional bartering practices, and communal norms of mutual care and support. However, the persistence of non-market relations is also partly attributed to state power and stringent environmental regulations that have, since 2006, prohibited local villagers from the provision of tourism services, on the ground that it causes environmental degradation. The tourism sector, in contrast, is now exclusively at the hands of a state-owned enterprise. To pacify local villagers’ discontent with the exclusion from market participation, the state resorts to policies such as providing direct subsidies to local villagers, hiring them as waged workers, and tolerating to a limited extent tourism services conducted by them. Nevertheless, state regulation has enacted a highly rigid market/non-market divide that positions community practices as inherently incompatible with rational market orders.

In this context, more intriguingly, market transition has heightened local people’s aspiration for modern lifestyles and consumer goods. As a result, local villagers creatively experiment with various ways in which non-market practices create extra flexibility and manoeuvrability for them to penetrate the market, given that subsidies from the state are deemed inadequate to meet their consumer needs. Three tactics employed by local villagers are analysed in this study. First, in light of the inadequacy of cash incomes, local villagers deliberately maintain the subsistence sector to save cash and concentrate the latter on consumer goods and modern lifestyles. Second, they adjust dietary arrangements to create surpluses of certain resources in the subsistence sector and then commodify them to generate additional cash incomes. Finally, the traditional bartering practices have been preserved and re-invented; in particular, many marketised consumer goods, purchased with monetised means in the first place, have entered the arena of bartering through the efforts of traders, further expanding the possibilities of daily livelihoods that villagers can tap into and blurring the boundary between cash and non-cash practices. The need to keep alive the subsistence sector and bartering, in turn, reinforces both intra- and inter-communal norms of help, collaboration, and interdependency.

By probing into such back-and-forth between market and non-market, this study hints at a number of theoretical points that help us better appreciate the relationships between the two domains in the frontier zone of market transition, which also pertains to the research agenda on theorising actually existing market economies (Berndt et al., 2020a, 2020b; Peck et al., 2020). First, we shed light on the unsettling and productive roles of non-market practices in configuring local variants of market economies. Second, this study discovers in the non-market realm new possibilities of market formations and practices, in which market and non-market logics are mutually compatible and supplementary rather than merely pitted against each other. In this vein, finally, it elucidates the mutual hybridisation, penetration and constitution between market and non-market through the lens of economies as contingent, practised and overdetermined by multiple forces and processes, resonating closely with the diverse/community economies approach (St Martin et al., 2015). Nonetheless, this study remains attentive to the structural powers of the state and market, which constrain grassroots agencies in some ways but simultaneously open new possibilities of negotiation and transgression. In doing so, we also echo the market frontiers approach’s long-held stance on the market/non-market divide as a contested site of power, violence, domination and struggle (Fraser and Jaeggi, 2018; Naylor and Thayer, 2022).

Economic possibilities across the market/non-market divide

To account for the economic differences and heterogeneities of our world, one approach widely adopted among academics since the late 1990s concerns the ubiquitous presence of alternative, diverse, and community economies. Reverberating with the concomitant scholarships on post-development (Escobar, 1995; Ireland and McKinnon, 2013; Sidaway, 2007; Ziai, 2017) and moral economy (Galt, 2013; Palomera and Vetta, 2016; Sayer, 2000), this agenda started with Gibson-Graham’s (1996) deconstruction of capitalcentrism, an ontology that posits capitalism as the hegemonic, or even the only thinkable form of economy, through ‘a variety of discursive commitments’ (4). Based on a critique of such discourses, Gibson-Graham (2006) broached a research agenda on postcapitalist and noncapitalist economies, one that unpacks the actually existing economic differences to inspire, and experiment with, bottom-up mobilisations and the transformative potentials of communally negotiated economic arrangements and relations. In rejecting a ‘monoculture of knowledge’ (Gibson-Graham, 2008) underlying capital-centric accounts of economy, this agenda resonates with theoretical traditions in heterodox economic research, which emphasise: (1) ethical reasoning, affective relations, and social norms; (2) proliferating definitions of utilities to include those associated with family, community, social solidarity, etc. and (3) a broad mix of social mechanisms that shape economies, among which market behaviours do not necessarily predominate (Slater and Tonkiss, 2001). In tandem with such points, Gibson-Graham (2006) conceptualises economy as a visionary field of innovation, invention, creativity and possibility. Instead of seeing the economy as a product of structural determination, the approach follows the methodologies of overdetermination and weak theory, and views economic landscapes as ‘populated by a myriad of contingent forms and interactions’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006: 54), therefore opening up an economic language that highlights the decentred distribution of economic value and a proliferation of economic practices beyond the confinement to ‘a set of governing laws and mechanical logics’ (60; also Roelvink et al., 2015). Emphasising the co-existence of market, alternative market, and non-market in all the three aspects of transaction, labour and enterprise organisation, this approach foregrounds the concept of ‘community economy’ to theorise different actors as entrained in relations of solidarity and interdependence (Gibson-Graham, 2006; St Martin et al., 2015; Wright, 2010). The question of what surplus can do is rethought, while stronger links between economy and community building are advocated – it is important to nurture and perform community-based ways of appropriating and using surplus, which are not geared towards the maximisation of profit and growth, but rather channel resources and surplus directly into care, solidarity, social wellbeing and diverse sociocultural values (Gibson-Graham, 2005, 2006, 2008; Holmes, 2018; Naylor, 2018; Rose, 2019).

A series of works have further enriched the debate by exploring how community economies are sustained, reconfigured, or challenged, while communities encounter, negotiate, or utilise market forces (Naylor, 2018; North, 2014; Qian et al., 2023). Community economies, therefore, have been rethought by taking into account situated contingencies. For example, the emphasis on alternatives must align with attention to opportunities and resources provided by market participation and development, as well as people’s aspiration for market inclusion (Matthews, 2017; Naylor and Thayer, 2022). Moreover, the functioning of community economies may be dependent on their coexistence and circularity with broader market dynamics and contingent on their compatibility (or lack thereof) with mainstream economic conventions (Lee, 1996; Lee et al., 2004; North, 2014). In addition, some nuanced works have explicated how different regimes of value are in fact ‘dialectically intertwined or “articulated”’ (Narotzky, 2015: 174). As they reveal, the participation in the production of market value may generate resources and capacities that restore the social and cultural fabrics for communities (Andolina et al., 2009; Mackenzie, 2013; Qian et al., 2023; Qian and Wei, 2020, 2023). More importantly, there are hidden relations of power that determine who can participate in market or non-market activities, and in what ways (Matthews, 2017; Naylor and Thayer, 2022; Qian and Wei, 2020; Wright, 2010; Ziai, 2015). The structural power of the market is not only constituted by bracketing the non-market domain, but often by diffusing into them. For example, many studies reveal that non-market differences can be exploited to justify and operationalise highly unequal distribution of opportunities and welfare, as well as the control and discipline of labour, a theme that we will revisit later (Bair et al., 2013; Bair and Werner, 2011; Collins, 2003, 2014; Qian and Wei, 2020; Tsing, 2009, 2015).

Given that community economies often reside in the border zones between market and non-market arrangements, more nuanced understandings about the relationships between the two domains are warranted. To inform this inquiry, we engage with a body of literature suggesting that the creation and manipulation of a non-market domain is a recurrent, indeed necessary condition for market economies and orders to take specific configurations, usually based on feminist, postcolonial, and poststructural perspectives. Market and non-market are entangled by relations of mutual constitution, as opposed to ontological separation. The differentiation of market versus non-market is by no means natural, stable or impervious, but in many cases comprised of multiple sites of powers and negotiations. Berndt and Boeckler (2023) identify the precarious boundaries of capitalism-social reproduction, economy-nature, economy-state. In all three contact zones, the latter components of the pairs are ‘shielded from market logics’ deliberately (133), so that cheap and flexible labour can be exploited, the costs and wastes of production can be externalised, and state authorities become entangled with global markets. In this sense, market economy achieves and consolidates its stability and coherence precisely by articulating with non-market relations, institutions and practices. In short, the non-market creates the ‘background conditions of possibility’ for markets to take specific configurations (Berndt and Boeckler, 2023; Fraser and Jaeggi, 2018). There are many nuanced ways in which the two realms ‘inform each other, enable each other, or even presuppose each other’ (Fraser and Jaeggi, 2018: 41). On the one hand, Fraser and Jaeggi (2018) point out that market consumerism is coexistent and even dependent on non-marketised livelihoods in households or communities, which are instituted according to alternative relations, norms, and ethics.

On the other hand, quite often market configurations are justified, and made sense of, based on non-market differences and considerations (Glassman, 2003, 2006). For example, Collins (2003) investigates how gender and ethnic tropes and differences are intrinsically relevant to employers’ strategies in the global apparel industry in recruiting and managing workers, rendering them exploitable and dispensable – transnational investments tend to favour those ‘labour pools’ in which labour control works through local institutions, traditions, cultures, and modes of reproduction that are complicit in the production of labour compliance and subordination (also Collins, 2014). Similarly, Narotzky (2015), proposing the concept of value realm, contemplates over how the overlap of market and non-market values allows flexibility and opportunism to configure labour relations towards more exploitative forms. Tsing (2009, 2015) reveals how supply chain capitalism takes advantage of the diversity of local sociocultural niches, institutional contexts and the variegated identities and aspirations of local people to bypass universal frameworks of labour rights and protection, which cements another layer of hierarchy and exclusion in labour mobilisation.

While the approach on market frontiers often takes the non-market realm as a target of control, manipulation, and/or exploitation to feed into market making, it also potentially opens up a horizon of analysis that focuses on the creativity and agency of community economies as they provide (part of) the building blocks of markets. Indeed, scholars have revealed how the border zones between market logics, grassroots livelihoods, and cultural/ethical concerns are able to nourish emerging market practices (Berndt and Wirth, 2019; Langley, 2016; Mahanty, 2019; Qian et al., 2023). This study thus re-centres our analysis on ordinary people who inhabit the market/non-market interface and use a wealth of everyday arrangements and practices to navigate a variegated tapestry of logics, interests, priorities, and powers. In this study, we are interested in situations where people relish alternative social relations and ethics embodied by community economies and simultaneously address and subvert their ontological enclosure undergirded by particular forms of power. As such, they creatively experiment with economic practices that facilitate the mutual engagement between the market and non-market and the articulation of multiple market and non-market logics. The ultimate objective is to maximise the possibilities of livelihoods and material wellbeing that can be eked out from the interstice between market transition, dominant powers and bottom-up agencies.

In the current study, while local villagers keep alive non-marketised provision and exchange, as well as communally negotiated norms of reciprocity and support, this alternative economic space is partly perpetuated by state power, and local people make no attempt to veil their wish for inclusion into the market. Intriguingly, the non-monetised subsistence economy enables villagers to save and sometimes generate cash incomes for accessing market-based consumer goods, while traditional bartering practice is increasingly wired into the circulation of modern commodities intended for the consumer market. These empirical storylines testify vividly to the interplay and interlocking of the ‘back and front stage that makes capitalism possible’ and how ‘both fuzzy realms feed one another, creating a productive tension at the margins that spurs the composition of hybrid, diverse entities’ (Berndt and Boeckler, 2023: 133). In this sense, not only does a non-market domain need to be fixed to serve the enactment of ‘rational’, ‘sustainable’ and ‘efficient’ markets by the state, but it also creates possibility and flexibility for local villagers to connect to market processes in creative and contingent ways. In sum, non-contractual and non-commoditised relations indeed constitute the ‘background conditions of possibility’ that multiply economic possibilities across the market/non-market divide (Fraser and Jaeggi, 2018). What needs to be theorised further through empirical investigation is how economic practices in this frontier zone are caught up in ongoing ‘boundary struggles’ (Fraser and Jaeggi, 2018: 44), during which practices at one side of the line leak to the other (Callon, 1998); hence the increasing ambivalence and hybridity of both the market and non-market.

Taking stock of our discussions so far, a fuller conceptualisation of the non-market realm vis-à-vis market expansion needs to comprise at least of three dimensions. First, the non-market domain often resides in local and community spaces that relish alternative economic relations and ethics (the first approach). Second, the non-market is often infused with hegemonic power that deliberately and selectively define certain sociocultural milieus as the constitutive outside of market to assemble and stabilise particular economic orders (the second approach). Finally, even though market power always permeates into the non-market domain (Glassman, 2003), the latter is not reduced into a social backwater denuded of agency; rather, it is fraught with improvisations and experimentations, including those that effectively penetrate the market to blur any rigid compartmentalisation between market and non-market, and thus multiply differently articulated value realms (Narotzky, 2015).

Background and method

Lolong and Nyiru Villages are located within Potatso National Park, Shangri-La City. Lolong is home to 36 households, with a total population of 183. Nyiru comprises of 3 sub-villages, with 124 households and 650 people. Given that the village stretches across a vast area of eight square kilometres, in this study we focus on two sub-villages, Nizhong and Baizhong, whose numbers of households are, respectively, 37 (194 people) and 47 (236 people). The national park, covering a vast area of 602.1 km², is the first national park established in China as a means to protect the high-altitude ecological system, in particular its biodiversity. The park adheres to the principle of ‘protection first, supplemented by leisure and tourism’, and more than 90% of the total area is enclosed with heavily restricted access for visitors. Only 4.6% of the area, which is outside the core protection zone, is open to tourism, while another 3.4% to indigenous communities for agricultural production and livelihoods. Yet, the situation was radically different in the 1990s and early 2000s, when the predecessor of the park, Bitahai National Reserve, adopted tourism as a key strategy of local economic development. During that period, restriction on the penetration of tourists was minimal, and households in the two villages were heavily involved in the provision of services such as horse riding, catering (inter alia barbeque), and accommodation, which generated about Chinese RMB 5000–10,000 per household per year, an important addition to local villagers’ cash pool, given the largely non-monetised and subsistence-based nature of the local economy.

But after the founding of the national park in 2006, villagers became subject to environmental regulation that de-legitimatised all tourism activities provided by Lolong villagers, while a small amount of tourism services are allowed for Nyiru villagers, since Nyiru is located at the outskirt of the national park. The regulation is based on the assertion that the tourism services provided by villagers lack concern for ecological conservation and often exceed the carrying capacities of local environments. As a result, the state has contracted tourism development to a state-owned enterprise founded by the prefectural government of Diqing, which is expected to deliver high-quality tourism experiences and services in centralised and rationalised means, while subsidies are paid to local villagers to compensate for their losses. Note that this market transition is not based on the vision for a self-disciplined market but a mix of state and market logics. This situation is far from peculiar in the Chinese context, where the state actively engineers the market as a device of development and plays a dominant role in coordinating and regulating economic practices (Peck and Zhang, 2013). While the state ‘demonstrates a greater interest in introducing, developing and deploying market instruments and engages in market-like entrepreneurial activities’ (Wu, 2018: 1384), the market also serves as a medium through which state interventions and powers are constituted (Wu, 2020), including those directed at economic development and social welfare. That said, the day-to-day functioning of the tourism economy still draws upon market principles, especially the extraction of market-based profit (Peck and Zhang, 2013). In sum, the ‘market script’, in the words of Berndt and Boeckler (2023), envisaged by the local state is neither purely capital-centric nor community-oriented, but based on a hybrid scheme encoded by the economic, social, and environmental rationales.

The empirical research is based on two fieldwork trips that took place, respectively, in May 2020 and April–May 2021. During the period of time, the researchers spent 59 days in the case study sites – 12 days for collecting general information about the national park and the two villages, 23 days for focussed research in Lolong, and 24 days Nyiru. During this period, data came from four sources. First, second-hand materials, such as archives, public media reports, policy documents, planning documents, books on local histories, among others, were collected extensively and systematically. Second, on-site observation was undertaken, pertaining to a diversity of topics, including changes in local material landscapes, livelihoods tactics, tourism development, social relations between villagers, the overall status of communal solidarity, etc. Third, interviews were conducted with 127 different actors and with varying depths depending on the circumstances of the conversations. The informants, among which 79 are males and 48 are females, include 112 villagers, 3 state officials, 7 employees from the national park and 5 tourists. Interviews were mostly conducted in the Chinese language, of which most villagers are capable given the ethnic mixture in the region. In circumstances when the informants did not speak Chinese, interviews were conducted in Tibetan with the help of local acquaintances. All interviews were transcribed, the texts totalling more than 250 thousand Chinese characters.

Finally, the researchers used a short questionnaire to collect information about different types of non-monetised and monetised incomes for local households (as of 2021). This work was to appreciate the innate diversity of the local economic landscapes, and how villagers shuttled between the market and non-market to balance between various livelihood possibilities. Collated data about the two villages are presented in Figure 1 and Table 1. The questionnaire survey was applied to 108 households in total (36 in Lolong and 72 in Nyriru). Given that our case study sites are home to only 120 households, the survey can almost be seen as exhaustive, while 12 households in Nyiru were not surveyed because of their regular urban residence and disarticulation from the local economy.

Figure 1.

Livelihoods structure in Lolong and Nyiru in 2021 (combined).

Table 1.

Livelihoods possibilities in Lolong and Nyiru (2021).

Domain	Categories	Items	Households concerned	Unit	Quantity	Per Household
(a) Lolong
Non-monetised	Crops	Turnip	33	Mu	67	2.03
		Highland barley	34	Mu	130.5	3.84
		Potato	34	Mu	38.4	1.13
		Rapeseed	24	Mu	58	2.42
	Livestock	Horse	1	Head	10	10.00
		Cattle	34	Head	1075	31.62
		Pig	35	Head	241	6.89
		Hay	33	Bundle	133	4.03
	Animal products	Cheese	33	Piece	2189	66.33
		Butter	33	Piece	2189	66.33
		Pig	34	Head	97	2.85
Monetised	Employment	Waged work	34	1000 yuan	2685.04	78.97
	Crops & livestock	Cheese	25	1000 yuan	42.7	1.71
		Yak	31	1000 yuan	393	12.68
		Pig	1	1000 yuan	10.5	10.5
		Butter	25	1000 yuan	226.7	9.07
	Edible fungus	Edible fungus	32	1000 yuan	552	17.25
	Subsidy	Subsidy	34	1000 yuan	1248	36.71
	Dividend	Dividend	34	1000 yuan	680	20.00
	Rent	Rent	3	1000 yuan	12	4.00
(b) Nyiru
Non-monetised	Crops	Turnip	72	Mu	124.7	1.73
		Highland barley	72	Mu	174.7	2.43
		Potato	72	Mu	30.2	0.42
		Corn	72	Mu	336	4.67
	Livestock	Horse	51	Head	200	3.92
		Cattle	57	Head	2514	44.11
		Pig	72	Head	383	5.32
		Yak	12	Head	665	55.42
		Goat	7	Head	515	73.57
	Animal products	Cheese	71	Piece	3282	46.23
		Butter	71	Piece	3282	46.23
		Pig	72	Head	191	2.65
Monetised	Employment	Waged work	71	1000 yuan	3703.4	52.16
	Crops & livestock	Cheese	45	1000 yuan	62.3	1.38
		Yak	31	1000 yuan	1035	33.39
		Pig	6	1000 yuan	202	33.67
		Butter	47	1000 yuan	334.3	7.11
		Cattle	34	1000 yuan	807	23.74
	Edible fungus	Edible fungus	72	1000 yuan	1248	17.33
	Subsidy	Subsidy	72	1000 yuan	1101	15.29
	Tourism service	Tourism service	13	1000 yuan	560	43.08

(1) ‘Mu’ and ‘catty’ are units of measure used by in the local context – one ‘mu’ equals to 666.67 m² and one catty equals to 0.5 kg in China; (2) items usually refer to income with the year, but in the non-monetised domain, livestock may be accumulated over more than a year, while for the monetised domain, livestock refers to what is sold within 2021; (3) in Nyiru, animals are foraged in the wilderness, so hay is not counted as a kind of livelihood resource.

Market transition in the Potatso region

Before analysing how community economies in the Potatso region transgress the boundaries of the non-market realm and venture into market engagement, we provide a historical account of how a rigid market/non-market divide has been instituted and reinforced via the power of the state, as well as the disempowerment of which this divide is generative, echoing the market frontiers approach. Market transition in the Potatso region took off in the 1990s as tourists flowed in to explore its natural and cultural amenities. Resultantly, Lolong and Nyiru villagers began to conduct the provision of tourism services. For Lolong villagers, market participation was mainly in the form of using horses to ride tourists to Batatso (Ch: Bi Ta Hai), a scenic lake at the heart of the natural reserve, supplemented by barbeque, photo-taking, and hostel service. For Nyiru villagers, tourism income mainly came from serving as guides to tourists hiking from Shudu Lake or Batatso to Nyiru Village, located at the fringe of the natural reserve, who would subsequently seek catering and accommodation in the village. Tourism participation, however, was uneven across different local households. Generally, households that were better educated (and could thus converse in the Chinese language), possessed surplus labour, and had better family incomes were better positioned in providing tourism services, by expanding the raising of horses, constructing hostels, and capitalising on the increasing influx of tourists. However, externalities of tourism, such as pollution, degradation of ranches, and deforestation, were borne evenly by all members of communities and led to the worsening of livelihoods for those excluded from tourism participation. As Mr. W, a villager from Lolong, commented:

Back then, tourism caused a lot of pollution and more importantly the worsening of the ranches. This was because a large number of humans and horses kept stamping on the grass, preventing the latter from growing. Ultimately, the cost was paid by everyone in the village. (Interview, April 2021)

In 2006, the natural reserve and vast surrounding areas were consolidated into China’s first national park, with the establishment of Potatso National Park Management Authority (PMA hereafter), under the direct supervision of the provincial and prefectural governments. The founding of the national park entailed profound changes to local villagers’ livelihoods. The local state franchised the Diqing Tourism Corporation Co. Ltd., a locally based state-owned enterprise, to oversee tourism development in the park. On top of pre-existing state and community ownership of land, the enterprise claimed an extra layer of property right by charging an entrance fee to all tourists. The latter’s itineraries and activities in the park were to be centrally planned or managed by the company through the enactment of a series of touristic spaces, including trails, shops, restaurants, hotels, etc.

After this business model was implemented by the local state and the enterprise, they began to see the bottom-up tourism economy run by the villagers as an eyesore and were determined to eradicate it, on the ground of a number of assertions. On the one hand, the local state was concerned with the environmental externalities of grassroots participation in tourism services. For example, to ride tourists led to an increasing number of horses, whose foraging in the park caused the degradation of surface vegetation; to supply catering caused the introduction of exogenous species to the local ecological system and a rising number of yaks and pigs to provide meat, the latter exceeding the carrying capacities of local environment; the need to construct basic tourism infrastructures (such as small restaurants and shops) and undertake barbeque led to a rise in logging activities; and finally, provision of accommodation entailed a large amount of waste water discharged into local water bodies (Multiple interviews with local officials, April 2021). As a series of policy and planning documents portrayed the grassroots economy:

At that time, spontaneous tourism services were not subject to centralised management; tourists [imitating Buddhist practices and] setting free animals led to the introduction of exogenous species to local ecological systems; the increase of horse-riding and other unnecessary tourism activities such as barbecue exacerbated damages to grasslands and vegetations in the environs of Batatso. (Plan of Franchised Operation in Potatso National Park, 2020)

This is, however, not to suggest that local villagers essentially lacked an awareness of ecological conservation. Like other ethnic minority groups in Yunnan Province, local villagers in Potatso had rich vernacular knowledge about the symbiosis with natural environment (Litzinger, 2004; Sturgeon, 2007). Yet, such knowledge was anchored at the scale of everyday livelihoods, which were not yet impacted significantly by environmental externalities of tourism, as opposed to the ecological security of the broader region and even the nation-state, emphasised in state discourses. As a villager of Lolong revealed frankly:

Horse riding for tourists was very lucrative, and I should be honest with you about this. But it did cause issues of pollution and subsequently the problems of cutting and burning woods for barbecue. You could imagine – one villager could only lead two horses at the same time, and if there had been hundreds of tourists, how many horses would you need and how many villagers would need to be there? Their presence surely had the effect of polluting the environment. (Interview, Mr. M, April 2021).

On the other hand, a second and relatively minor complaint about grassroots tourism economy was related to the competition between villagers and the state-owned enterprise. For example, local villagers might assist tourists to use small lanes leading into the park and thus bypass the entrance fee, in exchange of a much lower renumeration. They also disallowed the enterprise to set up tourism facilities in the vicinity of their villages, by underlining the sacred meanings of the surrounding milieus. Villagers might even deliberately cause minor damages to the trails and fences enacted by the enterprise so that tourists could access areas that they were initially forbidden to visit, and subsequently seek services from the villagers (Multiple interviews with local villagers, April–May 2021).

Callon (1998, 2007) once theorised marketisation as the enactment of boundaries between framing, which comprises networked relations inhabited by a multiplicity of human and non-human actors and performs specific calculative orders, and overflowing, which is seen as a deviant outside at odds with rational calculation. In the view of the state and the enterprise, the grassroots tourism economy was not only environmentally detrimental but also disruptive to centralised and rationalised management of tourism in the park. A proper and functional market framing, in contrast, must be instituted to overcome such shortcomings. Accordingly, the grassroots tourism economy was seen as an aberrant and disorderly overflow that needed to be excluded from local market transition.

As early as in 2005, that is, during the preparatory stage of the national park, the PMA already initiated the phasing-out of the horse-riding service. Further, with the formal establishment of the national park in 2006, grassroots tourism economies were relentlessly outlawed by the local state and PMA. Due to the regulation, villagers’ access to cash income was abruptly cut off. As Callon (1998, 2007) has also argued, the normative boundaries between framing and overflowing are not always contained and controlled. In the cases whereby overflows provoke new matters of concern and social identities, market framing needs to be re-bordered to pacify controversies and account for the interests of erstwhile excluded actors and relations (Berndt and Boeckler, 2023). To quench the discontent of villagers and maintain the stability of the state-sanctioned market formation, the PMA decided to implement a policy call the Scheme on Tourism Feeding back to Communities, which has been in practice to this day. The scheme comprises four major dimensions. First, direct monetary subsidy drawn from the company’s tourism revenue is paid to individual villagers, households, and collectives, on separate terms, as a compensation for villagers’ withdrawal from market participation – Table 2 provides details of the scheme, which had been implemented throughout three rounds by the time of our fieldworks in 2021. Moreover, in 2012, the national park and the state-owned enterprise jointly invested RMB 18 million to build a hotel featuring Tibetan architectures, cuisines, and cultural elements. As the hotel is built on the communal land of Lolong, it is obliged to pay each household in the village an annual dividend of RMB20,000, on the condition that the latter would receive tourists for home visit and tasting of Tibetan butter tea, both free of charge. In addition, the hotel absorbs a sizable quantity of agricultural products from the community, creating yet another source of cash income for local villagers.

Table 2.

The subsidy scheme (in Chinese RMB).

Village	2006–2008 (Pilot round)	2008–2013 (First round)			2014–2021 (Second round)
Village	Paid to individuals (annually)	Paid to household (one-off)	Paid to individuals (annually)	Paid to village collective (one-off)	Paid to individuals (annually)	Paid to households (one-off)	Paid to village collective (one-off)
Lolong	5000	5000	2000	100,000	5000	10,000	957,000
Nyiru	None	1600	300	200,000	1000	10,000	400,000

Second, an annual subsidy of RMB 2000, 4000 or 5000, respectively, is provided to local students pursuing high-school, junior college, or college education. Third, priority was given to local villagers for employment opportunities created by the national park, such as those as cleaners, drivers, security guards, hotel workers, forest patrols and so on. Finally, permission is granted for local people to collect forest products, plant staple crops, and forage livestock within delimited areas, while a small quota of logging is also given to local households for the construction of housing. Besides, Nyiru villagers are allowed to continue operating guidance to tourists, horse-riding, catering, and accommodation, on the condition of officially approved permits, thanks to the village’s peripheral location – in turn, Nyiru villagers receive less direct subsidy from the PMA.

These policies, on the one hand, have thus far been effective in keeping popular discontent at bay and maintaining a collaborative façade in the relationship between local communities and the state – ‘the situation is that, if their business [the state-owned enterprise] performs well, we will also benefit, and this is to our best interest as well; as a result, the relationship between us and the company is collaborative, and rarely do we hear any complaint about the current arrangement’ (Interview, village official of Lolong, April 2021). Interestingly, the state’s take-over of the tourism economy has reduced income inequality among local villagers – while the availability of surplus labour, Chinese language fluency, and family income continue to shape the numbers of animals that can be raised, the ability of providing accommodation to tourists, and access to urban labour market, subsidies are equally paid to all villagers and households, and Chinese fluency is not a major factor for employment opportunities provided by the park. Inequality among villagers is more pronounced in Nyiru, where tourism participation is not totally outlawed, and a few households continue to monopolise grassroots tourism economy.

On the other hand, they also steer villagers to internalise state-promoted codes of civility when it comes to environmental conservation, inter alia the interdictions against logging, quarrying, foraging in prohibited areas, polluting natural water bodies, disposing waste, hunting, making fire in the wilderness, introducing exogenous species, etc. Villagers are also enrolled by the state to contribute on a voluntary basis to fire vigilance, the protection of wild animals, forest patrol against illegal logging, etc. Environmental knowledge of local people that aligns with the mandate of environmental conservation is celebrated in state propaganda and performed by villagers in their daily life.

To sum up, the market/non-market divide is perpetuated, at least partly, by the power of the state (Collins, 2003; Tsing, 2009), and market transition is entrenched partly through the confinement of local villagers within non-market community economies. Subsequently, potential irritations and controversies that might challenge the legitimacy of state-endorsed market framing are pacified pre-emptively by allowing villagers to access a certain proportion of market-generated value, extending the market framing into the erstwhile excluded spaces of the communities (Callon, 2007). This arrangement, however, produces limited efficacy for local people to exert agency and build capacities, for it focuses only on a redistributive mechanism. The latter will be the theme addressed in the next section.

Transgressing the market/non-market divide

As we argued earlier, while local villagers were initially banished into the outside of the market economy, they were subsequently reframed into the local market transition, if in partial and selective ways. Nevertheless, during our fieldwork, it was frequently reiterated by villagers that the state subsidies were hardly adequate to satiate their emerging consumer needs and lifestyle pursuits, a transformation overdetermined by a broader market transition, increased incomes, and the circulation of urban cultural tastes and discourses. As Mr. T from Lolong commented:

Now it is easier to make money – it is common to have an income of two or three hundred RMB per day. But it is also easier to spend money, and the actual worth of money has decreased. Our children are obsessed with purchasing shoes and clothes. . . and they like pursing famous brands and qualities of products. (Interview, April 2021)

For example, in addition to traditional staple foods and animal products, Tibetan villagers now demonstrate interest in a variety of food ingredients, cuisines, and snack foods, and see them as integral to modern lifestyles. Moreover, local villagers have notably diversified consumption preferences, and frequently express strong inclinations towards touring other places; visiting consumption spaces such as bars, shopping malls, and Karaoke; and purchasing consumer goods, especially mobile phones and clothing, on China’s e-commerce platforms (e.g. Taobao). Most households have also purchased cars as the means of transport to navigate the vast and sparsely populated region. More noteworthily, increase in household income since the 1990s has shaped a new aesthetics of residential space, one that prioritises large sizes and lavish decorations, although retaining Tibetan cultural elements and styles. Large wooden structures and exquisite wooden carvings, the latter finding their origin in ethnic Bai communities nearby, are gradually integrated into local residential forms. Villagers have also begun to emphasise the incorporation of modern facilities (such as flush toilets) and modern building materials (e.g. steel and concrete, to replace traditional materials such as stones and clay). As a result, the construction of housing has become a highly expensive endeavour – it is now dependent on the commodified labour of professionals such as carpenters, sculptors, and builders, and market-based circulations of raw materials, as opposed to the old times when building a house was a community event drawing upon local materials and voluntary labour of fellow villagers. Villagers estimate that to build a new-style housing normally demands an amount of 600,000–1 million Chinese RMB, which is equivalent to more than 20 years of subsidy plus dividend for an average household in Lolong, and 40 years in Nyiru. Finally, local people envisage a pathway towards college education and decent urban employment for their children. Therefore, they tend to send their children to schools in the city centre, which entails increased expenses in tuition fees, commuting, and housing (i.e. the need to rent housing in the city).

In this context, local villagers improvise with a number of tactics to save the spending of cash to concentrate it on emerging consumer needs, as well as generate new sources of cash income. As we can see from Figure 1 and Table 1, local households demonstrate a diversified profile of monetised incomes. A major means that local people can employ is simply to commodify their labour – as employees in tourism facilities operated by the national park, drivers for lorries and tourist buses, or waged labourers in urban employments. Some households have bought lorries, buses, or excavators to engage with the tourism and construction sectors in more depth; some others have become involved in the trading of vegetables. As per Figure 2, income from commoditised labour (45.9% of total monetised income in Lolong, and 40.9% in Nyiru) has already dwarfed incomes from subsidy (21.3%) and dividend (11.6%) in Lolong, and subsidy (12.2%) and tourism services (6.2%) in Nyiru. More intriguingly, local villagers appropriate three alternative tactics that mobilise the non-marketised subsistence sector into ‘background conditions of possibility’ (Fraser and Jaeggi, 2018) for market participation. Together, they result in new daily consumption choices for local villagers. These tactics, which pertain to: (1) the non-marketised subsistence sector; (2) the cash incomes from animal products (11.5% of total cash income in Lolong and 27% in Nyiru) and the collection of the matsutake mushroom (9.4% in Lolong and 13.8% in Nyiru) and (3) the persistence of bartering practices, constitute the focus of our analysis in this section.

Figure 2.

Monetised livelihoods (per household and capita) and their structures in Lolong and Nyiru in 2021.

Tactic 1: Maintaining the subsistence sector

The first tactic that local villagers employ to negotiate the mismatch between cash income and emerging consumer needs is to keep alive a subsistence sector inherited from prior to market transition. Referring again to Table 1 and Figure 1, this sector provides non-monetised and non-commoditised sources of livelihoods, including staple foods such as barley, potato, and corn, animal products such as meat, dairy products and leather, cooking oil from rapeseeds, and fodder from the stockpiling of hay.

For local villagers, the implication of a continuing and vibrant subsistence sector is that, in their search for market-based incomes and lifestyles, this sector serves as an anchor of stability, security, and material abundance in the backdrop. Firstly, it provides a key source of stability, certainty, and security vis-à-vis market volatility. Historically, local villagers experienced multiple cycles of boom and decline in the local economy – from the logging economy that flourished between the 1960s and 1980s, to its decline due to environmental impacts and subsequent replacement by tourism in the 1990s, to deepening of pollution and lack of infrastructure tarnishing the reputation of tourism in the early 2000s, and eventually to the national park delegitimising grassroots tourism services. During this tortuous history, the subsistence sector provided a constant in life and a buffer zone vis-à-vis changing development priorities of the state and the fluidities of the market. Since the founding of the national park, subsidies have made up a relatively stable source of cash income, but the recent Covid-19 pandemic has cast shadow over its long-term sustainability. In the narratives of our informants, the subsistence sector was consistently named as a bedrock of livelihoods:

Most households in the villagers emphasise tourism, and pay less attention to crops and livestock. But it does not have to be so. Some households may consider not engaging in tourism and use their lands to expand plantation and the raising of animals. If you sell (some of) the products (to the market), your income will increase all the same, which is also conducive to the progress of the whole village. (Interview, Mr. B, Nyiru villager, May 2021).

Secondly, the subsistence sector also enables local villagers to minimise the spending of cash incomes on basic livelihoods and save the latter to meet market-based consumer needs. This is possible not only because the subsistence sector supplies some key components of everyday livelihoods such as food and clothing, thus sparing the need to purchase them from the market, but also because it represents an almost enclosed loop both in a biophysical and social sense, achieving its self-maintenance and self-renewal largely free of market-based interventions and relations. In terms of the biophysical, the subsistence sector maintains within its boundaries significant flows and circulations of material resources and energies. For example, fodder fed to animals is either drawn from local ranches or a by-product of crop plantation. The manure produced by animals is in turn used to fertilise crops and ranches. Such a closely interlocked cycle means that there is no need to turn to the market for obtaining fodder and fertilisers.

In terms of the social, villagers have kept alive community norms of reciprocity and mutual support, attesting to the key role that community economies may play in grassroots people’s entry into the market, as we argued earlier. For example, during sowing, fertiliser application, and harvesting, these activities need to be executed within a brief period of time, thus requiring a large input of labour. Hence, one household often relies on the voluntary help of others, and the normative expectation is that the assisted household would reciprocate the labour when others are in need. In the meantime, households that lack assets such as yaks and horses can borrow from other households to assist agricultural work and tourism services, either free of charge or at the cost of a small gift. Besides, for households that are short of labour for various reasons (e.g. urban employment, split of households, illness, etc.), a routine arrangement is that other households would lend support in managing their livestock so that the assisted households can maintain a reasonable amount of family assets. In return, assisted households would offer the assisting ones to use part of their arable lands to supplement the latter’s staple crop production, which is in turn beneficial to households with a large working population. In all, these arrangements ensure that within the subsistence sector, the input of labour and productive factors is largely outside market calculation and does not encroach into villagers’ cash incomes.

Tactic 2: Selective commodification of the non-market domain

As to the second tactic, this is about capitalising on tourists’ and urban consumers’ passion for the allegedly authentic, uncontaminated agriculture of Tibetan communities, and selectively commodifying certain components of the subsistence economy to augment cash incomes. In other words, this tactic bridges the market and non-market realms by translating surpluses in the subsistence sector into market assets. One noteworthy observation that we had during the fieldwork was that most local households had withdrawn from eating yak meat, which was traditionally essential to Tibetan diet. The reason was that due to the fever for yak meat among tourists of Han ethnicity, local villagers were prone to selling yak meat to tourists and retailers, instead of consuming it themselves. Meanwhile, they have increased the raising of pigs, which are not as profitable as yaks in the commercial market, as the main source of meat supply, although a smaller amount of pork is sold to the market as well. What is partly commodified also includes dairy products from yaks, such as cheese and butter, although the largest part of dairy products is still retained within the subsistence sector and consumed by local villagers.

Moreover, villagers have largely refrained from eating the matsutake mushrooms (Ch: song rong), which are picked in the surrounding forests during July and August, and were erstwhile eaten as supplements to staple foods. Instead, they sell them to the market almost exclusively, because of the fervent pursuit of this variety of mushroom in Asian markets such as China and Japan for its aromatic flavour (see Tsing, 2015). Indeed, environmental regulation enforced by the state means that the area accessible to villagers for picking the mushrooms, which can only grow in wilderness, has been radically reduced. As a result, local villagers have to suppress their own consumption to maximise the profits that can be extracted from the markets. As Ms. ZM, a Lolong villager, remarked:

Matsutake mushroom used to be worthless, and we ate it just like all other mushrooms, The quantity was very big then. Nowadays, the area to which we can go is limited, and there are so many people picking them, so each’s harvest is now very small. Now that the mushroom is very expensive, we tend to sell it exclusively. For our own consumption, there are all other varieties of mushrooms, and we have no problem eating them instead. (Interview, Ms. ZM, Lolong village, May 2020).

Also intriguingly, in Nyiru, local villagers liaised with local government agencies responsible for agricultural development and from 2010 introduced on a massive scale the plantation of corn, which was traditionally not a staple crop in the Potatso region. Due to the use of new techniques such as film planting (i.e. covering the soil with a thin layer of plastic film to slow down evaporation), the yield of corn per unit of land significantly exceeds barley. Therefore, to partly substitute corn for barley as a staple food can reduce the land that is planted to feed humans, and people can use the saved land to expand the growing of fodder and barley to feed animals, thus increasing the quantities of meat and dairy products sold to the market. Again, this arrangement is deemed necessary because environmental regulation restricts the areas available for planting and foraging, and villagers must improvise with livelihoods adjustment within the available lands. Again, this tactic shows how the non-market domain can be manipulated and recontoured to relativise the rigid separation between the market and non-market.

Tactic 3: Maintaining and re-inventing bartering practices

The last tactic that we reflect on in this study is the persistence of bartering practices that exist between rural communities of different ethnicities dispersed across a broader region, which constitute another link between resources and surpluses in the non-market domain and new priorities and needs situated in the context of the market transition. The non-monetised types of livelihoods detailed in Figure 1 and Table 1 are not exclusively consumed within producing households but often bartered to expand the variety of goods available to local communities. Bartering networks are not confined to the city of Shangri-La, but stretched widely to a number of nearby townships, municipalities, and prefectures, such as Dali and Baoshan. What to be exchanged and at what rates are based on long histories of negotiations among individuals and communities, contingent on the complementarity between the different products from plural places on the one hand, and on the other, careful and negotiated calculation of different goods’ use values and the huma labours congealed in them – for example, 3 kilos of potato or 1 piece of dried fish from Tibetans can be bartered for 1 kilo of rice from low-altitude communities in Dali or Baoshan, 1 kilo of butter for 3 kilos of rice, 1 kilo of cheese for 2 kilos of rice, 1 kilo of barley for 1 kilo of bean, and so on. Within shorter distances, Lolong and Nyiru villagers trade livestock and animal products with nearby Tibetan villages for utensils such as handmade dustpans, chicken coops, butter containers, bowls, buckets, etc – one cake of butter for a butter container, one piglet for a coop plus a dustpan, etc. These rates of exchange remain stable over relatively long periods of time, thus exempting villagers from excessive fluidity and volatility in transactional relations.

Germane to the first tactic, bartering facilitates the production, circulation, and exchange of goods and resources without having to commoditise them, another means to save cash. It is therefore also a background condition that assists villagers’ access to market consumption and lifestyles. More remarkably, in this study bartering has effectively eroded the market/non-market divide – many professional traders would obtain consumer goods from the market, exchange with Tibetan villagers for local goods, and finally cash out the latter in the market. While they visit the villages, they bring modern consumer goods such as cooking ovens, mobile phones, and microwave ovens, and what they desire the most are puppies of Tibetan Mastiffs, a dog breed passionately pursued by Han Chinese for its association with Tibetan cultures. Yet, other kinds of livestock and poultry, and sometimes used home appliances, mobile phones, motorcycles are also occasionally accepted as payments.

For local villagers, the mobility of professional traders helps them to further integrate with the consumer market by overcoming the constraint of their peripheral locations on the one hand, and on the other hand, their relative lack of capacity in engaging directly with market business. More importantly, the use of bartering to facilitate the circulation of market-based consumer goods and mediate the genesis of ‘fictious commodities’ (Polanyi, 2001) – that is, non-monetised elements of life whose market values are eventually created, such as the dogs – has caused the distinction between the market and non-market to collapse even further in villagers’ economic practices:

We know that mastiff puppies are worth some money. In the 1990s, they used to be very expensive, and we would sell them by ourselves. Nowadays, the prices have gone down, and the market is very competitive, so we do not want to engage in the business ourselves. We would rather exchange them directly for things such as the cooking ovens. (Interview, Mr. AR, Lolong villager, May 2021)

To sustain this alternative space of exchange and circulation, bartering connections need to be built upon social codes and ethical relationships, again testifying to the intrinsic connections between community economies and market dynamics. To begin with, formation of the trading team relies on the voluntary contribution of labour and horses from those households that are better-off, have young male members, and/or enjoy social prestige within the communities. Inter-community, trading teams from Nyiru would be offered free catering, accommodation, and folder at Lolong (the former would reciprocate fruits or corn), and vice versa. Meanwhile, given that agricultural products and handicrafts are not subject to the regulation of industrial standards, their qualities tend to oscillate within a reasonable range. Despite this contingency, it is a norm that households should offer products of the highest qualities in bartering to care for the others’ interests. Finally, bartering often serves the exchange of solidarity rather than utility. Between individual households within or across villages, villagers would often offer crops, animal products, or utensils to worse-off households to address their most urgent needs. What the former receives in return is based on the latter’s affordability and simply serves as a token of gratitude, highlighting the ritualistic meanings of solidarity rather than equivalence between actual use or exchange values.

Conclusion

This study is situated in a broader intellectual tradition that rejects totalising accounts of the market as dominated by a singular mode of production and exchange, but is interested in the co-existence and even close entanglement between market and non-market relations. The ultimate mission of this research agenda is to reveal the concrete, specific, and variegated forms of markets, and the ‘relational combinations of multiple principles and logics’ (Peck et al., 2020: 5) underlying different pathways towards market transition. As Slater and Tonkiss (2001: 200) pointed out, such a stance:

Would necessarily involve understanding particular programmes and concepts of marketization, particular institutionalizations of exchange, particular framings of exchange (Callon) that internalize or externalize pertinent social consequences.

Taking this assertion as a point of departure, this study draws upon theoretical insights from the diverse/community economies and market frontiers approaches to theorise indigenous communities encountering, negotiating, and appropriating market forces and their agency in the contact zones between market and non-market, rather than confined to community-based and non-capitalist arrangements. Recognising the perennial existence of cultural and ethical considerations in economies and the economic and social innovations of which vernacular practices are generative (the first approach), as well as the view that how market making unfolds is at least partly dependent on the ways that the non-market realm is shaped (the second approach), we nonetheless argue that it is not adequate to just appreciate diversity or focus on the operation of power that controls, manages, or utilises contact zones to configure specific regimes of capital accumulation. In many circumstances, the market and non-market reside in relationships of mutual engagement and enrichment that serve people’s life projects and supply extra affordance, viability, and stability to community economies. To envision the unfolding of these processes, it is necessary to recentre analysis on grassroots agency and experimentation (the first approach) but within an epistemological frame that emphasises mutual constitution and critical reflection on how the market/non-market divide is patrolled and negotiated (the second approach). In sum, shuttling between these two approaches, this paper ventures to build a dialectical conversation to cast light on economic possibilities across the market/non-market divide and the oscillating dividing line as part and parcel of the market order (Fraser and Jaeggi, 2018).

As the series of tables and figures presented in the paper have shown, villagers in the Potatso region inhabit a highly diversified economic landscape and draw their livelihoods from market and non-market engagements. In the first place, the market/non-market divide in Potatso is largely a product of state engineering, attesting to the mutual constitution between the two realms. However, boundaries between the two are far from impervious – on the one hand, the non-market provides an alternative means for circulating resources and generating livelihoods, and serves as the ‘background conditions of possibility’ that enable local villagers to pursue modern consumer needs in a situation of relative secure and stable provision of subsistence. On the other hand, it also determines the kinds of goods and resources that can be selectively commodified and injected into market dynamics, to further broaden the scope of market participation.

This conversation also allows us to reconcile between two orientations in heterodox economic research – one following the perspective of overdetermination and arguing that economies are not structurally determined but contingently made by multiple forces and processes (Gibson-Graham, 2006), and the other insisting on the centrality of structural power (Glassman, 2003). In Potatso, while the market/non-market divide is a site for the performance of state power, it is nonetheless susceptible to negotiation and destabilisation initiated by local villagers. For the latter, their negotiation with state policies and environmental regulations is embedded in structural processes that institute market-based production and exchange, which gradually permeate into, even assimilate local subjectivities, aspirations and lifestyles. This is, however, not to obfuscate the fact that local economic decisions continue to draw upon, often quite heavily, community-based traditions, relations, and ethics, rather than dominated by scripts of instrumental rationality, self-interest, and calculation underlying an ideal market (Slater and Tonkiss, 2001). The continuing vibrancy of community economies is likely to serve as an important buttress for the long-term economic and social sustainability in these communities, vis-à-vis the structural conditions of market transition.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Dezheng Wang for his help in producing the figures and tables.

Correction (May 2024):

The article has been updated to correct minor data in Table 1 since its original publication.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research receives funding support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 42171240; 42071171), and the Provincial Department of Human Resources, Yunnan Province, China (Project title: Indigenous modernisation of ethnic communities in Yunnan).

ORCID iD

Junxi Qian

Notes

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