Distributed for UCL Press
Contraband Cultures
Reframing Smuggling across Latin America and the Caribbean
Contraband Cultures reframes smuggling activities across Latin America (including the Caribbean) and its diasporas through the lenses of kinship, political movements, economic exchange, and resistance to capitalist state hegemony, countering the popular representations of smuggling in the region as chaotic, lawless, violent, and exotic.
This book includes a broad range of chapters from social science and humanities scholars, and it uses various methodologies, theoretical traditions, and analytic approaches to explore the efficacy and valence of smuggling as a lens to examine personhood, materiality, statehood, and political (dis)connection across Latin America. Its combination of historic documentation and contemporary ethnographic research highlights the development of these cultural practices while grounding them in the capitalist and colonial refashioning of the entire region since the sixteenth century.
292 pages | 1 halftone, 3 maps | 6.14 x 9.21 | © 2024
Anthropology: Cultural and Social Anthropology
Table of Contents
List of figures
List of contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction: contraband as culture, culture as contraband
Jennifer Cearns & Charles Beach
1 ’Born in this abominable sin’: contraband trade in colonial Spanish America
Joseph M.H. Clark
2 ’Yo siempre quis ser bichote’ en ’P FKN R’: Bad Bunny and the representation of Puerto Rican narco-culture in gore capitalism era Luis Javier Cintrón-Gutiérrez
3 Entitled to contraband: citizenship and sovereignty in an Indigenous borderland (Guyana-Venezuela)
Olivier Allard
4 Ranching, rustling, and wage-work: navigating the entangled smuggling economy in northern Paraguay
Cari Tusing
5 Emprendedores forzados: Ex-smugglers of Venezuelan petrol turned unwilling entrepreneurs in the Colombian border-city of Cúcuta
Charles Beach
6 Abundance as an ethic: emergency food ingress and moral concern in Venezuela
Eva van Roekel
7 Crush your pills: smuggling medication into Rio de Janeiro’s prisons
David C. Thompson
8 Intermediaries in the Haitian wout: the dynamics of (im)mobilities in the Americas
Mélanie Montinard
9 State policies and contraband economies in the Bolivia-Argentina borderlands: grappling with subordinate financialization
Charles Dolph
10 ‘Los piratas del Caribe’: disrupting capitalism through digital piracy in Cuba
Jennifer Cearns
11 Counterfeit: disruption and creation in the files of transnational adoptions from Guatemala to Europe
Silvia Posocco & Sophie Villérs
12 Conclusion: beyond contraband
Rebecca Galemba
Index