Congo-Paris: Transnational Traders on the Margins of the Law (African Issues) - Softcover

MacGaffey, Janet; Bazenguissa-Ganga, Rémy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0253214025 ISBN 13: 9780253214027

Publisher: Indiana University Press, 2000

Synopsis

Congo-Paris
Transnational Traders on the Margins of the Law
Janet MacGaffey and Rémy Bazenguissa-Ganga

Globalization as practiced by Congolese traders who operate a thriving second economy linking Central Africa and Europe.

Congo-Paris investigates the transnational trade between Central Africa and Europe by focusing on the lives of individual traders from Kinshasa and Brazzaville who operate across national frontiers and often outside the law. Challenging the boundaries of traditional anthropology, Janet MacGaffey and Rémy Bazenguissa-Ganga follow complex international networks to examine the ways in which the African second economy has been extended transnationally and globally on the margins of the law. Who are these traders? What strategies do they have, not only to survive but to shine? What kinds of networks do they rely on? What implications does their trade have for the study of globalization? The personal networks of ethnicity, kinship, religion, and friendship constructed by the traders fashion a world of their own. From Johannesburg to Cairo and from Dakar to Nairobi as well as in Paris, the Congolese traders are renowned and envied. This lively book shows that it is not just the multinationals who benefit from jets and mobile phones.

Janet MacGaffey, Professor of Anthropology at Bucknell University, is author of Entrepreneurs and Parasites and coauthor of The Real Economy of Zaire.

Rémy Bazenguissa-Ganga teaches at the Centre d’Études Africaines, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, and is author of Les Voies du politique au Congo: Essai de sociologie historique.

African Issues―Alex de Waal and Stephen Ellis, editors
Published in association with the International African Institute, London

Contents
Traders, Trade Networks, and Research Methods
Resisting Exclusion and Reacting to Disorder
Commodities, Commercialization, and the Structuring of Identity
Contesting Boundaries: The De

About this title

About the Author:

Janet MacGaffey is Professor of Anthropology at Bucknell University, author of Entrepreneurs and Parasites, and coauthor of The Real Economy of Zaire.

Re[acute accent over the e]my Bazenguissa-Ganga teaches at the Centre d'Etudes Africaines, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, and is author of Les Voies du politique au Congo: Essai de sociologie historique.

Review:

Congo-Paris is another book in the impressive African Issues series, and it combines the high standards and frank realities that have characterised the series...a meticulous and illuminating empirical case-study, based on a thorough set of research methods. - Khalid Koser in JOURNAL OF ETHNIC & MIGRATION STUDIES This fascinating book explores a neglected topic in African studies: petty transnational illegal trade between central Africa and Europe. Congo-Paris is unusual in at least three ways. First, it is concerned with the informal sector, focused as it is on the commercial activities of young traders who seek their 'fortune' by setting up links between France and Africa. Second, it discusses in some detail the question of African identity as it evolves in the course of such a long bi-continental roving existence. Finally, it examines the relationship between seemingly insignificant trading activities and the evolution of globalization - as it applies to Africa ... based on a relatively new form of anthropological research... - Patrick Chabal in INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS ...an impressive illustration of the vigour of coping in the most daunting conditions of economic and political collapse - Nigel Harris in DEVELOPMENT POLICY REVIEW ...intriguing book... AFRICAN BUSINESS The strength of the work is in ethnographic detail and argument. ASAAP

About this edition

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0253214025
• ISBN 13: 9780253214027
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 208