From Informal Markets to non-hegemonic Politics of Value: Crosscutting approaches between Porto Alegre and Buenos Aires in the production of street objects and subjects

Abstract

The anthropology of informal markets always faced with some difficulty the basic problem of proposing definitions of what constitutes the informal. Economists and sociologists have proposed all too generalizing conceptualizations, linking it to the formal economy; anthropologists run into excessively particularized conceptions, often denying the heuristic ability of the notion. This paper suggests a third answer to the problem. It explores the economic policies that attach value to subjects, objects and locations, framing and producing them in relation to each other. It focuses on how competing discourses on informality – imagined, mobile and incomplete – take form and are performed. Ethnographically, the article draws from the transition of a street market to a popular mall in Porto Alegre/RS; and on the public debates between journalists, businessmen and traders about the expansion of the world’s biggest informal marketplace, called “La Salada”, in Buenos Aires