Regulating Style: Intellectual Property Law and the Business of Fashion in Guatemala - Softcover

Thomas, Kedron

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520290976 ISBN 13: 9780520290976

Verlag: University of California Press, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

Fashion knockoffs are everywhere. Even in the out-of-the-way markets of highland Guatemala, fake branded clothes offer a cheap, stylish alternative for people who cannot afford high-priced originals. Fashion companies have taken notice, ensuring that international trade agreements include stronger intellectual property protections to prevent brand “piracy.” In Regulating Style, Kedron Thomas approaches the fashion industry from the perspective of indigenous Maya people who make and sell knockoffs, asking why they copy and wear popular brands, how they interact with legal frameworks and state institutions that criminalize their livelihood, and what is really at stake for fashion companies in the global regulation of style.
 

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kedron Thomas is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. She is coeditor, with Kevin Lewis O’Neill, of Securing the City: Neoliberalism, Space, and Insecurity in Postwar Guatemala.

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"Regulating Style brings anthropology to fashion. An inquiry into the production of brand and style in the global south, this book contributes to passionate debates about intellectual property rights in a novel realm: the global fashion industry. Thus far, scholarship has focused on IP rights as they relate to digital media, which means that the distributed networks of production in the garment and fashion industries have not been treated in a similar, systematic way. Regulating Style brings both production and creative processes into one frame for a new view of the distributed networks of a powerful global industry."—Janet Roitman, The New School for Social Research

"Regulating Style is timely, theoretically innovative, methodologically sound, and well-written. Intellectual property rights is a well-tilled field, but Thomas takes a new and innovative approach that adds significantly to our understanding of piracy in the context of developing countries as well as indigenous peoples, who offer their own understanding of the issues that sometimes converge and sometimes diverge from Western frameworks. This is an important piece of scholarship: academically meritorious, on a subject of much theoretical interest, and told in a compelling narrative fashion."—Edward F. Fischer, Vanderbilt University

"Regulating Style is a remarkable ethnography exploring the garment industry in the indigenous Guatemalan highlands. Demonstrating the ways in which brand ‘piracy’ is secured by racialised systems of distinction in global political economies and countered by local moral economies of community, Thomas makes a groundbreaking contribution to economic and legal anthropology. Her unique insights into legal rights, poverty, and insecurity add significant dimensions to the evolving schlolarship on intellectual property, human rights, and development."—Rosemary J. Coombe, Tier One Canada Research Chair in Law, Communication, and Culture, York University

Aus dem Klappentext

"Regulating Style brings anthropology to fashion. An inquiry into the production of brand and style in the global south, this book contributes to passionate debates about intellectual property rights in a novel realm: the global fashion industry. Thus far, scholarship has focused on IP rights as they relate to digital media, which means that the distributed networks of production in the garment and fashion industries have not been treated in a similar, systematic way. Regulating Style brings both production and creative processes into one frame for a new view of the distributed networks of a powerful global industry."&;Janet Roitman, The New School for Social Research

"Regulating Style is timely, theoretically innovative, methodologically sound, and well-written. Intellectual property rights is a well-tilled field, but Thomas takes a new and innovative approach that adds significantly to our understanding of piracy in the context of developing countries as well as indigenous peoples, who offer their own understanding of the issues that sometimes converge and sometimes diverge from Western frameworks. This is an important piece of scholarship: academically meritorious, on a subject of much theoretical interest, and told in a compelling narrative fashion."&;Edward F. Fischer, Vanderbilt University

"Regulating Style is a remarkable ethnography exploring the garment industry in the indigenous Guatemalan highlands. Demonstrating the ways in which brand &;piracy&; is secured by racialised systems of distinction in global political economies and countered by local moral economies of community, Thomas makes a groundbreaking contribution to economic and legal anthropology. Her unique insights into legal rights, poverty, and insecurity add significant dimensions to the evolving schlolarship on intellectual property, human rights, and development."&;Rosemary J. Coombe, Tier One Canada Research Chair in Law, Communication, and Culture, York University

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Regulating Style

Intellectual Property Law and the Business of Fashion in Guatemala

By Kedron Thomas

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2016 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-520-29097-6

Contents

List of Illustrations, vii, 
Acknowledgments, ix, 
Introduction, 1, 
1. Economic Regulation and the Value of Concealment, 35, 
2. The Ethics of Piracy, 68, 
3. Brand Pollution, 101, 
4. Fiscal and Moral Accountability, 145, 
5. Making the Highlands Safe for Business, 184, 
Conclusion: Late Style, 227, 
Notes, 243, 
References, 255, 
Index, 285, 

CHAPTER 1

Economic Regulation and the Value of Concealment

Guillermo Ordóñez owned one of the garment workshops in which I spent time cutting and sewing garments in Tecpán Guatemala in 2009. A forty-year-old Kaqchikel Maya man, Guillermo specialized in making youth sweaters and sweatshirts featuring the logos of globally popular fashion brands, such as Abercrombie & Fitch and Hollister. Typical of the regional trade, his business occupied a cinder-block room built onto the back of his home. Teenage boys rode their bikes from the outskirts of town or from nearby hamlets each day to operate the half-dozen Juki sewing machines imported from Japan and the two Universal knitting machines from Germany, shouting to one another in Kaqchikel, the primary indigenous language spoken in this part of Guatemala, over the mechanical noise. Although it could barely be heard, the radio played bachata and reggaeton music.

Guillermo's relationship to the apparel trade was forged in the early 1970s, when his father purchased a knitting machine from a salesperson in Guatemala City. For the next ten years, his father made baby hats and blankets at their home in Xenimajuyu', a small hamlet outside of Tecpán. He would leave the village late at night to arrive early in Guatemala City on market days. Guillermo's mother, Doña Eugenia, explained in Kaqchikel, "My husband walked the path from Xenimajuyu' to Tecpán. He carried the hats and blankets in a bag. Then he rode to Guatemala City to sell to mayoristas" — here, she used the Spanish word for "wholesalers" — "and some of the hats would go to El Salvador." Her eyes lit up when she talked about how the little hats she helped her husband make ended up in another country. "There was no market for baby clothes around here back then because everyone made their own. But in El Salvador, they didn't make these things, so we could always sell what we made." At that time, the capital served as an international trading post for the Central American market. In many such stories that people told me about the early years of the apparel trade, Guatemala City is remembered as a vibrant center of economic life and a gateway to distant places.

Things changed quickly for Guillermo and his family when, in 1982, at the height of the country's internal armed conflict, his father was killed not far from their rural home. His body was discovered in the woods outside Xenimajuyu'. Guillermo's father was one of many in the region to meet his fate at the hands of soldiers, state-sponsored death squads, and armed civil patrols acting on government orders (Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico 1999). The military strategically targeted indigenous professionals and business owners, though the particular circumstances surrounding Guillermo's father's death remain unknown.

This chapter recounts Guillermo's story — the history of his family's involvement in the apparel trade and the business style on which his modest success is based — and that of several other apparel manufacturers as a means of giving historical and ethnographic shape to an industry that is today largely and strategically hidden from outsiders. Maya manufacturers who once carefully conformed to state regulations now conceal their work from tax agents, police, and other state authorities, and sometimes also from one another. The regional trade has been transformed by state-sponsored violence and the more recent advent of free trade regimes that privilege multinational capital over local industry and encourage state government to target informal enterprises as sites of criminality and delinquency. The transformation of the trade from a state-regulated sector to one operating out of sight of state agencies runs counter to the master narratives that are so central to international projects of modernization and development, which tell of economies moving naturally and progressively from less formal to more formal relationships to the state. These narratives also include the idea that such an evolution brings about material benefits for the regulated, "developing" populations. At the same time as the historical processes and transformations evident in the apparel trade disrupt such neat accounts, the characterization of the trade as "informal" obscures ongoing and important relationships to the state and to legal regimes and ignores the regulatory practices of multiple sets of actors who exercise control over apparel manufacturing, markets, and meanings of work on regional and national levels. This chapter draws on social scientific analyses of the informal economy in Latin America and anthropological studies of economic regulation to parse out the "regulating style" that structures highland business practice and business ethics, a style that contrasts with the models of development and regulation enshrined in international trade and legal agreements. This chapter thus contributes to economic anthropology by analyzing the historical embedding of an industry and particular modes of regulation and ways of doing business amid dynamic social and market processes and in view of a local moral world where norms and values other than those privileged in international development and IP law shape the kinds of work that people do and the business ethics that they espouse.

While Maya manufacturers place tremendous value on secrecy and the concealment of their business practices from outsiders, they also actively share business knowledge, information, and resources across networks of kin and neighbors in Tecpán and the surrounding region, and they teach what they know to younger Maya men, whom they encourage to start their own workshops. What I term the "pedagogical imperative" is as much an ethical dictum as it is a means to several ends, including the spurring of what indigenous manufacturers describe as economic development in Tecpán and the maintenance of long-term social relations. In this chapter and the next, I describe the moral contours of sharing and pedagogy and demonstrate how this commitment has its own regulatory effects on the trade. I argue that the tension between, on the one hand, secrecy and concealment and, on the other, sharing and pedagogy conditions the dialectical movement through which business and regulating styles are elaborated in the highlands. This tension will be important in later chapters for understanding how copying matters for and is evaluated by Maya workshop owners.

ORIGINS

Guillermo's family history is typical in many ways. Beginning in the late 1950s, Maya men and women in several highland towns — such as Totonicapán, San Francisco El Alto, Quetzaltenango, and San Pedro Sacatepéquez, to name the most prominent — took up nontraditional apparel production. Such activities were structured either as cottage industries or as small-scale, independent manufacturing...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of California Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0520290976
• ISBN 13: 9780520290976
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 326
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar