We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected]
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
This chapter reconstructs the ethical ambiguities and popular anxieties that emerged during a spectacular period of coffee smuggling in the 1970s, centered in Chepkube village near the border of Kenya and Uganda. The criminalized trade provided residents with newfound wealth and consumptive possibility; magendo, as it was known, also was a stark challenge to the Ugandan state’s ability to monopolize the valuation of its most important export. However, participants’ unease did not reflect the illegality of magendo. Rather, the excessive and rapid riches acquired through coffee smuggling challenged prevailing ideas of propriety, respectability, and morality. In other words, existing ideas about how proper value should be morally produced—through laborious effort and familial networks—were undermined by the sudden revaluation of coffee. Smuggling is a form of arbitrage, a style of economic action premised on the capitalization on disjunctures of jurisdiction, of measurement, and of appearance. Magendo participants actively worked to produce such differences in order to acquire wealth; yet arbitrage generated an ambiguous mix of desire and disdain. Based on oral histories and fieldwork on both sides of the border, this chapter reveals how the careful orchestration of social relations and material goods is at the heart of valuation, and it emphasizes how popular valuation practices change and conflict with state projects of governing value and defining citizenship.
Recommend this
Email your librarian or administrator to recommend adding this to your organisation's collection.