Publication Type: Abstract
Abstract: Main argument of this paper depends on the determining the conditions of petty commodity producers in entering relations to a transnational retail market (Carrefour) and a national corporation (Pinar) in a village of Turkey. I would like to learn these conditions from villagers of Bugduz by conducting in-depth interviews that a village in the province of Eskisehir.
Villagers are very eager to sell their products to those corporations without problematizing the conditions of the market. The class structure of villagers is totally different from the customers of both corporations. As a matter of fact, food products of Pinar have always been the representative of secure and healthy food with high prices. Furthermore, customers of Carrefour have always been from the middle and upper middle class part of the society.
In Turkey, rural people consume diversity of local brands that have not seen in national and international retail markets. Farmers enter both traditional and contemporary market relations for protecting themselves from being unpropertied and poverty.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Challenging contemporary debates concerning the regulation of ocean fisheries, this paper deploys theoretical insights developed by Karl Polanyi. In The Great Transformation, Polanyi documented the consequences of the establishment of market economy upon European society, and thereby upon the entire planet. The concept of the self-regulating market, according to Polanyi was based on three "commodity fictions" of land, labor and money; the extension of this concept to all of the economic institutions of society he called "market utopianism." This paper extends Polanyi's fictitious commodity thesis to the living resources of the ocean and argues that the roots of the contemporary problems of the world's fisheries originate in the exposure of nature to a market economy. Concerned with the future governance of ocean resources and democracy in fishery regulation, the paper examines the globalization of the fishing industry in comparative and historical perspective to illuminate the validity of Polanyi's theory. While there can be no final agreement as to the constitution of "good society", a useful starting point for debate is provided by the work of Karl Polanyi. A good society, he claims, is a society capable of producing goods, and a necessary condition of life in such a society is that human beings and nature are not treated as commodities

Publication Type: Proceeding
Abstract: This essay explores Cordillera indigenous peoples’ subjection and opposition to “the new imperialism of exploitation as development” (Spivak 1999) in the post-independence Philippines. I provide some context for understanding developmentalism and indigeneity in the Philippines before examining specific struggles of Cordillera indigenous peoples (IPs) to maintain their land and assert the authority of their customary laws regarding ancestral domain. I discuss the juridical history of state appropriation of IPs’ ancestral domain, arguing that the much heralded Indigenous Peoples Rights Act of 1997 cannot successfully accomplish the abjected (Kristeva 1982) indigenous other’s juridical inclusion without displacing the sovereignty of the state. Finally, I address women’s leadership in mobilizing against “development aggression,” and examine how the practice of Kalinga and Bontok women’s “breast-baring” to achieve visibility as political subjects subverts commodity fetishized femininity in the Philippines.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: By mapping the movement of commodities from production to exchange to consumption, the global commodity chains (GCC) analysis has been helpful in clarifying the unequal distribution of profits across the world system. While analyses of upgrading (the movement of states and firms up the GCC to more profitable economic niches) has been used to demonstrate the process of economic development at the level of the nation and at the level of the individual business firm, comparatively little attention has been paid to the impact of upgrading on systems of labor control on the ground. The present analysis looks at the historical development of Colombia’s leading coffee capitalist organization (National Federation of Coffee Growers, FEDECAFE), comparing two historical moments of upgrading. The first upgrade came as a response to mass worker mobilization in the 1930s, culminating in hegemonic mechanisms of labor control. The second upgrade came as a response to the incapacity to maintain such mechanisms in the 1980s, which culminated in a resurgent labor movement.

Publication Type: Abstract
Abstract: This paper interrogates theories of neoliberalization in the global agro-industrial system. China has become the world’s largest apparel and textile producer and the largest importer of raw cotton. In this increasingly globalized sector, the sourcing and distribution regimes of transnational cotton merchants rest on sanctity of contract. Yet domestic traders and nation-states in China, India and other developing countries are challenging a wholesale shift to Western market rules and arbitral bodies. The U.S. state cannot pursue these specific interests of transnational merchants as its obligations to domestic class fractions have put them in a deadlock in WTO negotiations. In this context, transnational merchants have launched a privately-led hegemonic project to enroll other firms, nation-states, business and producer groups into an agreement on the rules of contract sanctity and arbitration that will govern the global cotton trade. This paper is based on ethnographic research and commodity chain analysis.