Counterfeit Itineraries in the Global South: The human consequences of piracy in China and Brazil

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, Counterfeit Itineraries in the Global South 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.

Based on fifteen years of ethnographic field work in China and Brazil, Counterfeit Itineraries in the Global South will be of interest to scholars of economic anthropology, development studies, political economy, Latin America studies, Chinese studies, and socio-legal studies.