Corinna Frances Howland
Published: 2013
Total Pages: 128
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Fair trade is a contemporary social movement and market formation that regards international trade practices as unjust and inequitable. By implementing an alternative form of trade that provides higher wages, production assistance and welfare provisions for impoverished developing world producers, fair trade claims it can "lift the world's poor out of poverty" (Trade Aid N.d.g: n.p). Fair trade is therefore posited as a more 'ethical' or 'moral' modality of commodity production, retailing and consumption than its mainstream counterparts. Through an ethnographic analysis of Trade Aid, a fair trade shop in Wellington, New Zealand and its predominantly New Zealand-European, middle-class, tertiary-educated and female supporters - this thesis explores the assumptions, values and practices underpinning claims to fair trade's ethics or morality. I argue that fair trade constitutes a novel iteration of a secular morality - an assemblage of discourses, processes and practices within which forms of ethical thought, actions and embodiments are co-produced by fair trade institutions and their supporters (Zigon 2011; Barry 2004). I deploy a heuristic of content, practice and consequence for analysing this assemblage. I first examine significant convergences in moral understandings between Trade Aid and its supporters, including avoidance of suffering, the pursuit of universal justice and beneficence, and the belief in an inherent, rational capacity for social and moral good in the capitalist system. I then explore institutional practices, including Trade Aid's pedagogical processes of moral objectification of distant producers within Western exchange contexts. Finally, I analyse the consequences of fair trading for its supporters - including processes of moral self-work and the pursuit of middle-class social distinction through participation in this form of leisured activism. Overall, my research demonstrates the anthropological importance of institutionalised moralities as potentially enduring and influential sites for the dialogic production of moral subjectivities.