Borders and smuggling: ethnography of merchandise trade-imitations in the Border Space of Atacama-Lípez (EFAL) (Chile and Bolivia)

Abtsract

The purpose of the text is to visualize contemporary forms and processes related to the circulation of people and things that participate in the trade and smuggling of merchandise-imitations from East Asia into the EFAL (Chile and Bolivia). Historically, such dynamics are linked to the rise and economic incorporation of marginalized social groups due to the colonial imprint of capitalism, market and state in our Region, being sanctioned simultaneously with a diffuse and/or criminal character for evading state taxation and laws international copyright It is observed that such practices [re] produce new geographies from the articulations between the Asian mega-economies and South America since 1970, allowing, on the one hand, that local populations intervene in part to control the symbols associated with the things that are mobilized for this; and a series of transformations and spatial, sociopolitical, cognitive and multi-scalar cultural rearrangements, on the other.

Keywords:
borders; smuggling; imitations; Bolivia and Chile