ABSTRACT Anthropologists have demonstrated how the creation of land markets as “frontiers” for global capital requires practices of “conjuring”—the narrative construction of place as desirable for large‐scale investment. This article emphasizes the contingency of this conjuring process in an urbanizing Kenya where land‐selling companies have emerged to mediate the market by purchasing remote holdings and subdividing them into smaller plots for resale to middle‐class buyers. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with these companies and prospective buyers, it shows how the former pitch their plots as speculative investments by narrating the prospect of a vibrant urban future itself —that city sprawl will arrive soon enough, driving up land values. In turn, would‐be buyers carry out their own due diligence, gauging these anticipatory visions for flaws. Site visits to prospective plots bring this persuasion game into focus—instances in which remoteness of “prime land” is revealed, scuppering transactions. The article closes by underscoring the challenges of successfully turning remote land on city edges into “assets of allure” when its material affordances and obdurate histories disrupt its representation as a desirable landscape for investment.
RESUMEN A partir del estudio de caso de una familia de tres generaciones dedicada al robo y a la circulación de mercancía caliente en el centro de México, analizo las formas en que sus integrantes cultivan su idea de prestigio y cómo esta se relaciona con sus motivaciones. En principio, señalo que el intercambio de artículos robados constituye una actividad económica vinculada a diversos circuitos de mercado por los que estos circulan, al establecimiento de empresas criminales y al perfilamiento de lo que defino como el pequeño empresario del robo. Planteo que la figura del pequeño empresario permite situar a los fundadores y líderes actuales de la empresa criminal Las Mudanzas en condiciones de reinvertir sus ganancias en propiedades, negocios y bienes. Si bien el consumo es central para explicar la motivación de los sujetos etnográficos para seguir delinquiendo, argumento que su actuar no se limita a ello. Además de las prácticas de consumo, señalo que la continuidad de la empresa criminal posibilita a la familia extensa el acceso a formas de prestigio relevantes en el mundo del hampa. De este modo, tomo como referencia las ideas que los líderes criminales de la familia Manríquez tienen en torno al prestigio para explicar por qué, aun teniendo cubiertas las necesidades básicas, persisten en el robo y en el intercambio de mercancía caliente.
ABSTRACT The article examines the politics and processes of establishing value for artworks, highlighting the continued belief in Walter Benjamin's idea of aura and describing the value aura generates as “auratic value.” Focusing on an artist residency program in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) during the country's arts boom, I analyze contestations between artists and the gallery director. In response to the gallery director's contracts, which accorded value by size and in which artists signed over copyright to their work, artists refused to invest their auratic value in their artworks, ultimately devaluing their own works but minimizing the value extracted from them. These instances show the continued relevance of aura and how value is negotiated between various actors in the art industry.
ABSTRACT This article tracks a transporter along the route linking Tripoli to the Saharan town of Ghadames in post‐2011 Libya, asking what secures an obligation when the institutions that normally underwrite it (offices, courts, recognized names) have receded. I distinguish the debt, the sum owed, from the security pledged to answer for it: what may be taken if the owing fails. To collateralize is to fix that security beforehand, and I follow this act along a road where enforcement is personal. The security descends: from goods to names and, when these fail, to the body itself. I trace this descent through a man answered for at a checkpoint and a man who binds himself in advance against labor never demanded and follow it into the body's health and the medical implications of being held. I set this descent alongside a 19th‐century Ghadames archive, where an older grammar of the pledge did analogous work until the abolition of the slave trade stripped it of its legally sanctioned object. Collateral, I contend, generates the reliable conduct typically ascribed to trust, yet leaves trust beside the point—and when the thing pledged is a person, the holding alters who they are. In this account, the corridor is not capitalism's outside but its exposed floor, where the force sustaining every pledge becomes visible.
