déchets. stigmatisations, commerces, politiques ... - Viva Rio en Haiti

for example, a mother and her children. In such cases
the quantity of objects collected during a day’s
work may justify direct transportation to the fi nal
purchase points: some workshops and the GS company,
located some kilometers away from the zone.
The objects are carried there in rented wheelbarrows.
The deliverer may be someone from the family
or sometimes another person paid for the job.
This once again demonstrates the point to
which the world of extreme poverty is highly differentiated
and how the small profi ts made are
continually subdivided in a dense network of intermediaries
and collaborators. This is a central
feature of the activities identifi ed with that is conventionally
called the ‘informal economy:’ a set of
open, non-mutually exclusive possibilities, which
in combination enable the survival of people in a
world with a low level of monetization. This universe,
where money from wages is almost non-existent,
is shaped by the production of ‘small profits’
(fè piti, in Kreyòl) like those obtained from collecting,
transforming and selling objects treated
as ‘garbage’ in other contexts. 23
7. WORKSHOPS
The area where the research was undertaken
is full of workshops making products for sale in
21 The plastic market is much smaller and less profi table
than the metal market. This explains why there
are no scales for weighing and buying plastic in the
streets, or large intermediaries, unlike the case of iron
and aluminium.
22 See Jean Jorel Janvier, “Port-au-Prince et les enfants
de rue: le phénomène des kokorats.” Thesis, Faculty of
Ethnology, Université d’Etat d’Haïti, 2004.
23 In the classic text introducing the notion of the informal
economy (“Informal Income Opportunities and
Urban Employment in Ghana.” The Journal of Modern
African Studies 11:1 1973: 61-89), Keith Hart makes no
mention of the logic of small profi ts. The merit for calling
attention to this phenomenon goes to Jane Guyer
in her book Marginal Gains. Monetary Transactions
in Atlantic Africa. University of Chicago Press, 2004.
It should be emphasized that the unemployment estimates
(some include a rate of up to 80% in the region
under study) face serious problems in conceptualizing
and measuring the small profi t-making activities described
here.
the country or for exportation. It would be diffi -
cult to overestimate the importance of these in any
understanding of the forms of family economic reproduction.
The region is home to workshops manufacturing
pilon (pestles) and other wooden objects
24 , bakeries supplying bread and biscuits with
wide networks of consumption, and workshops
directly linked to the garbage circuits, including
those fabricating aluminum pans (chaudières)
and iron objects such as stoves (réchauds), lamps
and cooking utensils.
The workshops (all of them, of course, though
here we concentrate on those that recycle metal and
plastic) involve the work of professionals, the reproduction
and transmission of know-how, savoir
faire, and the invention of new forms of manufacturing
and innovating. The workshops producing
aluminum or iron objects use small workforces
comprising the master and at most one assistant.
They combine a commercial site and a small
stall where items are sold wholesale and retail (as
we stated earlier, these workshops are concentrated
in the busy Rue La Saline, located at the start of
the Croix de Bossales market) (photos 21, 22 & 23).
Some traders who buy stoves for pans or kerosene
lamps at these workshops later sell the products
at other markets in the metropolitan zone (Marché
Salomon, Pétion Ville, Croix-des-Bouquets, and so
on), in the country’s rural interior and sometimes
abroad. 25
24 Craftwork objects made in La Saline are produced
for the international market with labels such as “Made
in Martinique”...
25 The structuring of the Haitian trade circuits depends
on the presence of these long-distance traders who connect
the different regions of the country and the latter
with the Haitian markets found beyond the national
borders, such as Santo Domingo, Kinsgton, Martinique,
Guadalupe, Panama or Miami. Women play a very important
role in these activities. These are the Madan Sara,
responsible for buying and selling food, clothing and also,
for example, lamps and small cooking utensils produced
in the workshops described in the text. However
the long-distance trade circuits are male, as we shall see
below, especially in the case of the pans fabricated in
the area and distributed to various regions of Haiti and
to other countries, including the Dominican Republic.
On gender relations in the Haitian markets, see Sidney
Mintz, “Men, Women and Trade,” 1971, and Pedro Braum
A. da Silveira, “Os Porcos e as Margens: notas sobre um
mercado camponês do sul do Haiti,” 2009.
GARBAGE | 47