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This chapter examines how Chamelqueños define prestige and status and how market women accrue prestige through their roles as marketers. It argues that Chamelqueños earn prestige in their daily pursuits and social interactions. Participating in resurgence movements, helping to preserve and promote Q'eqchi' culture, working to support others, showing strong personal character, joining municipal and family celebrations, and in some cases, accruing financial wealth and resources, are among the many ways by which Chamelqueños garner prestige and define their status. For some Chamelqueños, marketing also serves as a way to generate status. The recognition earned through these means generates immortality, ensuring that their legacies will persist and be remembered by future generations of community members long after they are gone.

This chapter explores the significance that the market plays both as an economic institution and a center of socialization for Chamelqueños. In doing so, it describes life in the market and analyzes marketing as women's vocation. It argues that Chamelqueños classify the market as a center of Q'eqchi' personhood and the embodiment of ancestral tradition. Vendors sustain local families by providing them with critical access to necessary goods and by connecting to them to an institution representative of their ancestors. In the market, they exchange money and commodities not just for capital wealth, but also for Q'eqchi' personhood.

This chapter examines marketing as the foundation of personhood for market women, their families, and Chamelco as a whole. Chamelco's vendors confront capitalist values, transforming capitalism's potentially alienating social effects into a model of Q'eqchi' identity for all. Although they participate in capitalist exchanges, they do so not simply for financial motives, but because marketing is an ancient occupation central to the town's historical identity. As vendors, Chamelco's women use exchange to define the logics of the Q'eqchi' house (junkab'al), the primary entity through which Chamelqueños define and live personhood. The chapter also sets out the book's purpose, which is to explore the intersections of kinship, global capitalism, indigenous identity, and memory.

This chapter situates Haitian studies in a multivalent and dialogic border space by analyzing the work of Fernando Coronil, Michel-Rolph Trouillot and Sidney Mintz on peasant culture from a new perspective. More specifically, it reflects on the problem of thinking Haiti through anthrohistory by drawing on Mintz's writings on Haiti. The chapter begins by considering one of the central tensions surrounding anthropological work on Haiti: that of seeing it, on the one hand, as a product and expression of a unique history and, on the other, as fully integrated within a diagnostic of broader global histories and processes. It then examines how and why the question of gender has found itself pushed to the edge of much theorizing despite its acknowledged importance in understanding Haiti. It also discusses Mintz's 1964 description of the deployment of capital by Haitian market women in relation to anthropological work and to the future of Haitian anthrohistory.

This chapter explores how global and regional macroprocesses become embedded in the local reality of one specific country, in this case Italy, generating new realities, new jobs, and new economic and social relations. Specifically, the chapter looks at how the feminization of migration generated through political and economic transformations both in sending and receiving countries came to intersect with the growing need for short and long-term eldercare in Italy, a need generated not only by demographic processes but also by cultural, social, and economic transformations. In addition, the chapter explores the role that migration policies, both at the regional and national level, play in creating a segmented, gendered, and racialized labor force.

This chapter relates the workings of circuits of information in U.S.-occupied Haiti (1915-1934). Upon their arrival, Marines encountered rich yet elusive circuits of news, rumor and gossip driven by Haiti’s peripatetic market women. Attempts to access or bypass these circuits with nascent wireless and telephone networks had limited success. These circuits came together most strikingly in the U.S. Marines’ use of radio sets as torture devices to electrocute Haitians during interrogations.

The conclusion compares the Dames’ understanding of work, gender, and citizenship with other revolutionary and postrevolutionary imaginings. In contrast to citizenship couched in a priori rights and rooted in electoral practices, the Dames framed citizenship as contingent and grounded in social experience. Their vision of citizenship resonated with the symbiotic relationships and reciprocal duties at the core of the social contract. The market women asserted that they earned civic membership and the right to make claims on the state through useful work that served society. Their labor assumed occupational forms through their marketplace trade, civic forms through their political activism, and gendered forms through their contributions as republican mothers. However, by 1799, the deputies had conferred full electoral and economic citizenship on male heads of households with property. Nonetheless, the Dames’ early political influence and the deputies’ economic legislation overturn arguments that democratic citizenship emerged fully formed and masculine at the start of the French Revolution. Finally, the market women illustrate how, while transitioning from a corporate to capitalist world, individuals became autonomized and atomized in parallel arenas of work and politics. The Dames’ political emphasis on whom one’s labor serves rather than where one’s labor is performed complicates scholarly categories of a masculine public sphere and a feminine private sphere in the nineteenth century. From the revolutionary marketplace, the Dames force us to rethink the relationship among work, gender, and modern citizenship.