How a Huckster Becomes a Custodian of Market Morality: Traditions of Flexibility in Exchange in Dominica

Abstract

Since 1995, Dominica has endured a massive economic downturn following a series of World Trade Organization decisions that have devastated the banana industry, its major export earner. Yet the trade decisions have not been the subject of much anxiety or debate. At the same time, their second largest contributors to foreign exchange earnings (hucksters) are seldom the subject of public discussion. I suggest in this article that these omissions have to do with the manner in which flexibility is culturally conceptualized. Rather than a recent adaptation to the physiopsychological disciplining of a post-Fordian or "globalized" economy, I argue that in Dominica, flexibility is historically constituted through a much longer engagement with capitalism in the formation of the Caribbean as a cultural area over the last five centuries. The entrepreneurial savvy found among hucksters is autochthonous to Dominica's trade culture.A Dominica National Gender Symposium held on 19 October 2000 conspicuously omitted any discussion of the extra-household economic activities of women. With only one intervention by a prominent Dominican anthropologist, the symposium stubbornly ignored the important role that the small-scale predominately female traders in agricultural produce (known locally as "hucksters") have played economically and socially for 250 years. It should be mentioned that this is a particularly odd omission. At the time of that panel, the trade routes over which hucksters are the principal exporters accounted for the second largest contribution to export earnings. As I show in this article, such an exclusion is illustrative of long-established Dominican cultural attitudes about the ordinary nature of flexibility in exchange practice, as well as the central role hucksters have played therein.Dominica's primary export earning industry is worth mentioning as well, because it is also evidentiary of a general cultural attitude among Dominicans to the ordinary nature of flexibility and economic struggle, processes which reflect a culture of flexibility for which the

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