Challenging boundaries, redefining limits: The experience of Bolivian handknitters in the global market.
Item
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Title
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Challenging boundaries, redefining limits: The experience of Bolivian handknitters in the global market.
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Identifier
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AAI9924836
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identifier
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9924836
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Creator
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Page, Janet Marie.
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Contributor
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Adviser: June Nash
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Date
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1999
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Anthropology, Cultural | Economics, Commerce-Business | Sociology, Industrial and Labor Relations
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Abstract
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This dissertation examines the evolution of a knitting industry in Bolivia where several thousand women produce sweaters for export. Handknitters tend to be women from rural areas severely affected by poverty, social inequality, drought and economic crisis. Productive relations within the industry are dominated by middlemen who control extensive putting-out systems premised upon keeping wages low. Some knitters have attempted to challenge their subordinate position in export knitting by organizing themselves into sweater production and commercialization cooperatives. In some cases, this grassroots mobilization cultivated a broader field of action for handknitters that became the basis for more politically and culturally oriented activities. However, grassroots mobilization and cooperation have not been sufficient to transform relationships within the industry or to significantly improve knitters' condition. In this study, I examine the history and structure of the knitwear industry and identify the factors inhibiting the successful operation of grassroots knitting cooperatives. I demonstrate how the global market for handknits plays a key role in restricting the development of cooperatives organized at the grassroots level. Yet perhaps equally significant have been cultural factors at work in the dynamics of cooperative knitwear production. I argue that the manner in which knitting employment was incorporated into the local social and economic context, the way that new social actors from international agencies and managerial members of the Bolivian bourgeoisie influenced knitters' success, and the very nature of grassroots organizing itself, led to the downfall of grassroots knitting cooperatives through a redefinition of cultural boundaries. In the process of becoming incorporated into global markets, the unity of vision and the common purpose which had provided a fulcrum for grassroots mobilization among knitters were undermined, negating fundamental premises of cooperative organization.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
