Sidewalk Capitalism: Notes on a Critical Visual Ethnography of Street Vending in Baguio City, the Philippines  

Oleh:

Guan, Yeoh Seng

Jenis: Article from Books
Dalam koleksi: Are We Up to the Challenge?: Current Crises and the Asian Intellectual COmmunity (The Work of the 2005/2006 API Fellows, page 216-221.
Topik: Self-Perception in a Changing Southeast Asia; “The City of Pines” in Transition; Critical Visual; Textual Ethnographies; Globalization; Capitalist Urban Space; Street Vendors; Sidewalk Capitalism; Urban Governance; Violence; Social Justice

Ketersediaan

Perpustakaan PKPM Nomor Panggil: 342.7 ARE Non-tandon: 1 (dapat dipinjam: 1) Tandon: tidak ada

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Arguably, the production of capitalist space buttressed by regimes of codes, signs, symbols and imagerinaries is most intense in a modern city. In this milieu, subalterns are typically accorded with little choice except to live by their wits. Their principal “tactic”, following Michel de Certeau’s (1984) suggestion, is to avoid the spotlight of the authorities (like the police, religious officials), and to live in the shadows. In this regard, sidewalk vendors are a particular breed of urban subalterns that live not only by their wits but also by sheer hard work and persistence in order to eke out a living in the challenges and opportunities thrown up in city. Curiously, the scope of their economic activities, which often lie outside the mechanisms of a formal economy, is called a “shadow economy” (or its many other permutations, e.g. the “informal economy,” “grey economy,” and so forth) even though there may be significant crosslinkages between them.1 It is within this liminal space that the subaltern attempts to mitigate, if not negate, their “stranger” and “outsider” status amidst the powerful strategies of surveillance, policing, and punitive actions imposed by the other side of this binary opposition. Arguably, it is also the legally hegemonic side of this binary that often vampirizes the energies and imaginations of the subaltern in order to sustain the appetite of late capitalism that, though transgressing nation-state borders at ease, is also anchored in strategic urban centres in nation-states. Put another way, “footloose” or “predatory” capitalism induces new kinds of market and instrumentalist rationality and entrepreneurship on a city landscape, of which sidewalk vendors are one of a chain of social agents who play out this script. To foreground the video documentary on street vendors that was produced as a result of three months of fieldwork, this paper will unfold in three parts. First, I will suggest that Baguio City’s historically and culturally privileged position is not insignificant to the political and economic contexts in which the street vendor operates. I then turn to a brief discussion of the research methodology and strategy deployed to “capture” the subaltern voices of street vendors before finally looking at the broader significance of some of my research findings in relation to the API research themes.

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