[Anthropgrad] FW: Anthropology seminar Wednesday April 30

[Melinda Hinkson]

Anthropology Seminar Series, Wednesday 30 April
9.30am, Coombs Seminar Room A

Lynne Milgram, Ontario College of Art & Design

"Activating Frontier Livelihoods: Women and the Transnational Secondhand
Clothing Trade between Hong Kong and the Philippines"
 
This paper explores the work of Filipina entrepreneurs in Baguio City who
have developed a branch of the global trade in secondhand clothing between
Hong Kong and the Philippines. Building on kinship networks of women working
in Hong Kong, these entrepreneurs navigate formal government and informal
economic and cultural channels to operationalize a transnational trade that
straddles legal-illegal practice in both locales. In so doing, traders
connect institutions and parts of societies not previously linked or connect
these in different ways, capturing contested markets and fashioning new
spaces of consumption.
 
I suggest here that Filipina entrepreneurs¹ transnational activism in the
Hong-Kong-Philippine used clothing trade reconfigures the market to unsettle
essentialist categories of economy, class, value and legality. By crafting
global, feminized circuits of commodities and using multiply migrant
communities these traders engender global transactions as female as well as
male. Simultaneously, state and cultural constraints on their new-found
flexibility, means that traders must also negotiate innovative tactics to
enable their frontier livelihoods. Women¹s work in this trade thus situates
local initiatives within wider negotiations of meaning and agency and
challenges the common exclusion of actions on the edge from analyses of
destabilizing political and global forces.
 
All welcome.
____________________________________
Melinda Hinkson
School of Archaeology & Anthropology
A.D. Hope Building
The Australian National University
Canberra ACT 0200

T: +61 2 6125 8246
F: +61 2 6125 2711
W: http://arts.anu.edu.au/AandA/






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