Abstract
Higglers in Kingston presents a rich and nuanced ethnography of informal sellers in Jamaica while developing important new theoretical frameworks, particularly that of “embodied intersectionality.” This concept, which frames higglers bodies as “ideological sites—spaces where a variety of discourses about race/color, class and gender converge” (p. 5), links the sociology of the body, theories of intersectionality, and the study of gendered work in the global economy in provocative and insightful ways. Brown-Glaude grounds intersectional theory not only in terms of bodies but also in terms of space and economics, arguing, “The formal economy is thus imagined as masculine, brown/white, and thereby legitimate, whereas the informal economy is predominately black, female, and illegitimate” (p. 168).
Higglers is a common Jamaican term for lower-class Black women who sell their wares on the street or in markets. Brown-Glaude divides higglers into two categories: (a) traditional higglers, mostly market women who sell locally grown produce and have formed an integral part of the Jamaican economy since slavery and (b) modern higglers, or informal commercial importers (ICIs), who sell manufactured goods (clothing, electronics, furniture, etc.) imported from New York, Miami, other Caribbean islands or China.
Brown-Glaude provides an important corrective to the current orthodoxy regarding microcredit and microenterprise as the ticket out of poverty for women in developing countries. Spearheaded by the work of Bangladeshi economist and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Mohammad Younus, the growth in microcredit programs has spurred growth and economic mobility for some women but in no ways constitutes a magic bullet in all contexts. Higglers demonstrates that Jamaican women are often hesitant to participate in these programs, not simply out of ignorance but as a conscious refusal. Specifically, women use rational choice in rejecting the financial risks of putting important possessions up for collateral, even “low-risk” items such as refrigerators or stoves, as the loss of these items would have a hugely negative impact on their families. Furthermore, they avoid these formal programs as the demands for character references often subject them to further stigma.
Instead, Brown-Glaude shows us how higglers choose, create, and navigate the margins of the informal economy in ways that make sense to them as individual and as collective actors. They carve out their own forms of informal work within the constraining contexts of colonial legacies, gender inequality, a contracting and debt-burdened economy, high unemployment, a violent drug trade, and contentious politics that shape contemporary Jamaica.
The study is based on interviews with 45 higglers—23 traditional market women and 22 modern ICIs. The research methods also include archival research, content analysis of local newspapers and participant observation in markets and arcades. Brown-Glaude provides a richly reflexive account of her fieldwork incorporating feminist approaches to theorizing power and difference. Although she identifies herself as a Black, working-class, patois-speaking Jamaican woman, her respondents perceived her as a foreigner, middle-class, and racially as “browning.” Furthermore, rather than regarding her as an insider, they were initially suspicious that she was a government spy. Brown-Glaude provides a transparent and theoretically sophisticated account of how these dynamics shaped the research.
The historical chapters are especially compelling, as they reveal the deep roots of the contradictions in the Jamaican economy that shape the current conflicting perceptions of higglers. On one hand, higglers are the bulwark of the economy, as they provide much needed products for consumers while supporting themselves and their families by performing unstable and often backbreaking work. On the other hand, these women are vilified as public nuisances, disease carriers, and economic threats to formal businesses, generating government campaigns to remove them from the streets. Brown-Glaude masterfully weaves the rich tapestry which provides the backdrop for the contradictory attitudes and policies toward higglers.
While Brown-Glaude develops and applies the concept of embodied intersectionality in compelling ways with regard to newspaper and archival representations of higglers, I would have liked to hear more about the everyday embodied practices of these women as they perform this work and their embodied interactions with customers, competitors, police, and other state officials. How do the higglers control their own appearance, behavior, and ideologies to discipline their own bodies or to resist control of their bodies?
The strength of this book is its in-depth exploration of the Jamaican context, but it would be instructive for the author to elucidate any comparative lessons for understanding informal work in other transnational sites. What dynamics are particular to higglers in Jamaica, and what are more generalizable patterns that emerge across locales?
In sum, Higglers in Kingston is a theoretically innovative, empirically rich, and topically relevant book that would be an engaging text for undergraduate and graduate courses on the sociology of work, globalization, gender, race, and the body.