Contact and identity: The experience of ‘China goods’ in a Ghanaian marketplace

Abstract

The rise in Chinese traders and increased availability of low-cost imported goods benefits consumers, challenges local African retailers and is a point of tension in local communities. China's presence in Africa has been largely discussed and analysed through a political economy perspective. The social impact in local communities has been documented anecdotally but has yet to be empirically studied. This study took place in Makola Market, Accra, Ghana, to investigate the emerging intergroup encounters between established Ghanaian traders and nascent Chinese traders. Photo-elicited semistructured interviews were conducted to explore how their interrelated experiences shape their interpretative framework and inform the dialectic of contact and social identity. I draw on these interpretative frameworks to propose a new model of contact, the Tri-relational Contact Model, to capture and highlight how people's experiences include contact relationships with not just each other, but also with their places of business and the goods of trade. The findings from this study empirically highlight the micro-level impact of China's presence in Ghana and help re-conceptualize the contact hypothesis through a new model of contact with greater analytical utility to explicate the relational nature of contact and social identity formation.

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