An Ethnography of Brand Piracy in Guatemala
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An Ethnography of Brand Piracy in Guatemala The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Thomas, Kedron. 2011. An Ethnography of Brand Piracy in Guatemala. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:10121971 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA ©2011 - Kedron Thomas All rights reserved. Professor Kimberly S. Theidon Kedron Thomas An Ethnography of Brand Piracy in Guatemala Abstract An important dimension of contemporary capitalism is the global spread of intellectual property rights law, drawing new attention by governments and media to the unauthorized copying of fashion brands. In this dissertation, I draw on sixteen months of ethnographic research with small-scale, indigenous Maya garment manufacturers to examine the cultural and moral context of brand piracy in Guatemala. I analyze what practices of copying and imitation, some of which qualify as piracy under national and international law, among Maya manufacturers reveal about two aspects of the social field: first, changing economic and cultural conditions following waves of neoliberal economic and legal reform, and, second, the nonlinear reproduction of forms of moral and legal reckoning at the margins of the global economy and amidst mounting insecurities that include rising violent crime rates and legal impunity for violent crime. I examine how practices of copying and imitation among manufacturers and competitive behavior more generally are evaluated locally in light of kin relations that promote the sharing of knowledge and resources within a somewhat loose property regime and given ideologies of race and nation that encourage class-based solidarity among Maya people. I find that the normative models and business practices evident among these manufacturers parochialize official portraits of progress, business ethics, and development promoted in neoliberal policy agendas and international law. iii Professor Kimberly S. Theidon Kedron Thomas In addition, I analyze significant gaps between what fashion and branding mean in Guatemalan Maya communities and how they are understood in international projects of legal harmonization that are also about re-branding and re-imagining the Guatemalan nation. Neoliberal statecraft following a long internal armed conflict in Guatemala involves policy approaches that amplify the presence of global brands while compounding conditions of social and economic inequality that limit Maya men and women’s access to authorized goods. Meanwhile, Maya people are invited to participate in a modernist vision of citizenship and social progress that encourages a privatized model of indigenous identity mediated by branded commodities and formal market transactions. The brand emerges as a powerful medium through which claims to legitimacy and authority and senses of belonging are negotiated at national and local levels. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgments vi Introduction 1 Chapter One: Culture and Intellectual Property 32 Chapter Two: Maya Workshops in the World System 71 Chapter Three: The Ethics of Imitation 117 Chapter Four: Piracy and the Politics of Branding 155 Chapter Five: Legal Pluralism and the Rule of Law 191 Conclusion 231 Bibliography 250 v Acknowledgements Funding for this dissertation was provided by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, the Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowships, and numerous sources at Harvard University, including the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, and the Department of Anthropology. I thank the many people in Guatemala who opened their homes and workshops to me during my travels and research for this dissertation. Thank you to Te Ix’ey and the other teachers at Oxlajuj Aj Kaqchikel Maya Institute for their instruction and for introducing me to so many aspects of highland life. I am also grateful to the research assistants in Tecpán and Guatemala City who devoted so much of their time and attention to this project. My time spent at the Universidad del Valle as a visiting professor was indispensible to this project, and I especially thank my remarkable students and the chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Andrés Álvarez Casteñeda, for their support and intellectual engagement. Thank you to the staff members of the Universidad del Valle, Universidad de San Carlos, Universidad Mariano Gálvez, Universidad Rafael Landívar, the Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica vi (CIRMA), and the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO), for making the library resources of their institutions available to me. Thank you to the various scholars of the Maya region who generously offered comments and criticisms of this project throughout its unfolding, especially Pakal B’alam, Carmelina Espantzay, Ted Fischer, and Carol Hendrickson. I also appreciate the comments offered by the many scholars who participated with me on panels at the American Anthropological Association annual meetings and various other conferences and symposia in the U.S. and Guatemala, all of which contributed to this project. I am eternally grateful to Kimberly Theidon for her unwavering support, encouragement, and intellectual guidance throughout my graduate studies. Thank you to Michael Herzfeld and Ted Bestor for their mentorship and inspiration. I would also like to acknowledge my deep indebtedness to other faculty within the Department of Anthropology and across the University who taught me and contributed to my scholarly and professional development during my time at Harvard, my fellow graduate students who offered both their friendship and lively intellectual debate, and the department’s staff members who were so generous with their kindness, time, and expertise. Finally, thank you to Pete for his inestimable contributions to this work, for his tireless support throughout the research and writing, for his relentless and contagious pursuit of conversation, and for introducing me to the lore and the lure of anthropology, and also to Manny, who unwittingly inspires me to be a braver scholar and a better person. vii Introduction: Postwar Style I sometimes took evening walks with friends and informants through Tecpán, the highland Guatemala town where I carried out the ethnographic research for this dissertation. The central plaza, a paved square edged by the colonial-era Catholic church and town hall, bustles after sunset with taco and shuco vendors offering cheap dinner fare. Adolescent boys kick soccer balls back and forth across the pavement. Old women sell atol , a hot beverage made of rice or corn, from heavy baskets and wooden carts. Dozens of young men lounge against the basin of the empty fountain or stroll the plaza. They all wear sudaderos , sweatshirts with oversized hoods pulled up over gel-drenched hair and shadowing their pimpled faces. Each of these sweatshirts features a US brand name – Abercrombie & Fitch, Hollister, or Ecko – splashed across the front. A pair of torn and faded blue jeans with wide legs and a pair of shiny black leather shoes – freshly polished by one of the adolescent boys lugging wooden shoe-shine kits and shouting “lustre, lustre! ” – completes the look. The sweatshirts these young men wear are part of the global piracy trade. Pirates are fascinating figures in the Western social imaginary. “The pirate,” writes one historian, “has become an instantly recognizable and identifiable image,” a symbol of “rebellion against authority” (Konstam 2008: 8). Pirates are liminal figures who “operate on the margins of acceptable society” (7), troubling the boundaries of the economy, the law, and especially, the nation-state. “Pirates deny the legitimacy of nations by taking their stuff,” writes literary scholar Talissa Jane Ford (2008: 12). She continues, 1 “Historically, pirates were deemed hostis humani generis , the ‘common enemy of mankind,’ and therefore outside the law; in some fundamental (legal) way, they didn’t count. … Upon turning pirate, they forfeited all national identity” (13). This dissertation is concerned with the lived experience of people who are dubbed “pirates” under new international legal regimes because they copy fashion brands. What Arjun Appadurai (1996) calls “modernity at large” involves the worldwide consumption of commodities that reference other places and temporalities and denote status, power, and affiliation. The ethnographic investigation of clothing has been important for understanding the globalization of particular cultural styles, dress as a marker of social distinction and a cultural practice that shapes relations of gender, class, national identity, and ethnicity, and how fashion figures into hegemonic political projects of control and subordination.1 Fashion brands have received less attention even though the brand form, what Rosemary Coombe calls a “hallmark” of late modernity (1993: 413), is integral to globalized material culture (Miller 1994; 1997). An important dimension of contemporary capitalism is the spread of intellectual property rights