Beyond the social embeddedness of economic activity: the quality-orientedness in coffee production of Timor-Leste and its implication for legal pluralism

Abstract

Legal pluralism has argued that overlapping and ambiguous regulatory bases can be found in any social field. However, most legal pluralism scholars still deplore the fact that the dominant view of the legal mechanism assumes a unified legal system with stable legal hierarchies. Does this mean that the dominant legal philosophy has very effectively disguised those complicated legal-pluralist negotiations as a realm of fixity? This question may be connected with another important question of how multi-scale normative orders are represented in knowledge practices. Attempting to explicate these questions, I aim to illuminate the issue of multiscalarity through a rethinking of the social embeddedness of economic activity. While some critical discussions on the concept of social embeddedness by economic geographers tended to focus on the typology of embeddednesses for explaining the linkage between social factors and economic outcomes, this assumed linkage itself must be carefully examined. In this paper, it is argued that since the social is not inherently a spatial concept, a turn to the act of embedding is required, detaching the adjective social from the noun embeddedness. Indeed, spaces are defined and redefined by identifying the terms of incorporation into the multiscalarity in question, rather than by their spatial property per se. In parallel, the complementarity between vertical and horizontal networks as simple reflections of realities must be rejected, requiring a new point of departure for legal pluralism in the context of rural development.

Keywords:

• scope of negotiability
• multi-scale normative orders
• social embeddedness
• vertical and horizontal networks
• epistemological marginalisation

Acknowledgements

This paper is based on my work experience as an independent coffee consultant from 2010 to 2012. The experience was also a basis for a PhD thesis at Osaka University under the supervision of Shinich Kohsaki and Masato Kawamori, whose advice helped in the writing of this paper. Melanie Wiber's constructive comments on an earlier version enormously improved the argumentation of this paper. I am also grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their critical and insightful suggestions. The usual disclaimer applies.

Notes

1. It has long been argued by sociologists that an antinomy stems from Polanyi's original arguments on embeddedness: on the one hand, market society cannot be perfectly self-regulating because economic action is essentially enmeshed in social relationships, but Polanyi paradoxically treats the market itself as ‘disembedded’ (see Krippner 2001; Block 2003; Gemici 2008). This paper does not focus directly on this debate. Instead, through an examination of the spatial implication of the embeddedness concept, it is argued that economic activities are not spatially embedded in a society in a literal sense because the spatiality of embeddedness is discursively constituted in parallel with the constitution of centre-periphery relationship.

2. For a helpful review of these arguments, see Hefner (1990), Li (1999, 2002), Sikor and Vi (2005) and Cramb (2007).

3. The field survey for this study was accommodated to my working commitment as an independent coffee consultant to a local coffee export company in Timor-Leste. The company, as an affiliated export agent of a Japan-based fair-trade group, deals, in principle, with rural smallholders’ organisations. I spent 15 months (August 2010–November 2012) in the country, basically conducting coordination efforts to export coffee with organic certificates for the Japanese market. Relatively official communication between coffee growers and me during this period focused on the issue of how to organise quality-oriented production of coffee. I would like to express my deep gratitude to all my colleagues in the company and the coffee producers with whom I communicated.

4. People in the coffee business call coffee fruit ‘red cherry’, distinguishing it from other commodity forms such as ‘parchment’ or ‘green coffee’. Coffee fruit consists of seeds and a four-layered skin structure. When red cherries are de-pulped, their outer skin and flesh are removed, but the parchment and the inner silver skin remain. After drying, as the moisture content drops to 10%–12%, these beans, which are actually coffee seeds with a two-layered skin, are called dry parchment. Generally, the process of producing dry parchment is called primary processing, while secondary processing typically means preparation for export.

5. Letefoho is a sub-district of the Ermera district, one of the major coffee production centres in Timor-Leste, located along the foothills of the highest mountain of this country, Mt. Tatamailau (2963m).

6. Please note that since its independence, or more precisely the restoration of political independence in 2002, Timor-Leste has used the US dollar as the national currency.

7 In rural areas of Timor-Leste, as in other Austronesian societies in Eastern Indonesia, social gatherings are prominently organised as ritual exchanges between kinship-based groups. These kinship-based groups may be called ‘cult house’, reflecting its name in a local language, Uma Lisan in the Tetun language, for instance. ‘Cult house’ means both a physical house-like structure where the ritual authority of a kinship-based group resides and the kinship-based group itself as a responsible unit of ritual exchanges. For more details about the roles of cult houses in this area, refer to Kanamaru (2014).

8. For a detailed explanation of the applicability of convention theory to agro-food studies, refer to Wilkinson (1997), Raikes, Jensen, and Ponte (2000), Renard (2003) and Gibbon and Ponte (2005, chapter 6). One important theme in these studies was drawn from ‘a movement in agrofood networks from industrial conventions (and the logic of mass production) to domestic conventions based on trust, tradition, and place’ (Gibbon and Ponte 2005, 172). In the wake of this movement, a series of quality contestations arose, stimulating several strands of convention-theory-inspired agro-food studies.

9. As noted by Neilson and Pritchard (2009, chapter 2), the analytical distinguishability between GVC and GPN is sometimes ambiguous in empirically grounded studies. Considering that there has been no clear-cut difference between the GPN and GVC approaches, it may be reasonable to explore another enhancement of the scope of the GCC/GVC analyses. For example, Neilson and Pritchard (2009, 47) state, ‘[a]n institutionally enriched form of GVC analysis, we argue, transcends the criticisms levelled on the approach on account of its allegedly sclerotic preoccupation with governance categories forged out of transaction cost dynamics’. This line of argument is critically addressed later in this paper.

10. In his formulation, Hess does not explicitly consider potentially multiple shapes of a regulatory framework. As Bavinck (2003, 634) emphasises, in addition to organizational fragmentation of state administration, State law itself ‘takes various shapes across space’. It is in this connection that legal pluralism literature may indicate the internal diversity of three dimensions of embeddedness in Hess's formulation, implying the difficulty and complexity to identify the potential meanings of each specific dimension.

11. Apparently, these ‘centres’ have a function similar to what Latour (1987) labels ‘centres of calculation’ (chapter 6). Latour (2005, 173–190) also reactivates this important concept to re-examine and re-formulate the micro-macro linkage. His formulation is thoroughgoing, prohibiting us from leaping at the vehicle of macro-structural nature.

Macro no longer describes a wider or a larger site in which the micro would be embedded like some Russian Matryoshka doll, but another equally local, equally micro place, which is connected to many others through some medium transporting specific types of traces. (Latour 2005, 175, original emphasis)

Macro-structure is based on nothing but specifically traceable connections stabilised in a certain way.