Women Traders in Cross-Cultural Perspective: Mediating Identities, Marketing Wares

By Linda J. Seligmann

This innovative volume studies women as economic, political, and cultural mediators of space, gender, value, and language in informal markets. Drawing on diverse methodologies—multisited fieldwork, linguistic analysis, and archival research—the contributors demonstrate how women move between and knit together household and marketplace activities. This knitting together pivots on how household practices and economies are translated and transferred to the market, as well as how market practices and economic principles become integral to the nature and construction of the household.

Exploring the cultural identities and economic practices of women traders in ten diverse locales—Bolivia, Ghana, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Morocco, Nicaragua, Peru, and the Philippines—the authors pay special attention to the effects of global forces, national economic policies, and nongovernmental organizations on women’s participation in the market and the domestic sector. The authors also consider the impact that women’s economic and political activities—in social movements, public protests, and more hidden kinds of subversive behavior—have on state policy, on the attitudes of different sectors of society toward female traders, and on the dynamics of the market itself.

A final theme focuses on the cultural dimension of mediation. Many women traders straddle cultural spheres and move back and forth between them. Does this affect their participation in the market and their identities? How do ties of ethnicity or acts of reciprocity affect the nature of commodity exchanges? Do they create exchanges that are neither purely commodified nor wholly without calculation? Or is it more often the case that ethnic commonalities and reciprocity merely mask the commodification of social and economic exchanges? Does this straddling lead to the emergence of new kinds of hybrid identities and practices? In considering these questions, the authors specify the ways in which consumers contribute to identity formation among market women.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Mar 1, 2002
• ISBN: 9780804764018

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Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 2001 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University

Printed in the United States of America

On acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Women traders in cross-cultural perspective : mediating

identities, marketing wares / Linda J. Seligmann, editor.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

9780804764018

1. Women merchants—Developing countries.

2. Markets—Developing countries. 3. Women—

Developing countries—Economic conditions.

4. Women—Developing countries—Social conditions.

I. Seligmann, Linda J., 1954–

HF4055.W66 2001

381′.1′082—dc21 00-059509

Designed by Janet Wood

Typeset by G&S Typesetters, Inc. in 11/14 Garamond

Original printing 2001

Last figure below indicates year of this printing:

10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01

Frontispiece: Informal vendors sell fruit and potatoes on Santa Clara-San Pedro Street near the Central Market of Cuzco, Peru, 1993 (detail). Photo credit: Linda J. Seligmann

Table of Contents

Copyright Page

Preface

About the Authors

Introduction: Mediating Identities and Marketing Wares

PART I - Gender Ideologies, Household Models, and Market Dynamics

CHAPTER ONE - Nineteenth-Century Views of Women’s Participation in Mexico’s Markets

CHAPTER TWO - Markets as Gendered Domains: The Javanese Pasar

PART II - Fields of Power

CHAPTER THREE - Inside, Outside, and Selling on the Road: Women’s Market Trading in South India

CHAPTER FOUR - Nursing-Mother Work in Ghana: Power and Frustration in Akan Market Women’s Lives

PART III - Identity, Economy, and Survival in the Marketplace

CHAPTER FIVE - Situating Handicraft Market Women in Ifugao, Upland Philippines: A Case for Multiplicity

CHAPTER SIX - Gender on the Market in Moroccan Women’s Verbal Art: Performative Spheres of Feminine Authority

CHAPTER SEVEN - Hungarian Village Women in the Marketplace During the Late Socialist Period

CHAPTER EIGHT - Traditional Medicines in the Marketplace: Identity and Ethnicity Among Female Vendors

PART IV - Research Agendas

CHAPTER NINE - Market /places as Gendered Spaces: Market /women’s Studies over Two Decades

Conclusion: Future Research Directions

Notes

References

Index

Preface

As I write these words, I feel a bit like one of the market women that the Kumasi traders of Ghana, Africa, describe as nursing mothers. Nudging this manuscript along through several years of twists and turns until it emerged as a coherent piece of work was hardly what I expected when I undertook the project. The wide-ranging comments, questions, and interest generated by an invited session I organized at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), sponsored by the American Ethnological Society and the Society for the Anthropology of Work, prompted me to consider transforming our session papers into an edited volume. This turned out to be harder than beginning with three oranges to sell and ending with five more and enough to spare for the family breadbasket. So be it. Working to understand the intimate intersection of culture and economy in the context of women traders was a relatively uncommon thing to attempt to do. I am indebted, as I always will be, to the many women in Cuzco’s markets who, with laughter, pride, and not a few tears, have shared with me the stories of their work and lives. These stories were a principal impetus for organizing the AAA panel and they inform the theoretical construction of this volume. I also issue a special thanks to Teófila Huáman who has consistently assisted me in my market research in Peru.

The contributors to this volume always cooperated with my many demands and tolerated not a few unexpected delays. Working with them has been an enjoyable learning experience. Theodore Bestor and Florence Babb were the discussants at our session. Florence also contributed a chapter to this volume. Both of them offered comments and perspectives that illuminated connections among the papers and specified areas to which we needed to dedicate more attention. Hanna Lessinger, also a contributor to this volume, could not resist exercising her journalistic penchant for clarity, and the Introduction which follows has benefited from her editing pencil. Ayesha Aliana did the legwork of tracking down sources on markets as my graduate research assistant. Laura Kaplan, also my graduate research assistant at George Mason University, went to work organizing my database for another project in the works but stopped in the middle to help me do one last round of editing on this book. Her editorial skills are impressive and are matched by her kindness. Kathleen Fine and I have held long and stimulating conversations about our respective research. I am lucky to have a good friend who is also intellectually inspiring. Susan Russell and two anonymous readers offered many helpful suggestions to improve the manuscript; I am grateful to them for reserving time from their busy schedules for this task. Many thanks to John Stone, my colleague at George Mason, who urged me to act and who has always been smart and fair, judicious to an extent I rarely see in the academy. Alex Giardino did a careful job of copyediting. Kate Washington and Kate Warne have been supportive, efficient, and pleasant in facilitating the publication process. Muriel Bell told me it would not be easy and saw it through. The encouragement and empathy I have received from my parents, Albert L. Seligmann and Barbara B. Seligmann, and my sisters, Susan Moreno, Ann Lyons, and Wendy Seligmann, have helped to keep my spirits high. John Cooper, Marina Cooper, and Gus are my family. As I occupy the roles of being professor, wife, and new mother, I understand better what it means to juggle identities and mediate among them, particularly in the context of social expectations. My family has brought me joy and a sense of well-being; I value their presence in my life more than the words on this page can convey.

L.J.S.

About the Authors

Jennifer Alexander, formerly an Australian Research Council Fellow, held her award at the University of Sydney, Australia, where Paul Alexander teaches social anthropology. Their numerous individual and joint publications have been based on extensive fieldwork in Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and Malaysia. They are currently engaged in research on the export furniture industry of Indonesia and the destruction of small-scale communities in Central Borneo.

Florence E. Babb is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Iowa, where she has also served as director of women’s studies and of Latin American studies. She is the author of Between Field and Cooking Pot: The Political Economy of Marketwomen in Peru (University of Texas Press, 1989; rev. ed., 1998), based on research carried out between 1977 and 1997. She is presently completing a book entitled Mapping Gender and Cultural Politics in Neoliberal Nicaragua. She has recently published articles in Identities, Latin American Perspectives, and Cultural Survival.

Gracia Clark is an assistant professor in anthropology at Indiana University. Her fieldwork with market traders in Kumasi Central Market, Ghana, began in 1978 with her Ph.D. research for the University of Cambridge. She has also done development consulting with UNIFEM and the ILO. Her 1994 book, Onions Are My Husband (University of Chicago Press), integrates these two interests. Presently she is editing life histories of Kumasi market women and analyzing their economic ideas.

Éva V. Huseby-Darvas received her Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and teaches at the University of Michigan at Dearborn and University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Since the early 1980s she has been conducting research in rural Hungary and among Hungarian Americans. Her publications include Elderly Women in a Hungarian Village: Childlessness, Generativity, and Social Control (Journal of Cross-Cultural Gerontology, 1987); Migrating Inward and Out: Validating Life Course Transitions Through Oral Autobiography in Life History as Cultural Construction/Performance (Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 1988); and Migration and Gender: Perspectives from Rural Hungary (East European Quarterly, 1990).

Deborah A. Kapchan is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. She has been the director of the Center for Intercultural Studies in Folklore and Ethnomusicology since 1996. The chapter in this volume grows out of her fieldwork in the Moroccan marketplace, documented in her 1996 book, Gender on the Market: Moroccan Women and the Revoicing of Tradition (University of Pennsylvania Press). She is currently working on Moroccan popular culture and oral poetry.

Johanna Lessinger is an anthropologist who has worked in South India since 1971. Her initial investigation of the men and women employed in Madras City’s marketing system, carried out during a period when feminist analyses were just entering anthropology, led to a larger interest in women’s employment within the Indian urban working class. Her work on Madras markets has been followed by more recent research into the employment of women in the city’s export garment factories. She has also carried out research on Indian immigration to the United States. Her ethnography, From the Ganges to the Hudson, Indian Immigrants in New York City, was published by Allyn and Bacon in 1995. She is a research associate in the Department of Anthropology at Barnard College, Columbia University, and a visiting professor of anthropology at the University of New Hampshire.

Judith Marti is an associate professor of anthropology at California State University at Northridge. She has pioneered the use of archival and photographic materials for researching gender roles. Together with Mari Womack, she edited The Other Fifty Percent: Multicultural Perspectives on Gender Relations (Waveland Press, 1993). She is currently working on a book on nineteenth-century market women in Mexico.

B. Lynne Milgram is a lecturer in anthropology at the University of Toronto, where she held a postdoctoral position. She is also a research associate at the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto. Among her most recent articles on women and crafts in Southeast Asia are Craft Production and Household Practices in the Upland Philippines in Transgressing Borders: Critical Perspectives on Gender, Household and Culture (Bergin and Garvey, 1998) and Locating ‘Tradition’ in the Striped Textiles of Banaue, Ifugao in Museum Anthropology. Her current research on women’s craft cooperatives and microfinance projects in the northern Philippines addresses issues of gender and development and tourist art production.

Linda J. Seligmann is an associate professor of anthropology at George Mason University. Her current research concerns women in markets as cultural, political, and economic mediators. Among her publications are Survival Politics and the Movements of Market Women in Peru in the Age of Neoliberalism in The Costs of Modernization in Latin America (Jaguar Books, 1998), Between Reform and Revolution: Political Struggles in the Peruvian Andes, 1969–1991 (Stanford University Press, 1995), Between Worlds of Exchange: Ethnicity among Peruvian Market Women, (Cultural Anthropology , 1993), and "To Be in Between: The Cholas as Market Women in Peru" (Comparative Studies in Society and History, 1989).

Lynn Sikkink is an assistant professor of anthropology at San Jose State University, California. She has carried out research on ethnoarchaeology and household studies in Peru and Bolivia, respectively. Her publications include The Household as the Locus of Difference: Gender, Occupational Multiplicity and Marketing Practices in the Bolivian Andes (Anthropology of Work Review, 1995) and "Water and Exchange: The Ritual of Yaku Cambio as Communal and Competitive Encounter" (American Ethnologist, 1997). Her current research is on women’s work and vending traditional medicines.

e9780804764018_i0003.jpg

The sprawling informal market of Avenida del Ejército, along the railroad tracks, Cuzco, Peru, 1991. Photo credit: Linda J. Seligmann.

Introduction: Mediating Identities and Marketing Wares

LINDA J. SELIGMANN

Hagglers, peddlers, hawkers, traders, market women, higglers, and queens are among the many labels scholars have assigned to the women who work in the marketplaces of the world. Such terms seek to describe the complex, varied activities of buying, selling, trading, gossiping, and mothering. Yet few researchers have focused on the kinds of larger mediating roles—those extending beyond economic functions—that market women play in merging disparate social spaces, gendered identities, supposedly separate kin-based, religious, or economic values, as well as different ethnicities and language genres.¹ Little in the way of previous scholarship on markets has examined market women’s lives comparatively, across multiple geographic locations. An important exception is Gracia Clark’s (1988) edited volume that explores women traders’ relationships to the state in several different societies.

Much of what has been written about market women has used the framework of political economy, a theoretical approach that tends to concentrate narrowly on the economic dynamics of market women’s activities and on the ways in which women have been able to establish themselves as entrepreneurs in the informal sector.² Often missing in such work is an extensive exploration of how a particular set of economic behaviors, found globally, are shaped by local cultural practices and values, especially those pertaining to gender.

In contrast, the contributors to this volume, some of whom also use political economy as a framework, treat as an analytic whole both the economic and cultural practices that shape the lives of women who work in markets in a wide range of societies—Bolivia, Ecuador, Ghana, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Morocco, Peru, and the Philippines. The collection of work presented here grew out of an invited session of the 1995 annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association, cosponsored by the American Ethnological Society and the Society for the Anthropology of Work. Although contributors to this volume approach the subject of market women from different analytical traditions, they share the assumption that market women are not simply traders or vendors of economic wares. Rather, they seek to demonstrate the complexity of the positions these women occupy, to explain how and why their positions change over time, and to specify the structural conditions that inhibit or enhance market women’s activities. These chapters are informed by newer trends in anthropology that look at personal agency and at the cultural construction of identity. Many of the contributions consider the cultural dimensions of a changing global economy and of interventions of the state and of international aid and lending agencies, and their effects upon market women’s work.

By demonstrating the critical importance that cultural values and practices have in shaping economies, the contributors challenge established anthropological and sociological paradigms of how economies work. Rather than assuming a simple dichotomy between substantivist and formalist approaches to economic dynamics, or adopting economic determinist explanations of market activities, the authors offer in-depth examples of how market women impose cultural calculations that may manipulate and transform the laws of supply and demand. The work on women and markets in this volume speaks most eloquently to the usefulness of not disengaging economic from political and cultural processes if one is to understand how economies work.³ The contributors uncover refreshing evidence of the interplay of culturally constructed categories and ideologies within the organization of labor, production, and exchange, and in processes of economic development and nation building. They also show how activities that are often considered to unfold in separate spheres—for example, in the market or household, in rural or urban spaces, or in local, national, or global domains—actually interact and shape the activities that take place in all of these domains. In short, the authors in this volume, through an examination of the identity, position, and activities of market women, disrupt neat sociological categories. They call into question many widely held assumptions about how economies work and they employ research methodologies that situate the lives of market women within complicated webs of social ties, institutional structures, and economic forces.

All of the contributors seek to integrate multiple levels of analysis and to explore comparatively a cluster of issues centering around the complexity of market women’s social identities. By using this approach, we hope the chapters comment on one another, thereby exposing readers to more than one perspective. Despite the specificity of gender relations and historical processes that shape how market women are situated in each society, it is possible to discern general patterns that characterize most, if not all, women’s participation in markets everywhere. From there it is possible to venture theoretical explanations for why these patterns emerge.

GENDER IDEOLOGIES, HOUSEHOLD MODELS, AND MARKET DYNAMICS

Women vendors move between and knit together household and marketplace activities in intriguing ways.⁴ The very participation of women in markets is determined in part by household structures, sexual divisions of labor, and marriage, residence, and inheritance patterns. Household and market interact dialectically as kinship dynamics, gender ideologies, and household practices and economies are translated or transferred to the market. Meanwhile market practices and economic principles become integral to the reproduction of the household and the nature of the activities that take place within it. Where women’s work in markets is negatively sanctioned because of gender ideologies operating within the household as well as in the larger society, particular conditions or strategies may nevertheless permit some women to enter the workplace as vendors.

Frequently women will enter the market as an extension of household tasks they perform as well as to make possible the economic survival of those households and, particularly, to secure the survival of their children. While women are often socialized to contribute the largest share of their labor to the household in order to ensure children’s welfare, in many societies that work is not conceptualized as physical caretaking but rather as the economic maintenance of children. In this volume, Alexander and Alexander, in their work in Indonesia, Clark in her research in Ghana, and Huseby-Darvas’s work in Hungary all find this to be the case. That is, women enter the market as mothers and do not necessarily assume that the actions they must take to ensure the welfare of their children occur solely within the home.

At the same time that gender ideologies may not necessarily prohibit women from pursuing particular kinds of economic activities, they may create intense conflicts along class and gender lines. Lessinger in this volume traces the way cultural values about appropriate female activities in Madras, India, are stretched to their limit when women enter vending. Because it has such low entry barriers, vending is one of the few occupations available to Madras households struggling to counteract widespread unemployment. Nevertheless, women’s entry into vending when cultural values and gender ideologies disapprove of it causes great stress within households. Huseby-Darvas in this volume explores how gender ideologies as well as notions of appropriate generational demeanor stigmatized middle-aged Hungarian women who embarked on marketing activities in the late socialist period, even though their income was of tremendous value to family members.

In contrast, Milgram finds that because there are no ideological constraints on women seeking upward economic mobility through commerce in the upland Philippines, women traders have become the main risk takers and the gateways to cash earnings through the handicraft industry. In fact, where trade is both an economic imperative and a cultural tradition in which generations of women have engaged, women are able to accumulate considerable capital for themselves and even to move into wholesaling (see Alexander and Alexander; Milgram, this volume).⁵ Marketing activities among women are hardly unusual in societies where women are naturally considered to be economically autonomous. This contrasts with the negative attitudes of most men toward women’s engagement in paid work in Latin America and India and the consequent restriction of women to the lowest levels of marketing where they have little opportunity for accumulation of capital (see, for example, Pescatello 1976; Guttman 1996).

Women become vendors, rather than pursuing more lucrative occupations, for many reasons. For instance, men often monopolize or jealously guard employment in better-paid work; it is thus easier for women with little capital to pursue vending. Lineage and inheritance dynamics may also encourage women to enter marketing.⁶ Furthermore, jobs with more flexibility, like trading, enable women to combine their household and work responsibilities; as vendors, they may already have rights to certain kinds of crops, especially perishable food products within the household economy, that they can market. However, ambivalence may surround these women’s economic activities if their incomes begin to surpass those of men and if they gain access to their own capital rather than depending on male kin to supply it. The economic fertility associated with capital accumulation is considered to be appropriate for men, not women, whose work should be primarily directed toward biological reproduction and economic reproduction of the household.

Despite societal or male disapproval, women may be compelled to enter the workplace as vendors because of economic conditions eroding the ability of the household to survive. The implementation of structural adjustment programs (SAP) in so many societies being drawn into the global capitalist system initially puts men, with their more established employment, out of work. The dire needs of the household then begin to take precedence over cultural sanctions or gender ideologies that prohibit women’s entry into the marketplace. Women, operating in the most flexible end of the informal sector, have begun to take up the slack (see Babb; Clark; Lessinger, this volume).

Many of the volume’s contributors find that drawing a clear boundary between private and public spheres of economic activity is not helpful.⁷ Ideologies of appropriate female or male labor may clash with the actual economic activities that both men and women perform, as the above examples demonstrate. The lack of a clear boundary also means that gender ideologies, as they structure the sexual division of labor within households, do not determine cultural rules about labor. Women who enter a new workplace sometimes devise creative ways to challenge restrictive gender ideologies. Likewise, men may take on tasks formerly considered to be women’s. Depending on the value attached to the goal of a task, a man’s activities may come to be not only socially tolerated but also admired. A case in point is that of a man in Ghana whose nursing-mother work in maintaining his children economically was highly regarded (see Clark, this volume).

The patterned links between women’s vending activities and household dynamics demonstrate that women may seek work in the marketplace as a means of achieving or maintaining autonomy, alleviating poverty, and protecting children, even as their actions may perpetuate the very systems that disadvantage them. Whatever the specific motivation for women’s entry into marketing activities, the cases in this volume demonstrate that gender ideologies and economic forces intervene to shape women’s experiences as vendors. In turn, women’s marketing activities may occasionally have an impact on the cultural values that structure the sexual division of labor. The studies thus suggest, if sometimes obliquely, the sources of change in gendered employment structures and work cultures.

IDENTITY, ECONOMY, AND SURVIVAL IN THE MARKETPLACE

Though theoretically the market is indifferent to personal social characteristics, the societies into which it is introduced are not. They are deeply gendered and this fact affects how market institutions bed down.

—J. SHAW

Contributors to this volume address the cultural dimension of women’s trading and emphasize how the identities of traders and their participation in markets are affected when they straddle cultural spheres and shuttle between them. Some chapters offer examples of how cultural values and practices affect commodity exchanges in such a way that they are neither wholly com-modified nor wholly without calculation. These conditions (mediating between worlds and using at least two different modes of calculating value) sometimes lead to the emergence of new kinds of hybrid identities and new economic practices.

Once women enter the market as vendors, they establish themselves using both economic and instrumental strategies of identity. They interweave household economic dynamics with those of a market economy. In particular, women traders in many areas incorporate reciprocity as a primary aspect of their transactions rather than reducing all exchanges to the law of supply and demand. This reliance on reciprocity has multiple advantages, as both Milgram and Sikkink show in this volume. The producers who supply market women may feel a greater loyalty to them, thus providing a more constant and cheap supply of goods if a kinship or fictive-kinship relationship already exists between supplier and vendor. This reciprocity will ensure that vendors continue to return to the same producers. Reciprocity may also play a critical role in the way that market women organize among themselves, a subject to which I shall return in the section below on political activities among market women.

The breadth and depth of social networks constitute a rich source of capital for market women as the chapters by Milgram, Babb, Clark, and Alexander and Alexander show. These networks have particular characteristics. Often originally established for noneconomic purposes, they draw on long traditions and on ethnically specific means of constituting social life. Such networks are not available to just anyone; they can be inherited by subsequent generations and can be converted into economic, symbolic, or political capital (see Steinhauf and Huber 1996).

Gender ideologies, which in some societies hamper market women, can also be a source of strength as female vendors draw on them in constructing presentations of self that facilitate successful sales or offer protection in the face of frequent legal difficulties. Contributors found two common presentations of self among women vendors: (1) the motherly but shrewd and tough entrepreneur; and (2) the helpless victim of circumstance. Distinguishing between these self-presentations as deliberate and manipulative, or as a perpetuation or transfer of gender ideologies from the household to the marketplace, is not a simple task (see Clark; Marti, this volume). Marti, drawing from historical records, offers a particularly useful view of the interplay between these two stereotypical presentations. She traces society’s views of market women in nineteenth-century Mexico, specifically the ways in which different media represented market vendors as well as how market vendors presented themselves to city government officials. She concludes that, deliberately or not, tremendous ambiguity surrounded the figure of market women; it is unclear whether the dominant society wanted to portray market women as vulnerable, helpless, and dependent, or whether the vendors themselves manipulated that representation for their own purposes. Marti also presents evidence of the ways female vendors and their activities were construed to support or criticize local government. Vendors could be lauded for being shrewd and enterprising, yet those same qualities could be ruthlessly condemned in battles for control over revenues from street markets and fairs.

One of the most important findings of contributors to this volume is that market women value their social skills, information, and social networks more than they value economic capital in enhancing their ability to make a livelihood. Often, vendors form trading partnerships in order to maximize these resources that are particularly critical to women’s abilities to obtain loans, given the reluctance of banks to offer market women credit. While social skills, information, and social networks are crucial to both men and women petty entrepreneurs, gender ideologies force women to value social capital more heavily and to do so in three ways: women tend to have less economic capital available to them; they encounter greater obstacles to entry into alternative occupations; and they are more knowledgeable than men about the gossip and ties of daily life that constitute the material of social information and networks.

In practice, a vendor depends heavily on personal style to supplement general marketing skills. She needs social skills to bargain well, persuading her client that she is well aware of price ranges and is embedded in an extensive array of social relationships. Buying cheap and selling dear requires superb bargaining skills and constant testing of knowledge about price ranges. Alexander and Alexander (this volume) find that trade in the Javanese pasar (marketplace) is characterized by unstandardized products, ranges in value, a high number of selling points and traders, and traders who often come from different economic classes. These features inhibit the spread of accurate prices so that competition takes place between individual traders and customers, rather than between traders of the same commodity. To do well in these conditions, traders have to control the flow of information through a highly complex and far-flung market system.

The Alexanders also observe that, in comparison to the unwieldy requirements for obtaining bank loans, the credit and debt agreements among wholesalers, trading partnerships, and petty traders provide cheap and efficient distribution of scarce financial resources through the marketing and production systems as a whole (see also Clark; Milgram, this volume). While large loans may not be so common in these more informal arrangements, agreements structured by interpersonal considerations may allow women without a credit history to obtain needed capital at particular moments, on short notice, and on more flexible terms.

Identity strategies seem to prevail most in the instrumental efforts of market women to establish themselves and expand their entrepreneurial activities by gaining control over niche markets. These identity strategies often reveal the ability of global economic and cultural currents to insert themselves in local environments. Sikkink finds that Bolivian women from rural communities who sell herbal remedies in urban markets inhabit class/regional /ethnic identities that are fluid and contextual. The identity vendors adopt depend greatly on the scale at which they sell, how separated they are from rural households, the frequency of their vending activities, and how they are perceived by consumers of their products.⁸ Exchange itself and the kinds of goods involved in the exchange shape identity as tourists and urbanites attribute the efficacy of herbal medicinal remedies to rurality and exotic, potent, mysterious Indianness. Even though some regular vendors identify themselves as shrewd entrepreneurs engaged in a business venture, the products they sell, their knowledge of traditional healing practices, and the views of their consumers, including tourists, root the vendors in an ultratraditional, indigenous rural identity. If these traders want to continue to do well in the marketplace, they must offer more than herbal remedies; they must also wear the trappings of knowledgeable native medicine women.

In the Philippines, Milgram observes that the style adopted by women intermediaries seeking to purchase weavings and woodcarvings from producers plays a huge role in their ability to make a living. It is not only a question of the amount of credit or raw materials they might have to offer but also how they offer them. Abundant generosity, maternal protectiveness, and a willingness to create an intimate and sociable environment for exchange serve both parties, especially when competition becomes fierce and brokers want to assure themselves of a reliable and loyal group of producers. Social skills then—a culturally informed understanding of how to ensure access to credit, how to establish trust for a transaction, how to make a culturally grounded calculation of reciprocity and its timing, as well as a sensitivity to the nature of consumer demands—are critical to market women’s economic relationships.

A related factor in the success of women in marketing is their ability to learn the culture of the marketplace, which includes acquisition of the appropriate language and aggressive behavior characterizing so many marketers. These skills may be acquired through either an informal socialization process or formal apprenticeship. Market women with firm roots in a particular marketplace appear to share cultural practices and values, some of which are predicated on their command of a special language or slang. Market women often have a distinctive way of talking among themselves, especially if they are quarreling, discussing prices, or assessing customers. (They may also use a number of slang words and expressions familiar to customers.) Customers themselves acknowledge the unique site that market women occupy by developing their own slang to let market women know their financial difficulties (Musisi 1995, 132; and Alexander and Alexander; Clark; Kapchan; Milgram, this