HOW A HUCKSTER BECOMES A CUSTODIAN OF MARKET MORALITY: TRADITIONS OF FLEXIBILITY IN EXCHANGE IN DOMINICA

Abstract

Since 1995, Dominica has endured a massive economic downturn following a series of World Trade Organization decisions that have devastated the banana industry, its major export earner. Yet the trade decisions have not been the subject of much anxiety or debate. At the same time, their second largest contributors to foreign exchange earnings (hucksters) are seldom the subject of public discussion. I suggest in this article that these omissions have to do with the manner in which flexibility is culturally conceptualized. Rather than a recent adaptation to the physiopsychological disciplining of a post-Fordian or “globalized” economy, I argue that in Dominica, flexibility is historically constituted through a much longer engagement with capitalism in the formation of the Caribbean as a cultural area over the last five centuries. The entrepreneurial savvy found among hucksters is autochthonous to Dominica's trade culture.

Key Words:

• Caribbean
• political economy
• flexibility
• traders
• markets

Notes

1. Roseau has the largest such market, which is open most days of the week, but sales spike on Saturday mornings, “market day.” Smaller markets are located in Portsmouth (Dominica's second largest “city,” actually a large village), and Mahaut. There are fish markets located in several villages, including Fond St. Jean, Marigot, Soufriere, Thibaud, and Point Michel. And there are roadside vendors and grocery stores that operate as markets as well.

2. This particular informant (a very well educated man with experience in environmentally sustainable development) was performing, playing on information and ideas he knew I would have about the history of resource extraction in the Americas. For instance, we had previously discussed the problems of bauxite mining in Jamaica.

3. I am reminded here of Paul Stoller's (2002) discussion of the rationalization of pious Muslim West African traders who market items religiously considered idolatrous or obscene that “money has no smell”.

4. Elsewhere, I have discussed the political economic thought underlying this conceptualization, drawing on the work of Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (2002), as a basis for understanding the more complex moral philosophy that underlies capitalist practice and the valorization of entrepreneurial activity, and distinguishing this from the global capitalist process which has emerged (Mantz 2003).

5. This is, of course, a subtle but significant form of silencing, to use Michel-Rolph Trouillot's (1995) term, with respect to colonial, ancillary class, race and gender predispositions.

Dominica Market News 1997. 15(6) (Oct)

Honychurch, Lennox n.d. A Report on the Old Roseau Market. Compiled for the Dominica Conservation Association

Leevy, Alfred C. n.d. The Labour Situation Less Than One Decade After Emancipation