You must have people to make business: Relations of proximity in small-scale trade in Haiti and the DRC

Abstract

Abstract This article analyses the everyday activities of female traders in open air markets, houses and streets through a comparative approach based on two ethnographies, one situated in Haiti’s Central Plateau, the other in Kongo Central province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In both studies, we identify an essential kind of knowledge needed to do business, namely the creation and maintenance of interpersonal relations that help the trader to form stocks, make journeys, guarantee a clientele, loans and financing in settings of uncertainty and economic instability. Simultaneously, we highlight a moral universe that qualifies more and less acceptable ways of obtaining money. In pursuing this comparative approach, we offer an alternative understanding of economies conventionally treated as informal, proposing an analysis primarily focused on the relations of proximity structuring them.