Counterfeit Itineraries in the Global South

<p>At the end of the 1970s Chinese merchandise moved to Brazil via Paraguay forming an on-the-margins-of-the-law trade<i> </i>chain involving the production distribution and consumption of cheap goods. Economic changes in the twenty-first century including the enforcement of intellectual property rights and the growing importance of emerging economies have had a dramatic effect on how this chain works criminalizing and dismantling a trade system that had previously functioned in an organized form and stimulated the circulation of goods money and people at transnational levels. </p><p></p><p>This book analyses how exchange networks that produced distributed and sold cheap manufactured products animated a huge and vibrant system from China to Brazil examining the process at global national and local levels. From a global perspective intellectual property is a powerful discourse that governs the world system by framing the notion of piracy as a criminal activity. But at the national level how do nation-states resist and/or endorse interpret and apply a global perspective? And what effect does that have on how ordinary people organize their lives around this system? Interweaving discourse on transnational traders and producers national projects and international institutions <em>Counterfeit Itineraries in the Global South </em>presents low-income traders not as passive victims of globalization but as active actors in the distribution of cheap goods across borders in the Global South.</p><p></p><p>Based on fifteen years of ethnographic field work in China and Brazil <i>Counterfeit Itineraries in the Global South </i>will be of interest to scholars of economic anthropology development studies political economy Latin America studies Chinese studies and socio-legal studies. </p>