Tight Knit

Global Families and the Social Life of Fast Fashion

Elizabeth L. Krause

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780226558103
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

The coveted "Made in Italy" label calls to mind visions of nimble-fingered Italian tailors lovingly sewing elegant, high-end clothing. The phrase evokes a sense of authenticity, heritage, and rustic charm. Yet, as ElizabethL. Krause uncovers in Tight Knit, Chinese migrants are the ones sewing "Made in Italy" labels into low-cost items for a thriving fast-fashion industry—all the while adding new patterns to the social fabric of Italy's iconic industry.Krause offers a revelatory look into how families involved in the fashion industry are coping with globalization based on longterm research in Prato, the historic hub of textile productionin the heart of metropolitan Tuscany. She brings to the fore the tensions—over value, money, beauty, family, care, and belonging—that are reaching a boiling point as the country struggles to deal with the same migration pressures that are triggering backlash all over Europe and North America. Tight Knit tells a fascinating story about the heterogeneity of contemporary capitalism that will interest social scientists, immigration experts, and anyone curious about how globalization is changing the most basic of human conditions—making a living and making a life.

1

Ethnography

Fangli and I walked along a worn stretch of Via Roma: empty storefronts, trash-strewn curbs, dingy bars with sticky tabletops and washed-up-looking clientele. We had just finished our second interview of the day. The first had been with a physical therapist at a public health clinic, where we had sensed the frustration of a health-care professional whose pediatric patient’s care had been thrown into limbo when his parents sent him to China. The second appointment had taken us to the city’s Social Services Immigration Office, where we had learned about the procedures for family reunification. The details had left my head spinning.

Our guard was down that midsummer’s day. We were both famished. We took a right on Via Lazzerini, where Fangli had parked her car and earlier had happened into Pasticceria Mannori for a croissant and coins. She raved about the pastry and how the cashier had been gracious in making change for her parking meter. We were hoping to return for a scrumptious lunch. When we arrived, the shades were drawn and the door locked. The shop was closed for lunch. As we stood on the corner deciding which direction to head, a diminutive Chinese man on a bicycle approached. As Fangli and the man spoke in Chinese, I inventoried the stranger’s load: four hefty steaks packaged in plastic wrap piled into a basket on the front of the bike and two cases of diapers strapped onto a rear rack.

Fangli turned to me. “He’s asking me what I’m doing with an Italian,” she said and repeated herself almost verbatim: “He’s wanting to know what I’m doing with an occidentale, a Westerner.”

I caught sight of drivers in cars gazing in our direction.

“He wants to know if you know of any way to have a boy baby.”

“No! Boy and girl babies are equal,” I asserted in Italian.

FIGURE 1.1. The quotidian life of local people inspired Quinto Martini (1908–90) and appeared in his sculptures and paintings, such as Woman Who Sews (Donna che cuce).

Photo by Giorgio Commini, courtesy of the Comune di Carmignano and the Associazione Parco Museo Quinto Martini

“What about in France or Germany?” he said through Fangli’s translations.

I shook my head. “Sex-selective abortion isn’t allowed.”

He asked Fangli for her cell number, and she turned to me and laughed in disbelief. I suggested she get his number and pulled out my notebook. He explained himself: given how well Fangli spoke Italian and given his knack for work, the two of them could join forces, start a business, and make a lot of money.

“Money, money, money,” Fangli joked, as we walked in the other direction. She voiced one of the stereotypical refrains that Prato residents say about Chinese migrants. On a serious note, she then told me she didn’t think he was “normal,” that he most likely had some disturbance. She may well have been right. His chastising her for keeping the company of a non-Chinese person brought to mind the wise fool, the figure who blurts out what polite people keep to themselves.

Local Encounters, Global Economies

A noisy part of the population in Prato was not behaving in a very polite manner when it came to issues of immigration. The very impolite book L’Assedio Cinese, or The Chinese Siege (Pieraccini 2010), was already in its second edition within two years of its original printing. Its author was none other than Silvia Pieraccini, a popular yet controversial journalist who was writing for the financial daily Sole 24 Ore. The book’s cover shows a throng of Chinese people. There is no explanation as to where the people, primarily young women, are standing or why they are crowded in that space; it simply conveys visually the sensational subtitle, which could well be translated as Prato’s Lawless Low-Cost Fashion District. The book speaks of women’s fashion that is ready to wear at any hour of the day or night. It describes workers without unions or rights who toil sixteen to eighteen hours per day. It portrays a production zone with an overwhelming record of “births” and “deaths” of firms in a constellation of turnover. It depicts deplorable health and hygienic conditions as workers sew, eat, and sleep in workshops. It asserts how illegality has become the norm. And it outlines Italian government attempts to crack down on the underground economy and address Prato’s record as the number one tax evader in Tuscany. All said, the tone is angry—a tone that echoed dominant sentiments in the city and its province.

Evidence of anti-immigrant sentiment was not difficult to find in private or in public. During ethnographic research for this project, I encountered hostility on a regular basis from Italian friends and acquaintances, old and new, because of my research topic. On more than one occasion, I was verbally attacked. Once, I came to tears and left. I had reached my human limit. Frequently, I listened as people ranted against the Chinese residents in their midst—people whom they had decided they could not trust, whether as neighbors, employers, or clients. The exception tended to be property owners who rented to Chinese tenants or real estate agents whose customers were the new-moneyed immigrant class in search of luxury villas. Health-care professionals and educators were recognized as being on the front lines of support vis-à-vis immigrants. Occasionally, displaced sweater artisans were also empathetic, saying that Prato would now be a ghost town if it weren’t for the new garment niche economy and the influx of Chinese workers. By contrast, the angriest Italians told me that the Chinese were not immigrants but rather occupiers. The implication was that I should have absolutely no sympathy for such people. They were ruining the social fabric of this old Tuscan textile hub. They were to blame for the economic crisis.

Angry sentiments and behaviors—at times uncivil and racist—abounded, whether in old-fashioned or virtual public spaces. They reflected the tensions brewing not only in this historic textile city but also in many places the world over (Fassin 2011; Holmes and Castañeda 2016; Vertovec 2011). This story is one that many cities have lived in the recent past as pressures to enhance profit and shareholder value have witnessed shifts in production overseas and lured cheaper labor forces to destinations across the globe (Ho 2009). Tight Knit is the story of an old-world region and its difficult transition to twenty-first-century globalization. It is the story of a city known literally for its rags-to-riches history, one that has shifted from having a robust textile industry to being a flourishing international fashion center (Johanson, Smyth, and French 2009). The trials and tribulations of this passage animate this story. How individuals, families, and institutions transform, cope, and create value in the context of transnational capitalism and immigration rests at its heart.

Getting at Globalization, Transforming a Method

The conditions of globalization create innumerable challenges for the people who move around as well as for the ones who stay put. The tool kit for understanding and addressing these conditions and the challenges they present requires refining, revising, and even revolutionizing current approaches to gathering information, making sense of it, and acting upon it. If illuminating the human condition in all its glorious and unequal diversity is ethnography’s core mission, as João Biehl (2005) has suggested, then an ethnographic accounting has much to offer in terms of grasping dynamics and particulars as global pressures rip apart a place and as people from diverse walks of life struggle to remake it. Ethnography, known for its thick description and nuanced analyses, offers a powerful albeit provincial way to interpret lived experience. Ethnographic inquiry involves sustained participation in social life. I listen for stories that fester beneath commonsense assumptions, expert tropes, and aggregate portraits. I turn to the ordinary to find the extraordinary. The aim is to confront large-scale tyrannies with oft-hidden truths, to challenge modern modes of power with up-to-the-minute modes of life. I am ever on the lookout for subjugated forms of knowledge—in other words, forms that may seem naive, quaint, or quirky. These knowledge forms are likely discounted yet hold potential for challenging taken-for-granted outlooks, practices, and forces.

I came of age as an anthropologist when Rayna Rapp’s (1999) materialist-feminist incitement seemed perfect for anthropologists: to see themselves as historians of the present. Foucault’s call for a “genealogical method” was all the rage. It invited a historical perspective and mode of investigation that entailed “a painstaking rediscovery of struggles together with the rude memory of their conflicts” (Foucault 1980, 83). Granted, Foucault was not much for ethnography, but the prized anthropological method of participation and observation in its sundry forms surely qualifies as a “painstaking” approach for accessing struggles that the commonsense narratives about globalization elide. It promised upending knowledge-power constellations. Like the man on the bicycle loaded with steaks and diapers, the act of asking may appear rude because the question does not traffic in the niceties of the day (see Gramsci 1971, Williams 1989). Ethnographic excavations collude with those whose “rude” memories perhaps have more to say than their provincial content might initially suggest.

Examples abound. Combining ethnography and forensic science, Jason De León’s (2015) Land of the Open Graves illuminates the ways in which global economic inequality and transnational migration become embodied in life histories of US border crossers. Focusing on the uneven ways that immigrants in France get categorized and treated, Miriam Ticktin (2011) in her Casualties of Care uses ethnography to forge a field of critical humanitarianism.1 Showing suffering among US migrant farmworkers, medical anthropologist and physician Seth Holmes (2013, 185) notes in Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies that ethnography represents “an especially important methodology for understanding the multilayered meanings and vertical slices of power that make up social and cultural life, including its inequalities and justifications.” I position myself as an ethnographer who straddles humanistic and social science orientations, maintaining that even in an Internet age of virtual information, there remains something incredibly potent about “being there.” I envision “copresence” as a multisensory sharing of social life as it unfolds, which transforms how and what we know, including “the anthropologist’s own self-understandings” (Borneman and Hammoudi 2009, 14). In other words, ethnographic copresence stimulates transformative insights.

Toward this end, I have conceptualized encounter ethnography to guide the investigation. In the legacy of anthropological scholarship, much has been written about encounters. The term is useful because it emphasizes experiences or processes that are at odds with one another, as in the phrases “colonial encounter” (Asad 1973), “development encounter” (Escobar 1991), “intercultural encounter” (Sahlins 2000), “clinical encounter” (Ferzacca 2000), “activist encounters” (Razsa 2015), and even “fieldwork encounters” (Borneman and Hammoudi 2009). Rather than leave encounters to the realm of theory or common sense, however, I nurture encounter ethnography as a theoretically informed methodological framework. I propose an orientation that places encounters, as points of interpenetration and mediation, at the center of the investigation, one that is mindful of realizing a locality analysis.

Specifically, this case study has allowed an up-close look at Prato as a “litmus test” of globalization and its triumphal assumptions (Baldassar et al. 2015, 3). Ethnographic research revolved around several sites of encounter: (1) encounters concerning child health, migration, and return; (2) encounters related to local production sites and global forces; and (3) encounters involving public places, meetings, and events. When I first developed encounter ethnography as a method, I had only a vague sense of the eventual project sites, but I imagined contexts that would expose jarring epistemological moments as when expert and lay forms of knowledge collide. Exposure is what the method is designed to do. The project reveals how such instances play out on the ground between institutions and migrants as well as between ethnographers and their “subjects.”2 This strategy allows for a focus on power-laden clashes between dominant and subordinate economies, epistemologies, social practices, ways of being, and moral orientations.

To be clear, I am not merely conceptualizing this project as a sort of global ethnography of capitalism in which the anthropologist considers the responses, or “economic ‘impacts’ and cultural ‘reactions,’” of those legendary “people without history” to the world capitalist system (Sahlins 2000; Wolf 1982). To cultivate something beyond such a two-dimensional perspective, encounter ethnography proposes a three-pronged conceptual scheme. For starters, there are structural encounters—namely, economic—that shape possibilities for human action and meaning making. Next, there are genealogical encounters, which open space to consider contrasting intellectual genealogies and the cultural logics that collide or emerge when erudite and subjugated forms of knowledge interpenetrate. Emancipatory potential resides in consciously bringing into dialogue such authorized and disqualified forms (Foucault 1980, 78–81). Finally, fieldwork encounters refer to those that occur when the ethnographer embraces what I call “structured spontaneity” (Krause 2005b). Such an orientation brings the researcher into confrontations with social life as it unfolds on terms mostly of its own making. Some of the most incomprehensible yet profound things happen through unexpected encounters, often resulting from systematic perseverance and careful attention to social life. The orientation is designed to address the trap of projecting one’s own understandings of the world onto those of others. Fieldwork at its core is constantly a humbling experience. When the experience of fieldwork itself is viewed as an object of inquiry, the interpersonal encounters between anthropologists and their subjects can lead to exploring crucial conundrums and producing valuable knowledge, thus making possible the co-construction of new narratives (Hartog 1988; Palevsky 2000; Raikhel 2009; Senders 2009; Stevenson 2009).

On the ground, natives and newcomers have struggled to grasp the meaning of encounters in terms of “their own system of the world,” as Sahlins (2000, 417) puts it. Yet is it conceivable that what “their own” meant in the 1790s could possibly be relevant in an era of globalist identity politics? Or might “their own” have become unrecognizably fragmented due to diasporic interpenetrations and mediations? My use of encounter ethnography allows me to engage these questions. It represents a slight shift in perspective from the purpose to discover “the culture mystified in the capitalism” as when, for example, in 1793, a British ambassador to China viewed his goods as presents whereas the Chinese emperor took them for tribute (Sahlins 2000, 421). Gifts or tribute? Sahlins’s reading of an envoy’s musings interprets the Brit’s view of presents to be “samples of their wares; even beyond that they were examples of industrial ingenuity, designed to signify the ‘superiority’ of British civilization and the majesty of George III.” But underscoring the clash of civilizations, he reasons, “from the mandarins’ perspective, if the ‘presents’ were indeed ‘tributes’ expressing the barbarians’ sincere desire to turn to civilization, manifestly they could not be superior to things Chinese” (Sahlins 2000, 429). The encounter revealed profoundly different logics at work in terms of who was doing what for whom and who had the upper hand—eventually exposed in the trade imbalance between silver and tea. The Chinese view of the gifts as tribute was possible because of a noncapitalist orientation to the world. Other cosmologies were clearly at work. Transnational encounters generate possibilities for misunderstanding and misconception yet also integration and differentiation. Novel regimes of value and forms of citizenship or stubborn forms of disparity are likely (Appadurai 1986; Rofel 2007). In short, encounters expose the contours of future possible worlds: utopias, dystopias, or admixtures.

As the name encounter ethnography suggests, the approach embraces the use of empirical evidence while also maintaining a healthy skepticism toward the scientific gold standard of reproducibility. We live in an age when, even in the most prestigious scientific fields, a crisis of confidence casts a shadow of doubt over knowledge claims. “Alt facts” aside, George Johnson reports in the Science section of the New York Times the finding that most scientific labs have a hard time repeating experiments and reproducing the same results as the original. Johnson notes, “It has been jarring to learn in recent years that a reproducible result may actually be the rarest of birds” (G. Johnson 2014; Ioannidis 2005).

Does ethnography as a method have a chance in navigating widespread skepticism about scientific knowledge? Skepticism about the truth of science has created unlikely bedfellows: the moderate scientists who say that reproducibility of scientific results is rare, the far-left skeptics of funded research, the far-right climate-change naysayers, and apolitical info-philes who bask in information at their fingertips and take the production of knowledge for granted.

If reproducing the same results is a problem in a controlled lab environment, it is particularly improbable in a field setting. Humans are not predictable, nor are conditions replicable from day to day, let alone from year to year. And so it may seem like a contradiction to situate my work as empirical yet also skeptical of erudite knowledge. The challenges are many for representing social life as it is encountered in an intensely globalized world. In a world that is in many ways ironically more ethnocentric than ever,3 I would like to suggest that there is still good reason to get out of our chairs, pull ourselves away from our computer screens and devices, and get into the field. There is also good reason that Willis and Trondman (2000) wrote a manifesto for ethnography, and that aha moments have the potential to inspire. Not everything we find in the field will be inspiring, to be sure. Much is troubling. And much is messy.4

Claiming to offer total perspective with sweeping vision can flatten differences and create a false sense of coherence, an illusion as clever and old as the trompe l’oeil.5 I take seriously the notion that knowledge is always situated and partial, as influential feminists have convincingly argued (Haraway 1988). Everyone has partial perspective. Realities are assembled and lived. Such recognition can just as easily enliven as paralyze our efforts to engage with the world.6 It can inspire us to care about not just what we write but how we write. As a discipline, anthropology lies somewhere between literary and scientific genres. Clifford Geertz (1988, 20) argued that its leanings were toward language as praxis more than language as means, with a stronger leaning toward romances than lab reports: “anthropological discourse certainly remains poised, mule-like, between the two.” And despite being labeled a second-fiddle genre (Behar 1999), this long-standing trait may be precisely what gives ethnography its hybrid vigor. The backstory of why anthropologists continue to write ethnographies, why they struggle to find a voice, tell a story, and, in the process, generate countless “paper babies” (Fordham 2011, 79), reveals a dogged commitment to creating counternarratives.

Collaborative Processes, Enriched Ethnography

As I began fieldwork, this project felt daunting. I still remember the first night in my monastic hostel room...