Contemporary global commodity trade is often understood to be controlled by large, multinational corporations. However, when we look more closely at actual commodity movements, a wide range of local actors comes into view. These include traders and trading communities who move goods and capital across surprisingly vast distances. Yet researchers who study global capitalism have tended to overlook the contemporary significance of such actors, assuming that because they may depend on kinship, community, and regional networks for commerce, their ability to affect global markets is limited. Recently, however, new evidence suggests that this assumption may be based on a false division between economic and social life and thus blind social scientists to the true importance of traditional traders and trading communities. To investigate this possibility, the research supported by this award will investigate several previously neglected questions. What relationships are there between local practicies and international commodity trade? Is contemporary commerce connected to historical trading networks? Are connections of kinship, friendship, and obligation important in modulating flows of goods across changing international regimes of regulation and taxation? And, given that traders are often key social as well as economic intermediaries, how might their activities affect relationships during and after periods of war and political stress?
To pursue these question, Stanford University anthropology doctoral student, Nethra Samarawickreama, supervised by Dr. Sharika Thiranagama, will undertake research on an Indian Ocean trading community. Because of the complexity of the questiions, the research site needs to be relatively bounded in order to be able to observe the economic micro-processes at work. Therefore, she has chosen to focus on the gold and gem trade in Sri Lanka, which has historically been dominated by family businesses that function locally and transnationally, do so across lines of ethnic difference, and have sustained economic relationships before, during, and after Sri Lanka's recent civil war. She will complement the Sri Lanka-based portion of her investigation with research in Singapore, where South Indian businessmen recirculate Sri Lankan goods throughout the Indian Ocean. To gather data, the researcher will use multiple social science research methods, including: participant observation, semi-structured interviews, the elicitation of family histories, and archival research. First, she will examine traders' discourses of trust to understand how trading families constitute themselves, access credit, build reputations, engage in philanthropy, and forge far-reaching relations of dependency. Secondly, she will seek to conceptualize traders' local relations through frames wider than the nation and situate them in transnational commercial networks. Thirdly, she will seek to understand how ethnic attachments and differences may coexist with enduring inter-ethnic commercial exchanges despite conflict and its aftermaths. Findings from this research will contribute significantly to understanding the relationship between local socioeconomic systems and global trade, as well as opening up new arenas for developing policies to faciliate peaceful co-existence in post-conflict situations.
