Using ethnography with groups of merchants and picoteros (smugglers), this text addresses the articulation and links between the construction and installation of a contraband lifeway with the forms and processes of transformation of spatial structures and cultural-economic strategies, related to the trade of electronic devices imported from southeast Asia in the Atacama-Lipez border (EFAL) between Chile and Bolivia. In this analysis, it is noted that the diffuse character commonly assigned to trade which tensions ‘taxation’ and ‘customs’ is nothing but the result of the difficulty for the states and capitalism of sanctioning a non-disruptive space of this commercial practice. Such difficulty does not only obscure the characteristic quotidian frictions of borders, but, above all, the historical, associative and performative role that this phenomenon plays in this space, its transformations and ways of living.
Muñoz Valenzuela, J. (2018). Trailers, commerce and picoteros. Approaches to the contraband space in the border spatiality Atacama-Lipez. Revista Chilena De Antropología, (37), 267–286. Retrieved from https://revistachilenahumanidades.uchile.cl/index.php/RCA/article/view/49516
