Playing the Game

Playing the Game

By Ben Woodruff

The concept of agency on the part of an Informal Commercial Importer (ICI) raised by Gina Ulysse in Downtown Ladies: Informal Commercial Importers, a Haitian Anthropologist, and Self-Making in Jamaica jumped out to me. She gave the example of two women engaging in a great deal of shopping in Miami and then taking those wares back to Jamaica. Upon reentering the country they declared their possessions and were required to pay duties. The taxes paid were more than what dedicated importers would “for their imported merchandise” (201).

This raises the question of why engage in this activity. The answer was given as “being a player, no matter how small, in the global market” (205) gives worth to the ICIs. They can see themselves as an important part of the local economy bringing in products not necessarily by those “established merchants” (201).

It was telling to me that Jamaican women chose this manner when creating their identity. Ulysse gave a historic overview of race (and color) and class impacts on the role of women. Women have continuously been reinventing themselves in Jamaica to include reinventing what it means to be a woman. Upward class social mobility was driven by the deployment of capital.

This was contrasted in my mind with the article by Violet Eudine Barriteau. She noted that in a previous address that the power in society must be better understood to prevent recreating the hierarchy that feminism seeks to undermine.  

These women are using the existing power structure to enter into a capitalist structure. She was speaking of particularly radical and socialist feminists review of the home “as a site of oppression for women” (21).  This is different in black feminist theory because black women often were forced to leave the home to earn money. The home is therefore a haven and not prison.