Walking the Tight Rope—Informal Livelihoods and Social Networks in a West African City, by ILDA LOURENÇO-LINDELL (Almqvist and Wiksell: Stockholm Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis, Stockholm Studies in Human Geography 9, 2002, pp. 275)

✍ Scribed by Irini Sotiropoulou

• Book ID: 102351602
• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2004
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 34 KB
• Volume: 16
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0954-1748
• DOI: 10.1002/jid.1096

✦ Synopsis

This book reports the findings of field research by the author in Bissau, Guinea-Bissau, supported with valuable information about the history and the social, political and economic conditions under which the people in the city live. Using a multi-disciplinary approach, Lourenc ¸o-Lindell examines in a critical way the informal sector, which covers an increasing share of the Bissau economy and society, in space and time. The author's main concern is the conduct of the most disadvantaged members of Bissau society and the means they use in order to survive the harsh economic conditions and the informal sector itself. What is most interesting is not the study of 'informality' as a means of resistance to economic conditions imposed without the participation of the vast majority of the population, but the critical examination of informal activities as a social space. Here, relations of subordination and exploitation can also exist, as nothing guarantees that the informal 'regulation' of economy will be more participatory than the so-called formal one.

The book consists of eight chapters. Lourenc ¸o-Lindell presents the theory and the methods used in her research (chapter 1), the history of informal economic activity in Guinea-Bissau (chapter 2), and she describes the space-and its features-where her research took place (chapter 4). The results of her research are grouped into four sections. The contemporary informal economic activity in Guinea-Bissau is in chapter 3. The contemporary informal activity related to the food trade, where the rice, fish and vegetable trade sectors are studied in detail in chapter 5. The social networks that sustain households to survive as consumption and production units (chapter 6) and the kin-based networks that help households and individuals to cope with economic hardship (chapter 7), complete the findings.

The author avoids the theoretical trap of the main contradiction between the formal and informal sector-a contradiction that is usually interpreted as an antithesis between the state [or, powerful agents'] policies and the individuals. She begins her argument from the study of the situation of the individuals (defined as social agents that participate in many different networks or activity spaces) and she continues to examine the interconnection of formal and informal sectors, the multi-level and multi-form regulation of economic activity and the dynamic evolution of the individuals' position in those structures. As a result, the book gives evidence and a well-documented argument that the informal economy is a space where the advantaged (formal and informal, state or non-state) agents can still gain at the expense of the less advantaged agents, where social exclusion is present and affects the most disadvantaged of the disadvantaged and where there is as much altruism as in any other social situation.

On the other hand, despite the effort to de-romanticize the informal sector, Lourenc ¸o-Lindell presents the ways invented by the Bissau urban poor to use informality in order to gain a living and face the exploitative practices that originate even in other poor individuals' ability to buy some more kilos of merchandise. The survival and resistance action takes the form of individual and/or collective choices concerning demand and provision of assistance. In other words, this action varies from the information exchange about prices and bad merchants to unilateral economic assistance or to the rotating savings groups, and it extends from two-person co-operation groups to complicated networks that may involve people living in different areas of the country.

The author studies in detail two main categories of networks: the networks that are based on kinship or, in general, on more or less traditional ways of interpersonal connection, and the networks that connect people that do not belong to the same kin or household group (compounds). Both categories are under pressure by the changing social conditions, and both seem to suffer from the bad economic situation of their members and, generally, of the country. However, both social and