Uptown ladies and downtown women: Informal commercial importing and the social /symbolic politics of identities in Jamaica.

Abstract

Recent transnational practices and the economic, political and cultural flows throughout the world have prompted numerous diverse groups of women to participate in the global proliferation of informal economies. This phenomenon is specially significant in the Caribbean. Since slavery, Afro-Jamaican women females have been avid participants in the informal sectors of the economy, as traders who are locally known as <italic>higglers</italic>. Higglering, an internal distributing system, is an encompassing social, economic and political phenomenon. It continues to occur within a context of conflict in a society where issues of race/color, class and gender have had historical significance. Hence, within and outside of the trade, the identity of participants is loaded with symbolic and material meanings which impact upon their activities. Recently, however, a new type of higgler has infiltrated interstices of the global economy as an independent import/exporter. In Jamaica, they have been recognized by the state and given the official title of Informal Commercial Importer (ICI). Historically, representations of gendered class identities have been respectively marked by the images of the <italic>lady</italic> and the <italic> woman</italic>. These oppositional categories have their class, racial and spatial dimensions in the concepts of <italic>Uptown lady</italic> and <italic> Downtown woman</italic>. The <italic>higgler</italic> has been transfixed in popular imagination as the icon of black womanhood. As such, she has always been viewed in opposition to the <italic>lady</italic>. I argue that have been stereotyped as a certain kind of <italic>woman</italic>. Hence, they occupy a culturally meaningful sub-category in which they are socially, economically and politically trapped. To challenge this stereotype, I demonstrate the heterogeneity among participants in this trade. As a result, I highlight the significance of distinction in self-representations of gendered and class identities among these traders. This provides a larger field in which to view ICIs' patterns of maneuver, within the context of this dichotomy, as traders who constantly manipulate their identities to negotiate their daily lives as these are impinged upon by larger ideological, social and economic structures. Using a reflexive/autoethnographic tens, I explore the social/symbolic politics of self-representation as <italic>lady</italic> or <italic>woman </italic> to reveal their everyday impact on the making of subjectivities in Jamaica. I foreground my own course of negotiating multiple identities and positions, as a black feminist from the region, to conduct fieldwork in shifting locations. In the process, I interrogate issues concerning research method, epistemology and knowledge production through explorations of recent challenges to anthropological methods and conceptions of the Caribbean and evaluate their impact on this project.