Eventful Associations: Value Transformation in the Value Chain of Illegal Waragi in Uganda

Abstract

This thesis is based on five months fieldwork in Uganda among traders who buy large quantities of illegal waragi, a high alcohol spirit, in an area of central Uganda and sell it along the borders with Rwanda and Congo and brokers who regulate the business from within. The aim of this thesis is to show how an illegal economic network is organized by the creation, maintenance and transformation of value. Value is the effect of practices of framing and is given shape by the triangular relationship between people, the product and the market environment. The value chain is a project in which this relationship is under reconfiguration as the product moves through the chain. Therefore, organizations emerge that attempt to standardize these conceptions, seeing that without a semblance of stability the chain would not be able to sustain economic rationality. My interest goes out specifically to traders and brokers because they hold a central place in governing the value created in the trade. The strength of analysing the network through the idea of value transformation is that it moves beyond social framing mechanism to incorporate the material through an Actor-Network approach, while at the same time making use of qualitative research to explore the normative concepts that anthropology is apt at elucidating. Seeing value, in accordance with ANT, as something born in the praxis through the performative relationship between people, products and the market questions the economy as self-contained entity dependent on laws and intrinsic valuations in favour of a view that explores the dialogical content of material-semiotic relationships in an economic network.